Biden effigy beaten, kicked at Kansas Republican event, drawing outrage

The chairwoman of the Johnson County Republican Party told the Kansas City Star in an email that the effigy had been set up as part of a booth hosted by a local martial arts school.

“This booth was hosted by a Karate school to promote their self defense class,” GOP Chair Maria Holiday said in an email to the news organization. Holiday did not immediately respond to calls or emails from The Post requesting comment.

The event — first reported by the nonprofit nonpartisan news website Kansas Reflector — prompted widespread condemnation and calls for Republican officials to resign.

The Kansas state GOP issued a statement Monday that said “it’s unfortunate the events took place.” But it blamed the incident on an outside exhibitor and a former state party member who “created false narrative in order to spew rhetoric and capitalize on continued attempts to divide the party.” No state party officials attended the event, the statement said.

On Saturday, Overland Park attorney Mike Kuckelman, the former chairman of the state Republican Party, said in a Facebook post that guests at the event had been “invited to beat the effigy of Biden with a baseball bat in exchange for a donation.”

“This conduct is shameful, and it is WRONG,” Kuckelman wrote, calling for Holiday and current GOP state Chairman Mike Brown to resign. “Silence is complicity in this case.”

Kuckelman said in an interview Monday that “it’s very disappointing as a Republican to see such a vile and disgusting display of violence against a mannequin of President Biden. It’s just wrong and there’s no explanation for that type of conduct.”

“The only people who are engage in this type of conduct are extremists who should be called out and shamed,” he said.

Kuckelman said Monday that he was surprised no current GOP party officials had yet apologized for the event.

“I think they’re standing firm that it was okay for them to do this and it’s really disturbing,” he said.

In his post, Kuckelman referred to the 2017 incident in which comedian Kathy Griffin posed with a Donald Trump mask made to look like a bloody, severed head — a gesture that also was widely condemned and severely damaged Griffin’s career.

Prasanth Reddy, a Johnson County oncologist and Republican running for Kansas’s 3rd Congressional District, which includes the suburb where the event took place, said in an X post that “ridiculous, thoughtless actions like this distract from those trying to deliver solutions.”

State Senate Minority Leader Dinah Sykes, a Democrat from Johnson County, called on current GOP elected officials to condemn the beating of Biden’s effigy.

“It’s disgusting,” Sykes said in an interview. “This is invoking violence and we should not be doing this. We can disagree on policy, but to have something where people are attacking with a bat [an effigy] resembling our president, that crosses the line and never should have happened.”

Both Kuckelman and Sykes said that the initial video — now removed — was posted by the account “MolonLabeTruth” on Rumble, an account that frequently posts content from the Johnson County GOP. The poster could not be reached for comment.

The effigy incident comes during what is expected to be a highly charged 2024 campaign season in which the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Trump, is facing felony charges for his alleged actions to overturn the 2020 presidential election before his supporters’ violent riot on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol.

Potential violence against members of Congress, judges and other leaders is a growing concern, the Justice Department has said. In recent months, law enforcement has been forced to grapple with bomb threats in state capitol buildings and “swatting” — where prank calls are made to summon law enforcement to a particular address — of elected officials of both major parties.

In January, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland called the wave of threats against government workers and public servants a “deeply disturbing spike.”