Two days after an armed man tried to enter the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt cited rhetoric from Democrats that she said is “inspiring violence” against President Donald Trump and other Republicans. But several of the statements she quoted were stripped of their original context, a point that House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries made in a rebuttal.

In prepared remarks in the April 27 press briefing, Leavitt called out a number of congressional Democrats, and a late-night television host, for “hateful and constant and violent rhetoric directed” at Trump. On April 25, security prevented the armed man from accessing the WHCA dinner, which the president and top administration officials attended. After Leavitt’s briefing, the man was charged with attempting to assassinate the president.

Leavitt takes questions during the White House press briefing on April 27. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images.

For example, the press secretary said: “As the first lady of the United States pointed out this morning, just two days prior to the shooting, ABC’s late-night host, Jimmy Kimmel, disgustingly called first lady Melania Trump an expectant widow. Who in their right mind says a wife would be glowing over the potential murder of her beloved husband?”

Later, Leavitt said she had “a whole host of examples” of “despicable statements” from Democratic lawmakers that she could share. “Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, just this April, this month, said we are in an era of maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” she said.

She continued: “Gov. Josh Shapiro said heads need to roll within the administration. Sen. Alex Padilla said people are, quote, ‘dying because of fear and terror caused by the Trump administration.’ Sen. Elizabeth Warren, President Trump is making the country look like a, quote, ‘fascist state.’ Sen. Adam Schiff saying President Trump using a dictator playbook. Sen. Ed Markey calling President Trump a dictator, saying that this administration’s actions are authoritarianism on steroids.”

And finally, reading off more quotes, she said: “Gov. JB Pritzker, never before in my life have I called for mass protests, disruptions. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. You have Rep. Pressley saying we’ll see you in the streets. Rep. [LaMonica] McIver, a Democrat representative on Capitol Hill, we will not take this shit from Donald Trump. He thinks he’s a dictator. We are at war.”

But Jeffries, the House minority leader, responded to Leavitt in his own April 27 press conference, calling her a “stone-cold liar” and claiming that the Democrats’ statements were “all taken out of context.”

Some, but not all, of the remarks she highlighted were presented without the context that shows them in a different way than Leavitt presented.

We’ll start with the statements by Jeffries, Kimmel, Shapiro, Padilla, Pritzker and Pressley that lacked important context.

Jeffries

On April 21, the day that Virginia residents voted to allow the state’s congressional district lines to be redrawn — potentially giving Democrats more seats in Congress next year — Jeffries posted about the election results on X.

“House Democrats have crushed Donald Trump’s national gerrymandering scheme,” Jeffries wrote, referring to Trump advising GOP state lawmakers in Texas and other Republican-run states to redraw their congressional district maps to give Republicans an advantage in the midterm elections this fall. After listing several ways that Democrats have stopped or negated those Republican efforts, Jeffries wrote:  “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

He expanded on his social media post the following day in a press conference celebrating the outcome in Virginia.

Jeffries said: “We are in an era of maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time. And we are going to keep the pressure on Republicans at every single state in the union to ensure, at the end of the day, that there is a fair, national map. Because we believe that it’s the people who should decide who’s in the majority in the next Congress – not Donald Trump and MAGA extremists.”

In an April 27 press conference in which he also condemned political violence, Jeffries responded to Leavitt quoting him without the fuller context about the back-and-forth over redistricting.

“The notion that any of us are concerned with so-called criticism from these phony Republicans as it relates to anything that has been said — certainly as it relates to the comment related to maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time, in connection with the redistricting battle that Republicans launched — I stand by it,” Jeffries said. “You can continue to criticize me for it. I don’t give a damn about your criticism.”

Jeffries noted that the “maximum warfare” phrase didn’t originate with him. It “came from the White House in the summer of 2025 when they started this redistricting battle,” he said. 

He was referring to an August 2025 New York Times article that quoted an unnamed “person close to the president” who told the newspaper that “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time” was the “White House’s political strategy” on redistricting.

Kimmel

On Thursday, April 23 — two days before the WHCA dinner — ABC’s late-night host, Jimmy Kimmel, included a segment on his show in which he performed a comedic roast similar to what is traditionally done at the correspondents’ dinner. The show spliced in footage of some administration officials facetiously suggesting they were in the audience.

Following a couple of jokes alluding to Trump’s age in that segment, Kimmel said, “And of course our first lady, Melania, is here. So beautiful — Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”

Both the president and first lady responded on April 27 with social media posts calling for Kimmel to be fired. Trump described Kimmel’s statement as a “call to violence.”

Likewise, Leavitt said at the press briefing the same day, “Who in their right mind says a wife would be glowing over the potential murder of her beloved husband? … This kind of rhetoric about the president, the first lady and his supporters is completely deranged and it’s unbelievable that the American people are consuming it night after night after night.”

But the context of the statement suggests that Kimmel was making a joke about the age gap between the two. Melania Trump turned 56 on April 26, which Kimmel mentioned, while Donald Trump — the oldest person to be inaugurated as president — is 79 and has a birthday coming up in June.

Kimmel responded to the criticism during his show on April 27, saying that the statement was “obviously” a joke about their age difference. “It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am. It was not — by any stretch of the definition — a call to assassination.”

The Federal Communications Commission issued an order on April 28 expediting a review of eight local broadcasting licenses held by ABC — a move that critics saw as retaliation from the Trump administration against Kimmel’s broadcaster.

