Actor John Schneider called for the executions of Joe Biden and the president’s son Hunter in a now-deleted social media post that drew ridicule and questions about whether he should be criminally charged.
Schneider, perhaps best known for his role as Bo Duke on the TV series Dukes of Hazzard as well as his recent runner-up finish on The Masked Singer, fired off the post on X at 2am local time on Thursday.
“Mr President, I believe you are guilty of treason and should be publicly hung,” Schneider wrote to Biden. “Your son too. Your response is..? Sincerely, John Schneider.”
The comment was a reply to a post from Biden which said Donald Trump – who is facing more than 90 criminal charges as he seeks a second presidency in 2024 – “poses many threats to our country”.
“But the greatest threat he poses is to our democracy,” Biden’s X post continued, in part. “If we lose that, we lose everything.”
Schneider’s response to Biden’s post drew thousands of replies before it was deleted.
As Newsweek first noted, among those to reply was the investigative journalist Victoria Brownworth, who wrote: “Just here for the ratio and to let you know that it’s ‘hanged,’ not ‘hung’.” Brownworth added: “There’s zero evidence of ‘treason.’ Step out of the Fox News bubble.”
Another user added: “Wow! You’re calling for the execution of a sitting president. May the secret service show up at your door with a reply.”
Citing anonymous sources close to the matter, Deadline reported later Thursday that the Secret Service – the agency tasked with protecting presidents and their families – had opened a preliminary investigation into Schneider.
Other commenters maintained Schneider’s remark fell short of constituting a death threat. Under federal law, threatening “to inflict bodily harm upon the president of the United States” could carry a fine and up to five years in prison.
In a statement to Deadline, Schneider denied advocating for Biden’s execution.
“I absolutely did not call for an act of violence or threaten as US president,” Schneider’s statement read, in part. “It’s my position, which I am entitled to have, that some of our nations leaders in Washington have lost their way, and corruption runs rampant, both on our nation’s borders and abroad. Transparency and accountability must happen in order for our constitutional republic to survive. There is no threat implied or otherwise in that statement.”
Schneider’s comments about the president came as conservatives and media outlets who are friendly to them – including Fox News – support Republican efforts to hold a formal vote to launch an impeachment inquiry into Biden.
Republicans have spent months investigating business dealings by Biden and his son Hunter in hopes of finding improprieties that could form a basis for an impeachment. But some Republicans have been vocal about their worries that investigators have not found misconduct by the president, whose son is facing federal tax charges.
Schneider was on The Dukes of Hazzard from 1979 to 1985. In 2015, the television channel TV Land announced it would pull reruns of the action-comedy series because the car the main characters drove around displayed the Confederate battle flag, a symbol adopted by white supremacist hate groups.
The fictional car itself was also named after Robert E Lee, the Confederate general who inherited the ownership of enslaved people upon the death of his mother.
Schneider – whose character’s full first name, Beauregard, is identical to the surname of a famous general in the Confederate army – protested against TV Land’s decision by remarking “the whole politically correct generation has gotten way out of hand”, as Today.com reported.
A second-place finish in Wednesday’s season finale of The Masked Singer had earned Schneider – also a country musician – some favorable celebrity media coverage. So had a new interview with Fox News in which he described how difficult he expected this Christmas to be after his wife, the producer and actor Alicia Allain Schneider, died from breast cancer in February.
“It’s going to be rough,” Schneider had said in that interview. “Grief will never go away.”