A week after the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump, Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill came under scrutiny for tweeting “a dead body is more competent than Trump to be president.” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, Utah Governor Spencer Cox and Utah GOP chair Rob Axson all criticized the tweet in posts on social media, calling it indecent and “a new low.”
When asked for comment by the Deseret News, Gill said, “My tweet was not about Trumps body, I came out and have been against any type of violence. It was that you could elect a dead person and that person would do more good for this country than him. If it was taken as anything else that was, and never would be my intent. That is why I tweeted the second tweet clarifying what I had meant.”
When Trump was speaking at a campaign rally earlier this month in Butler, Pennsylvania, a shooter identified by FBI as Thomas Matthew Crooks, opened fire. Trump was injured on his ear. Corey Comperatore, a firefighter, was killed, and two others were also injured.
Lee, Cox and Axson voiced criticism of Gill’s tweet in the wake of this rally shooting.
“Ask yourself: Where does this lead? This is not okay,” said Lee at the beginning of a multi-tweet thread. He expressed concern that the rhetoric could embolden people who are not stable.
“I get it: you don’t like Trump,” said Lee. “Better said, you don’t like Trump’s policies — the things he would do (and did do) as president. But when people say things like this, it cheapens the entire debate we should be having as a country about what we want in a president.”
Cox said on social media, “A new low for Sim following a literal assassination attempt. Disgusting.”
“This type of rhetoric makes clear that any degree of (prosecutorial) impartiality is absent as is the decency that we should expect of any public servant,” said Axson on social media. “@SimGillDA is void of the judgment his office demands and Salt Lake County would be far better with his resignation.”
Gill’s full tweet read, “What people already know. Truly, a dead body is more competent than Trump to be President. It would do exponentially less harm to our democratic republic & honor our ideals more.”
On Sunday morning, Gill tweeted, “In case you missed the point or misconstrued it, the point is that there is more thought in a pile of rocks, tree stump, a bucket of water than the current GOP nominee for President. That is all.”