President Donald Trump on Thursday told reporters that “we just have to beat the hell” out of “radical left lunatics,” following the killing of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.

The president, speaking on the South Lawn of the White House as he was heading to New York City, was responding to a reporter who asked what the president’s message was to conservatives who feel targeted by “radical groups.”

Trump, who also had some more measured comments about Kirk’s killing during the roughly 10-minute exchange with reporters, said: “We have to be brave in life, in all fairness, we have a life. I probably shouldn’t be out here talking to you in all fairness but we will be brave. And we have a great country. We have radical left lunatics out there and we just have to beat the hell out of them.”

The president added in a separate answer that he would urge his supporters to follow a nonviolent path in response to the shooting. “He [Kirk] was an advocate of nonviolence,” Trump said. “That’s the way I’d like to see people respond.”

Kirk in the past argued that his message was one of nonviolence and that “Antifa and far-left activists” have forced him to cancel speaking events at college campuses.

Trump’s comments come one day after the 31-year-old Kirk was killed in an attack at a college campus event in Orem, Utah, that stunned the nation. Authorities haven’t captured the shooter and a motive for Kirk’s slaying remains unknown.

In the wake of the shooting, Trump recorded an address from the Oval Office and distributed on social media, where he praised Kirk and also blamed the “radical left” for his death. He said that the “radical left” compared Kirk to “Nazi’s” and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals and blamed vitriolic rhetoric for the killing of the conservative activist.

“This type of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today,” the president said in the three-minute video.

He also said Wednesday night that his administration will find the “organizations that funded and supported” political violence, though he didn’t go into specifics on which groups he was talking about. Trump listed off the assassination attempt on himself last year in Butler, Pennsylvania, that left one audience-member dead, attacks on ICE agents, the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in broad daylight in midtown Manhattan and the 2017 shooting of House GOP leader Steve Scalise at a congressional baseball game.

“We have a radical left group of lunatics out there. Just absolute lunatics,” the president said Thursday. “And we’re going to get that problem solved.”

During the remarks to reporters Thursday evening, Trump added that authorities have made “big progress” in the investigation into Wednesday’s killing of Kirk.

On Thursday morning, Trump announced that he would posthumously award Kirk the medal of freedom.