Jim Jordan’s statement on Fox News is another example of violent rhetoric entering the Republican mainstream, analysts say
Anti-hate speech activists have condemned the Republican US congressman Jim Jordan for his apparent endorsement of Donald Trump’s declaration that members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff should have been executed.
Jordan asserted on Fox & Friends that the former president was “right on target” when he accused Clinton’s aides of spying on him, and that in another time in US history their “crime would have been punishable by death”.
“Trump and Jordan are escalating tensions at a time when this country sorely needs healing,” Michael Edison Hayden, senior investigative journalist with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s intelligence project, told the Guardian.
During the Fox interview, Jordan was not asked directly about Trump’s allusion to executions, but over the weekend he retweeted a Fox News article about it that included the “punishable by death” comments in full.