Democratic Congressional candidate Amy McGrath said that the closest she could come to describing the way she felt after Trump’s election was her reaction to 9/11.

At a “Meet the Candidates Series” event hosted by Indivisible Bourbon County on Nov. 20, 2017, McGrath described the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States as a “sucker punch.”

“And then, of course, the results of the election, we have a new commander-in-chief,” she said. “And that morning I woke up like somebody had sucker punched me. I mean, I felt like, ‘what has just happened to my country?'”

“The only feeling I can describe that’s any close to it was the feeling I had after 9/11,” she continued in the video, posted on June 11. “‘What just happened, where are we going from here?’ And it was that just sinking feeling of sadness, and I didn’t know what to do.”

The National Republican Congressional Committee has asked McGrath to apologize for her “deeply insensitive, divisive, and disappointing” words regarding a national tragedy that almost 3,000 innocent lives. “In her own words, Amy McGrath woke up the morning after President Donald Trump’s election feeling the same way she felt after a terrorist attack where 2,977 Americans were killed,” NRCC press secretary Maddie Anderson said and that she “should apologize immediately.”

Former Virginia congressional candidate Dan Helmer said something similar, claiming that the “greatest threat to our democracy” was once a man who lived in a cave, but now is one who “lives in the White House.”