Early on the morning of Friday, October 28, 2022, a man broke into a home in San Francisco carrying a hammer. He was looking for the Speaker of the House. She wasn't there. Her 82-year-old husband was.

The intruder asked "Where's Nancy?" and then beat Paul Pelosi with the hammer. Pelosi managed to call 911. He was hospitalized with a fractured skull and spent time in intensive care.

Later that same day, Claudia Tenney — then a sitting member of Congress, a colleague of Nancy Pelosi's, eleven days from an election — went on Twitter and made a joke about it.

She shared a photoshopped image from an account called Right to Bear Memes showing a group of men holding oversized hammers outside a house said to belong to the attacker. Above it she wrote one word:

"LOL"

The joke had a conspiracy theory inside it

The meme wasn't just tasteless. It was an advertisement for a lie.

Within hours of the attack, parts of the right had begun insisting that the assailant, David DePape, was secretly a gay man in a relationship with Paul Pelosi, and that the hammer attack was really a drunken domestic fight. There was never any evidence for it. The Finger Lakes Times, which took a screenshot of Tenney's post before she pulled it down, described the claim plainly as one of "a number of debunked claims that circulated following the attack" that "contradicted police accounts."

The image Tenney boosted was built on that lie. It showed a Berkeley house with a rainbow flag out front — the supposed "proof" the attacker was a leftist — doctored to add a row of men with hammers, drawn to look the way the meme's audience thought gay men look. That's the joke. It required a homophobic smear about a man in the ICU to work at all.

We now know what DePape's motive was, because he testified about it. He said he had planned to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage and break her kneecaps if she lied to him, and that he believed news outlets had repeatedly lied about Donald Trump. A federal jury convicted him on November 16, 2023 of attempted kidnapping of a federal official and assault on the immediate family member of a federal official. He was sentenced to 30 years.

There was no lovers' quarrel. There was a man with a hammer and a head full of internet conspiracies, and a congresswoman who thought the internet conspiracies were funny enough to pass along.

When people objected, she turned off the replies

The part that says the most about Tenney isn't the post. It's what she did next.

People — including other members of Congress — told her it was cruel. Rep. Eric Swalwell of California wrote to her directly:

"The husband of one of your colleagues is being treated in an ICU right now and this is your response? To mock his attack? When you were raising your son, did you ever tell him to laugh at the pain of others? Or did you teach him better? This is disgusting. Delete it."

She didn't delete it. She switched off the replies so people couldn't answer her, and left the post up. The journalist who first flagged it called that "cowardly" — she had turned off criticism instead of taking down the thing being criticized.

The post stayed up through the weekend and into the following Tuesday, four days later, before it quietly disappeared. There was no explanation. Her campaign did not respond to reporters asking about it, and no apology came with the deletion. She stopped letting people talk back, waited, and hit delete.

Other Republicans managed to do the normal thing

It would be easy to write this off as the political climate. It isn't, and the proof is in her own party, in her own state, the same week.

Rep. Joe Sempolinski — the Republican whose district included counties that were about to become part of Tenney's — put out a statement the day of the attack: "Lawless violence is wrong. I wish Mr. Pelosi a quick recovery and thank our first responders who are there when we need them most. Just like the recent attack on Congressman (Lee) Zeldin, violence must be condemned."

That's the whole assignment. A Republican said it about a Democrat's husband and connected it to an attack on a Republican three months earlier. It took him three sentences.

Asked days later whether Tenney's meme changed his support for her, Sempolinski said he was still backing her, and offered this: "everybody has their own reactions to situations. My reaction is I hope he (Paul Pelosi) is fine, that we should have no political violence and that I hope we have total transparency."

Even the colleague defending her couldn't bring himself to defend the post.

The hometown press was blunter. The Buffalo News editorial board ran a piece on November 3, 2022 under the headline "Claudia Tenney's retweet of a vile post reveals a broken moral compass." The campaign of her Democratic opponent, Steven Holden, issued a statement saying it found it "extremely distasteful that Claudia Tenney, a sitting member of Congress, would make fun of the attack on her colleague Nancy Pelosi's husband."

Eleven days later, voters in the 24th District elected her anyway.

What she says when it's her own house

Here is where it stops being about one bad post.

On January 6, 2022 — ten months before the LOL — Tenney issued a statement on the anniversary of the Capitol attack. In it she wrote: "I have and will always condemn unlawful acts like these that destroy property and abuse our right to peacefully assemble. Using violence to advance a political cause is wrong."

She had also, in May 2021, voted against creating the independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the Capitol attack — the vote her own report card documents.

On November 20, 2025, someone broke a window at Tenney's private residence in Washington. No one was hurt, and the motive was never established. She put out a press release the same day:

"This incident at my residence in Washington was disturbing and unacceptable... Violence, intimidation, and attacks against public officials or their families have no place in our society."

Read those two sentences next to each other.

Attacks against public officials or their families have no place in our society — written about a broken window at her own home, by the same person who wrote "LOL" about a man who was beaten unconscious with a hammer in his living room, in the very category she just named.

She knows the right words. She can produce them within hours when the target is herself. When the target was the 82-year-old husband of a woman she disliked, the words she reached for were the ones that got laughs from the meme accounts.

Why this matters in 2026

This is not a gaffe from a long-ago news cycle. It's a window into how someone treats people when she thinks the cost is zero.

We've watched other Republicans make the same calculation. Darren Bailey went live on Facebook ninety minutes after seven people were killed at an Independence Day parade and told Illinois to move on and celebrate, while the shooter was still at large. Brinker Harding, asked by Latino leaders in Omaha to take down a sombrero meme and apologize, went on camera and defended it instead. In every case the pattern is the same: the cruelty is the content, and the apology never comes.

Tenney is asking the voters of New York's 24th District to send her back to Washington. This is the same representative who won't sit down with the people she represents — constituents in Sackets Harbor had to hold a town hall with an empty chair where she should have been, and more than 200 of them showed up to address it.

She had one chance to say something decent about a man in intensive care. What she said was "LOL." Then she turned off the replies so nobody could tell her otherwise.

We deserve better.

Source

GOP Rep. Claudia Tenney Laughs at Paul Pelosi Attack, Deletes Tweet — The Daily Beast, November 2, 2022. Photo of Rep. Tenney via Getty Images.