'Love to do it to us': Trump relayed chilling warning to Spencer Cox after arrest of Charlie Kirk suspect

OREM, UTAH: Utah Governor Spencer Cox stood at a podium in Orem, Utah, on Friday, September 12 announcing the end of the 34-hour manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s killer after Tyler Robonson's arrest.

He also pleaded for peace in a country that appeared at risk of descending into more violence.

Not long after his remarks, President Donald Trump reached out to the governor directly, delivering a pointed warning about the dangers of political life.

Spencer Cox's appeal to young generation during Charlie Kirk presser 

Speaking to The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, Spencer Cox said that Trump called him shortly after he made an appeal for calm in the wake of Kirk’s death on Friday.

“To my young friends, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage,” Cox said during the presser.

“Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now," he said.

During the press conference, Cox also warned against the cycle of violence.

“We can return violence with violence, we can return hate with hate, and that’s the problem with political violence, it metastasizes, because we can always point the finger at the other side and at some point we have to find an off-ramp or it is going to get much, much worse,” Cox said.

Donald Trump warned Spencer Cox about Oval Office dangers

Shortly after Cox finished his address, his phone rang with Trump on the line.

“You know, the type of person who would do something like that to Charlie Kirk would love to do it to us,” Trump told Cox, according to the publication.

Trump also highlighted the dangers that come with holding the presidency. He pointed out statistics that “one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet” was his office, adding that 15 percent of men who had been president had been shot, while 8 percent had been killed.

Cox said he understood Trump’s concerns, recalling that Trump himself had narrowly escaped an assassination attempt just a year earlier, refering to Trumps narrow esacpe during a campaign rally in Butler Pennsylvania in July 2024, when a bullet from shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks grazed his ear.

Spencer Cox admits shock over identity of Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer

The Utah governor later shared that he had not slept in 48 hours as the manhunt unfolded.

While relieved that an arrest had been made, he said he was shaken by the identity of the accused, Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old man raised in a Mormon family in Washington, Utah. 

“I was praying that if this had to happen here that it wouldn’t be one of us—that somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another countrḍy,” Cox admitted during the presser. “But it did happen here, and it was one of us.”

His words drew criticism from some who accused him of looking for a politically convenient scapegoat. Still, the wider mood in Washington, DC, remains tense. “People are scared to death in this building,” a member of Congress told NBC News this week.