Republican demands congresswoman be 'hanged' for urging Trump protest

An Arizona Republican state lawmaker on Wednesday called for the execution of a Democratic congresswoman from Washington state because she urged people upset with President Donald Trump to protest in the streets.

Rep. John Gillette, R-Kingman, wrote on the social media site X that U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., was calling for the government to be overthrown and should be hanged.

“Until people like this, that advocate for the overthrow of the American government are tried convicted and hanged.. it will continue,” Gillette said in response to a video of Jayapal.

That clip uploaded to X was from a longer video, which was posted online in March, that is part of Jayapal’s “Resistance Lab” series in which she and others discuss protest movements and non-violent actions. The session in question featured a speaker who studied political violence and spoke about non-violence.

The post Gillette responded to claimed that Jayapal was making a call to violence because she said protesters should be “strike ready” and “street ready.” The Arizona Mirror watched the video in its entirety and found no calls to violence or advocating for overthrowing the government; it was focused on “non-violent resistance” to Trump and advising people on how to do that.

In contrast, Gillette has expressed support for the Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, who violently assaulted police officers and broke down doors and windows in order to access the building so they could stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election. In several posts on X, he called the 1,600 or so people who were prosecuted — and since pardoned by Trump — for their actions that day “political prisoners.”

He refused to answer questions when the Mirror reached him by phone on Thursday.

“You guys aren’t known for putting out accurate information,” Gillette said. “The comment is what it is, it is on the post. You can see what it is, there is no hidden meaning. No nothing. You report whatever you want to report. We are done. Stop calling me. Have a good day.”

Gillette then hung up and he did not respond to follow up questions texted to him about the post. A representative for Jayapal said that she is out of the country and currently unable to comment.

One of Gillette’s Democratic colleagues in the Arizona House of Representatives said the Kingman Republican’s call for an elected official to be put to death for exercising their First Amendment right was appalling.

“The Congresswoman was clearly talking about nonviolent protest and legal strikes — absolutely nothing violent,” Assistant House Democratic Leader Nancy Gutierrez said in a statement to the Mirror. “Representative Gillette misconstrued her words to once again put a target on a political opponent’s back, calling for her to be hanged. What will he need to say before Republican leadership in the House takes action? This is language that leads to violence. I’m tired of him putting us and our families at risk.”

Gillette’s recent comments come after some of his democratic colleagues have voiced concerns over his rhetoric after he castigated them for calling for civility and unity in the wake of the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In a message to all his fellow lawmakers that included a racial slur, he placed blame for political violence solely on Democrats and the political left, accusing them of stoking hate and violence against Republicans.

“The tone was set by your party; unity is no longer an option,” Gillette wrote to the 59 other members of the state House. “We handed you an olive ranch (sic), and you broke it. Your party invited the radicals to the table and they took over. Now you own them. As the J--s did at Peral (sic) Harbor, Radical Muslims on 911, your party has woken the sleeping giant.”

He has also recently come under fire for Islamophobic comments that led to an ethics complaint that was ultimately dismissed. The Republican chair of the House Ethics Committee said that Gillette had a First Amendment right to say whatever he wanted on social media without consequence.

Jeff Sharlet, a professor at Dartmouth and author of “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War,” said he was “wary” to call Gillette’s words a direct call to violence, but said the comments were still worrying and part of a larger trend.

“I think it is grotesque what he is saying. I would be afraid that someone would maybe act on it,” Sharlet said, adding that if he were a Democratic politician who had to work with Gillette, he may be nervous. “If he got anywhere near the Congresswoman he is targeting, I’d want security to take notice.”

Discussions around political violence have reached a fever pitch in recent weeks, with high-profile conservatives laying blame on their political opponents and their rhetoric.

“We are having a punctuated burst — a historically high period of political violence that I would call America’s era of violent populism,” Dr. Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who has studied political violence for 30 years, told the Mirror.

In June, Pape penned an op-ed in The New York Times saying that the country was on the brink of an “extremely violent era” in American politics.

“We are now … in the eye of the storm I was worried about,” Pape said.

Pape runs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a nonpartisan research center. In May, Pape’s organization found that 40% of Democrats supported the use of force to remove Trump and 25% of Republicans supported the use of military against anti-Trump protests, double what the numbers were last fall.

That violent rhetoric used by Gillette also could have an unintended consequence on him and his political allies, Pape said.

“It is going to push those supporters (of Jayapal) to becoming more defiant and probably more supportive of political violence against Republicans,” he explained. “Whatever his intentions are, it is increasing the danger to Republicans.”

Sharlet said that, although the intention behind Jayapal’s words was easy to discern, “this is not the time for ambiguous language.” Politicians, he said, should aim to speak to the public in a more truthful and concise manner.

“They need to know the way it boomerangs back in a negative way to their own community,” Pape said, adding that he’d advise them to be more like Kirk’s widow, Erika.

At the memorial service for her husband, she said she forgives the man who killed her husband, adding that “the answer to hate is not hate.”

“Erika Kirk offered an olive branch here, and we need more olive branches here,” Pape said.