Kathy Griffin Reshares Controversial Photo of Donald Trump Effigy With Severed Head After He Claims Premature 'Victory'
Kathy Griffin has re-shared a controversial image of Donald Trump's severed head after he claimed [...]
Kathy Griffin has re-shared a controversial image of Donald Trump's severed head after he claimed premature "victory" in the 2020 presidential election. The photo is of Griffin holding a mock head of Trump covered in blood. The photo was captured by photographer Tyler Shields, who is well-known for setting up controversial pictures.
Previously when Griffin shared the image in 2017, it sparked a lot of backlash and wound up getting her fired from CNN's New Years Eve program that she co-hosted with Anderson Cooper. She later issued an apology. Griffin re-shared the photo after Trump made remarks from the East Room of the White House Wednesday morning claiming that there is mass voter "fraud," and that he "did win" the election. Trump made the comments as votes were continuing to be counted, and this led to a lot of Republican leaders speaking out against his premature victory claim.
— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) November 4, 2020
According to Politico, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has long been an ally to Trump, appeared on ABC News and criticized Trump's rhetoric about voting fraud. "I talk tonight now not as a former governor, but as a former U.S. attorney. There's just no basis to make that argument tonight," Christie said. "There comes a point where you have to let the process play itself out before you judge it to have been flawed." He added, "I think it's a bad strategic decision, it's a bad political decision, and it's not the kind of decision you would expect someone to make tonight who hold the position he holds."
Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania who endorsed Trump in 2016, also spoke out. Santorum told CNN that he was "very distressed by what I heard the president say," and that Trump's claims "that there's fraud being committed by the people counting votes, I think, is wrong." He continued, "The President is a 70-some-year-old man at 2:30 in the morning, after a very stressful time. And I think he was just, unfortunately, being more a raw version of himself. And so that's just disappointing."
Santorum later added, "I hope that … they walk it back tomorrow and say, 'We want the votes to be counted.' Particularly in Arizona. If you want them counted in Arizona, you need to count them in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, too. And Georgia." At the time of this writing, votes are still being counted around the nation.