Christmas may be over, but the belated opening of a Christmas card from pornographic magazine Hustler brought about holiday outrage from the Louisiana congressman.
“Here's all you need to know about the radical Left. A young staffer of mine opened this in a stack of holiday mail today,” Johnson said in a Thursday tweet.
“I just shot Donald Trump on Fifth Avenue, and no one arrested me,” reads one portion of the Christmas card. The other half of the card shows the murderer, Americans and even Santa Claus himself rejoicing as a rotund, lifeless corpse resembling Trump bleeds out onto the streets of New York.
The cartoon plays off a remark uttered by Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.
"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I would not lose any voters, OK?" he said during an Iowa campaign rally in January 2016.
Naturally, many netizens expressed outrage over the depiction of the president’s murder, and some even agreed that the cartoon warranted a Secret Service investigation.
A number of other Twitter users pointed out that even if the Secret Service deemed the piece out of the bounds of free speech - which is protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution - the federal law enforcement agency had a very obvious lead on the perpetrators.
This is not the first time that Trump has been in Hustler’s crosshairs. Back in 2017, Larry Flynt, the magazine’s publisher and founder, took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post offering up to $10 million for “information leading to the impeachment” of Trump and his “removal from office.”
“I feel it is my patriotic duty, and the duty of all Americans, to dump Trump before it's too late,” the porno mag publisher said in the ad.
Despite Johnson tagging the Secret Service in his tweet, the law enforcement agency did not acknowledge the informal request for a federal investigation with any public response via social media.