Republican who joked about Dem's shooting now outraged about Trump piñata: 'Condemn this!'

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) demanded that Democrats condemn a video that depicts demonstrators striking a piñata bearing the likeness of President Donald Trump, and went so far as to suggest that such behavior exhibited in the video encourages assassinations.

“This isn’t funny,” Lee wrote in a social media post on X Sunday night, sharing alongside it the video of a child striking a piñata made to look like the president. “This is how assassination culture takes root. Democrats: please condemn this!”

The video was initially shared by the far-right and anti-LGBTQ social media account “Libs of TikTok."

“They want us all dead,” reads the original post from “Libs of TikTok” on X that was shared by Lee. “They’re teaching their kids to kill us.”

Lee received renewed scrutiny this week for having voiced outrage over those mocking the recent fall of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), despite himself having mocked former President Joe Biden’s fall boarding Air Force One just months prior, and also making a joke in reference to the fatal shooting of a Minnesota Democratic lawmaker and her husband in June.

Lee has undergone something of a transformation of sorts during his time in office, according to The Atlantic staff writer Tim Alberta, who noted the lawmaker’s former anti-Trump stance had fully reversed by 2020 where he supported the president’s efforts to overturn the results of the presidential election.

For Spencer Stokes, Lee’s first chief of staff in the Senate, the lawmaker’s shift in ideology came down to one matter: respect.

“Had he not gotten caught up in the Tea Party movement when he first got elected, he might have had a very different career,” Stokes told Alberta. “He might have been much more of a mainstream Republican. But Mike craves respect. Those groups on the right gave it to him. And because there were no accolades from the mainstream, he stayed where the accolades were.”