California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter sent a donor email containing the phrase "F*** Trump" four times, just one day after what has been described as the third assassination attempt on President Donald Trump's life at the White House Correspondents Association dinner.
The email, sent Sunday, opened with Porter asking supporters to join her in a coordinated chant against the president. Republican National Committee spokesman Nick Poche responded with a blistering statement. Writer and commentator Bethany Mandel, who shared the email with Fox News Digital, posted about it on X, drawing immediate attention to the timing.
The timing is the point. Whatever one thinks of crude fundraising appeals, and they are common enough on both sides, sending one laced with four instances of an expletive aimed at a president who was targeted for assassination less than twenty-four hours earlier is a choice that invites scrutiny. And Porter's campaign has so far offered no public explanation.
Porter's message to donors did not bury the lead. It opened with a rallying cry, as Fox News Digital reported:
"Today, I wanna start with one simple, powerful message we all agree on."
What followed was an explicit countdown:
"Say it with me. Ready, 1... 2... 3... F*** Trump."
Porter then doubled down, writing: "Yeah, that's right, F*** Trump." The email went on to frame the profanity as a statement of purpose, telling donors they would "kick Trump's a** in November and stop him in his tracks." In total, the phrase appeared four times in the body of the message.
Fox News Digital reached out to Porter's campaign for comment. No response has been reported.
The email landed in donor inboxes Sunday, one day after what Fox News Digital described as the most recent assassination attempt on President Trump at the White House Correspondents Association dinner on Saturday. The report noted that attendees ducked under tables during the incident, though specific details about the nature of the attempt were limited in the coverage.
Mandel, who first surfaced the email, framed the contrast in stark terms on X:
"Imagine Barack Obama surviving three assassination attempts and 18 hours later, a Republican sent a fundraising email like this."
It is a fair thought experiment. The political and media reaction to such a hypothetical would be immediate, sustained, and severe. Yet Porter's email drew comparatively little attention outside conservative media, a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched how politically charged stories are covered depending on which party is involved.
Nick Poche, the Republican National Committee spokesman, did not mince words in his statement to Fox News Digital. He called Porter "a degenerate loser who is sick in the head" and said the email revealed something broader about the Democratic Party's strategy:
"It's telling that failing Democrat candidates think their path to victory is to fan the flames of violence right after an assassination attempt."
Poche went further, arguing that silence from other Democrats amounted to complicity:
"The Democrat Party has completely lost its mind, and anyone who refuses to condemn Porter's remarks is just as responsible for the rise in left-wing political violence as Porter is."
Whether or not one agrees with the full sweep of Poche's language, the underlying question is legitimate: Where is the rest of the Democratic Party on this? When a gubernatorial candidate in the nation's most populous state sends a profanity-laced fundraising blast aimed at a president who was just targeted, silence from party leadership is itself a statement.
Porter's email did not arrive in a vacuum. Fox News Digital noted that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., declared just days before the assassination attempt that Democrats are in an "era of maximum warfare." That language, from the top-ranking House Democrat, set a tone that Porter's email then amplified in the crudest possible terms.
The broader context matters. The escalating tension between Democrats and the Trump White House has been building for months. Boycotts, procedural fights, and rhetorical escalation have become the norm. But there is a meaningful difference between political opposition, even fierce opposition, and the kind of language that lands in inboxes hours after a sitting president narrowly survived an attack on his life.
Three assassination attempts. That is the number both Mandel and Fox News Digital cited. Three times the president of the United States has been targeted. And the response from a prominent Democratic candidate running for governor of California was to blast out a fundraising email built around a four-word profane slogan.
The email also raises a practical question about the state of Democratic campaign strategy. Porter is not a fringe figure. She served in Congress, ran for the U.S. Senate, and is now seeking the governorship of California. Her campaign presumably employs professionals who reviewed and approved this message before it went out. Someone decided that the day after an assassination attempt was the right moment to send it. That decision tells you something about the incentives inside the party, and about what Democratic operatives believe their donors want to hear.
It is worth recalling that embarrassing moments for leading Democrats have become more frequent as the party struggles to find a coherent message beyond opposition. When the loudest signal a campaign can send is a string of expletives, the poverty of the underlying argument is hard to miss.
Fox News Digital reported that it reached out to Porter's campaign for comment. No reply was noted in the coverage. That silence is conspicuous. A candidate who builds an entire fundraising appeal around a provocative phrase ought to be willing to defend it publicly, especially given the circumstances.
The open questions are straightforward. Did Porter personally approve the email? Does she stand by the timing? And does she believe this kind of language, deployed hours after an assassination attempt, is appropriate for someone seeking to lead the largest state in the union?
Those questions remain unanswered. Meanwhile, the broader partisan clashes between Democrats and the administration continue to intensify, with rhetoric on the left showing few signs of cooling.
The most telling detail in this episode may not be the email itself. Crude fundraising appeals are, unfortunately, a bipartisan disease. The most telling detail is the absence of any prominent Democrat stepping forward to say: this was wrong, and the timing was indefensible.
After three assassination attempts on a sitting president, the bare minimum a political party should be able to manage is a twenty-four-hour pause on profane attacks. Porter's campaign could not clear that bar. And so far, no one in her party has asked her to.
When a party's loudest voices cannot muster basic decency the day after someone tried to take the president's life, the problem is not one candidate's bad email. It is a culture that has lost its way.