Glenn Beck Suspended By SiriusXM For Comments Made About Donald Trump

SiriusXM satellite radio has suspended Glenn Beck for a week in light of comments he made about Donald Trump, which some believed advocated for violence against the presidential candidate.

Glenn Beck Suspended

Beck hosts The Glenn Beck Program on SiriusXM, on which he chatted with author Brad Thor during the May 25 show. During the course of the interview, the discussion turned to Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Thor suggested during the conversation that extreme action might need to be taken in the event of a Trump presidency, which he believes will leave America open to a quasi-dictatorship.

“I am about to suggest something very bad,” Thor said. “… With the feckless, spineless Congress we have, who will stand in the way of Donald Trump overstepping his constitutional authority as president? If Congress won’t remove him from office, what patriot will step up and do that if, if, he oversteps his mandate as president, his constitutional-granted authority, I should say, as president,” Thor continued, according to CNN. “If he oversteps that, how do we get him out of office? And I don’t think there is a legal means available. I think it will be a terrible, terrible position the American people will be in to get Trump out of office because you won’t be able to do it through Congress.”

Beck’s response to Thor’s suggestion is what got him into trouble: “I would agree with you on that.”

The internet, prone to outrage, believed that Thor was making a veiled threat of an organized assassination should Trump get into the White House. And, therefore, it was believed that Beck was in support of such an action. In response to the backlash, SiriusXM decided to give Beck a one-week suspension from his conservative talk show, reported the Washington Post.

The comments “may be reasonably construed by some to have been advocating harm against an individual currently running for office,” SiriusXM said in a statement.

While Beck has yet to personally address his suspension, Thor has released a statement to assert that neither he nor Beck were calling for an assassination. Rather, according to Thor, they were pontificating a possible need to unseat a sitting president without Congress’s support and how that need would be met. Additionally, Beck’s show’s general manager, Dom Theodore, posted a statement to Beck’s website:

“As every listener of the show knows, Glenn has never — and will never — advocate violence. It wasn’t long ago that he was criticized by some for advocating peace during the Bundy Ranch saga,” the statement reads. “Glenn is a firm believer in Martin Luther King’s approach to affecting change, not Malcolm X’s.”