Shapiro

In a January interview with progressive podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen, Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, said that “heads do need to roll, certainly, within the administration” while calling for Kristi Noem, then the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, to be fired over tactics used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Minneapolis.

After Cohen asked about the possibility of Noem being held accountable through impeachment by Congress, Shapiro said, “As it relates to Noem, she should be fired. The president should fire her. If he doesn’t, I think Congress needs to act.” Acknowledging that impeachment was unlikely, Shapiro said that even a growing number of Republicans appeared to “understand that she is way in over her head and that her directions, and the president’s directions, are violating people’s constitutional rights and undermining who we are.”

Later, when Cohen noted that Noem had been quoted saying that she was simply following instructions from the White House, Shapiro criticized her for not pushing back on “unconstitutional” immigration enforcement orders.

“Yeah, I mean it confirms what we were just talking about a moment ago, which is this is a directive that was sent by the president or [White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Adviser] Stephen Miller or [Vice President] JD Vance to Noem, and Noem didn’t stop and say, ‘Hey, this is unconstitutional, I’m not doing it.’ Instead, she plowed forward and now Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti are dead,” Shapiro said, referring to Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two U.S. citizens who were killed in January by immigration officers in Minneapolis.

Shapiro then said, “People have been disappeared in the community. American civil rights have been violated. None of this is acceptable. Heads do need to roll, certainly, within the administration. But most importantly for the good people of Minnesota and across this country, this directive needs to end. The mission needs to be terminated.”

Padilla

A 57-year-old farmworker from Michoacán, Mexico, named Jaime Alanís died after falling off of a greenhouse roof during an ICE raid in Ventura County, California, in July.

The day after his death, Dana Bash — who was anchoring CNN’s “State of the Union” — asked Sen. Padilla of California, “We learned overnight that a migrant farmworker died after he fell from a roof during ICE raids in Ventura County in your state. Have you been able to talk to the family?”

Padilla answered [emphasis ours]: “I haven’t spoken with the family directly, but I have been in touch with President Teresa Romero of the United Farm Workers union. I have known her for a long time. We’ve been in touch over the last several days. She’s been with the family and other families of people that are literally terrorized and traumatized based on what ICE is doing.

“Again, if all they’re doing is going after serious violent criminals, that’d be one thing. But because of these artificial quotas established by — whether it’s Donald Trump or Stephen Miller or somebody in the administration — it’s causing ICE to get more aggressive, more cruel, more extreme, and these are the results.

“It’s people dying because of fear and terror caused by this administration. It’s not just undocumented immigrants. There’s lawful immigrants that are being rounded up. There’s United States citizens that are being detained. There are military veterans that are being detained.”

Leavitt quoted the portion of his answer in bold as an example of “Democrat elected officials calling for war against the president of the United States and his supporters.”

Pritzker

In an April 2025 speech at a New Hampshire event, Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, said that “these Republicans cannot know a moment of peace,” while calling for Democrats to “fight” and protest against Trump administration policies on immigration and more.

More than 26 minutes into his almost 30-minute speech, the governor said: “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact because we have no alternative but to do just that, that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.”

When some Republicans said at the time that Pritzker’s comments could be seen as a call for violence, he told reporters that interpretation was “ridiculous” and not his intent.

“I called for people to take out their megaphones and their microphones, to stand up on soapboxes and get to the ballot box in order to defeat the people who are trying to take so many things away from the American people,” he said. “That has nothing to do with violence.”

Pressley

In the first year of Trump’s second term, Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts attended rallies and called on citizens to demonstrate against some of the administration’s policies.

At a February 2025 rally against the administration’s cuts to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Pressley said, “We are going to litigate, legislate, agitate, and resist because you are worth it. So we will see you in Congress, and the courts, and in the streets.”

The same month, at a rally protesting Elon Musk’s access to the Treasury Department, Pressley said, “We will match their energy with unprecedented organizing, mobilizing, agitating. We will see you in the courts, in Congress, in the streets.”

Leavitt summarized her call to action as, “we’ll see you in the streets,” and cited it as another example of “Democrat elected officials calling for war against the president of the United States and his supporters.”

This isn’t the first time that Pressley’s calls for citizens to demonstrate against government policy have been cast by conservatives as an example of Democrats inciting violence. In 2021, we wrote about a viral meme that had cited her comments regarding postal funding as a call for violence.

Other Quotes

Sens. Warren, Schiff and Markey did, respectively, use the terms “fascist state,” “dictator playbook” and “authoritarianism on steroids” to refer to Trump, his administration or certain policies.

Leavitt criticized such characterizations, saying, “Those who constantly falsely label and slander the president as a fascist, as a threat to democracy and compare him to Hitler to score political points are fueling this kind of violence.”

And Rep. McIver said at the February 2025 rally outside the Treasury Department that “we are at war” while criticizing the Department of Government Efficiency and Musk, the former head of DOGE and a major Trump campaign donor, for being given access to sensitive Treasury data. “Anytime a person can pay $250 million into a campaign and then be given access, full access to the Department of Treasury of the United States of America, we are at war,” McIver said.

Whether those remarks amount to “inspiring violence,” as Leavitt said, we’ll leave for readers to judge. But we would note that the politicians did not explicitly promote violence.

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