Pastor Warns If Trump Is Removed From Office, 'Guys That Know How to Fight' Will Hunt Down Democrats

Christian church leader Rick Wiles threatened that "There's gonna be violence in America" if President Donald Trump is removed from office.

Wiles, the senior pastor at Flowing Streams Church in Florida, made the remarks on his right-wing TruNews program Tuesday evening. He claimed that cowboys, mountain men and "guys that know how to do violence" would start attacking and "hunting down" Democrats.

"If they take him [Trump] out, there's gonna be violence in America," the religious leader said. "That's all there is to it," he asserted.

"However he leaves, there's gonna be violence in America," Wiles went on. "I believe there are people in this country, veterans, there are cowboys, mountain men, I mean guys that know how to fight," he said, "and they're going to make a decision that people who did this to Donald Trump are not gonna get away with it."

"And they're gonna hunt them down," the pastor said.

"The Trump supporters are going to hunt them down," he added. "It's going to happen and this country is going to be plunged into darkness and they brought it upon themselves because they won't back off."

Wiles' threat came as it has appeared increasingly likely that Trump will be impeached by the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. The fast-moving impeachment inquiry, which was launched at the end of September, has already revealed that the president pressured Ukrainian leaders to investigate his political rivals and allegedly withheld bipartisan approved military aid to the country as a "quid pro quo" to open the probes.

Although it appears likely that Trump will be impeached in the House, most analysts do not believe he will be removed from office by the Republican-controlled Senate. Although a few GOP senators have expressed serious concerns about Trump's actions towards Ukraine, a two-thirds majority of the legislative body is required to remove the president from office. That would mean all the 45 Democrats, the body's two independents and 19 Republicans would need to vote for Trump's ouster.

Despite it remaining unlikely that 19 or more Republican senators will turn on Trump, a survey by the conservative Daily Caller website suggested this week that it's not outside the realm of possibility. Of the 53 Republicans in the upper house of Congress, only seven confirmed definitively that they do not support Trump's impeachment and removal from office. Additionally, 22 of the lawmakers declined to comment altogether.

Wiles and his TruNews program have a history of promoting highly controversial, anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ ideas and conspiracy theories. In 2017, the conservative religious figure argued that Hurricane Harvey's devastation in Texas resulted from Houston supporting the LGBTQ community. "Here's a city that has boasted of its LGBT devotion, its affinity for the sexual perversion movement in America. They're under water," he said at the time.

TruNews has also described former President Barack Obama as a "demon from hell."