On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Source,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) said that it’s “dangerous” for the Trump campaign to blame Democratic rhetoric for the recent attempted assassination of 2024 Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump and that doing so is “precisely what they shouldn’t be doing at a moment when they should be taking down the political temperature.” And also responded to Republicans saying they don’t trust the federal government by stating that “if you work hard enough to delegitimize the government in the eyes of Americans, you’re going to create a very dangerous environment.”

Host Kaitlan Collins said, “[G]iven the conversation we were just having of the Trump campaign pulling out any time a Democrat has said Trump is a threat to democracy as a point of Democrats needing to tone down their rhetoric, I just wonder what your take on that is.”

Himes responded, “Two things about this conversation are really bothersome and actually deeply dangerous: Number one, is making that statement. Now, the last thing I want to do is get into a tit for tat here, but the American people know who has advised the police to not be too nice in their apprehension of suspects, they saw what happened on January 6. It’s absurd that the vice presidential candidate and Donald Trump are pointing the fingers at Democrats. And by the way, it’s precisely what they shouldn’t be doing at a moment when they should be taking down the political temperature. The other thing that it just made me bristle when you said it is Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and others who are saying they don’t trust the feds, the misinformation and the notion that the federal government — and look, we do oversight of the federal government, so we’ll be the first to tell you that there are challenges inside the federal government — but when you constantly beat the drum that you can’t trust the FBI, that the intelligence community is in the tank for Democrats or for whoever it may be, what you do is, every time you say that, a few more Americans get angry at their own country for no good reason. There is no evidence backing any of this stuff, and if you work hard enough to delegitimize the government in the eyes of Americans, you’re going to create a very dangerous environment.”