Even
in mourning, Trump drives our country closer to the brink
Presidents
rarely address the country from the Oval Office, reserving that rite for
moments of extraordinary triumph or tragedy. Their remarks are scripted
accordingly, with an awareness of the weight each word carries. So I
listened carefully on Wednesday night, when President Trump spoke from the Resolute Desk,
directly to the camera, about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I hoped
against hope — silly, stubbornly optimistic me — that he’d say something
calming, something healing, something that not only recognized this
profoundly dangerous juncture but also sought genuinely to move us beyond it. His
condemnation of “radical left political violence,” which touched off days of
perversely lopsided and recklessly opportunistic jeremiads from him and his
allies, was the opposite of that. Not
because such violence doesn’t exist. It does. Along with radical right
political violence. And political violence that doesn’t fit neatly into
either of those boxes. And violence divorced from politics. We’re a violent
country through and through, a land where passions run disastrously high,
disaffection spreads ever wider, communities are fractured, traditional
support systems are crumbling, individuals are isolated and guns are
everywhere. Calling
out and vowing to pursue and punish the “radical left” doesn’t make any of
that better. It just perpetuates and exacerbates a related disease: the
insistence on evaluating every major upset or minor misfortune in American
life through a partisan lens, assigning blame in a disingenuously tidy
fashion and trying to score points. Trump,
senior officials in his administration and public figures supportive of the
MAGA movement have been doing that with a shocking, chilling intensity. More
than a few of them have essentially declared war against an entire,
vaguely defined group of individuals with political orientations contrary to
their own. While they remembered Kirk as a champion of civility and open
debate, they preached vengeance and silencing. Stephen
Miller, who has been tripping over his adjectives to describe the evil he
sees in his opponents, denounced “an ideology that has
steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good,
righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and
depraved.” Elon Musk, in a post on X, proclaimed: “The Left is the party of
murder.” They
were simply taking their cues from Trump himself, who, in an appearance on
“Fox & Friends” on Friday, sold a laughably benign take
on the right. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they
don’t want to see crime,” he said. “They don’t want to see
crime.” In contrast, he added, “The radicals on the left are the problem, and
they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.” In
his Oval Office address, Trump provided a litany of justifications for his
promised prosecution of the left, comprising only these examples, in this
order: the assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pa.; assaults on ICE
agents who are rounding up immigrants; the killing of Brian Thompson, the
chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, on a Manhattan sidewalk last December;
and the shooting of Steve Scalise, a prominent House Republican, during a
congressional baseball practice in 2017. “Radical
left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many
lives,” Trump said. He
made no mention of the assassination this year of Melissa Hortman, the Democratic former
speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, and her husband by a
gunman who also shot and seriously injured a Democratic state senator and his
wife. No mention of an assailant’s attempt to burn down the house of Gov. Josh
Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, as he, his wife and their children slept
inside. No mention of the plot in 2020 to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer
of Michigan, a Democrat whom Trump then reveled in vilifying. No mention of
the man who broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home in 2022 and struck her husband,
Paul, with a hammer, an incident that many of Trump’s allies — including his
son Donald Trump Jr. — made fun of. Reality
is a whole lot messier than Trump’s MAGA-under-siege message. To the extent
that researchers have sought to get a handle on the political violence of
recent years, many have determined that more has
come from the right than from the left. But
I’m hesitant to note that, because the point here is the violence itself,
with its unacceptable casualties, and how it savages civil society and
threatens a democracy that seems to me less steady and more vulnerable by the
hour. Radical right, radical left: The blood spilled is blood regardless. Also,
motive is a tricky thing. Inchoate rage or other emotional crises often drive
assailants whose actions are interpreted politically because of the
circumstances, not because of any definitive proof. In fact, a year after
Trump was shot in the ear in Butler, investigators looking into the
background of the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, were coming to the
conclusion that he was “socially isolated, educated but friendless” and
propelled “not by politics or ideology but by a sense of insignificance and a
desire to become known,” Carol D. Leonnig wrote in The Washington Post. Trump
on Wednesday night pantomimed high-mindedness: “It’s long past time for all
Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the
tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree.” President,
edit thyself. “Demonic forces” are actual words Trump used at a rally in 2023 to
smear his political opponents. That year or the next, he also described them as the “enemy from within,” “Marxist, fascist and
communist tyrants who want to smash our Judeo-Christian heritage,” “a sick
nest of people,” “thugs, horrible people, fascists, Marxists, sick people,” “vermin” and “radical left lunatics.” Those are highlights from
just the past two and a half years. He was whipping up hatred long before
then, and he whips up hatred still. In
his Oval Office remarks he also pledged to root out “those who go after our
judges, law enforcement officials and everyone else who brings order to our
country.” That would be new for him. On Jan. 6, 2021, a violent mob attacked
and injured law enforcement officials trying to maintain order at the
defining theater of American democracy, the U.S. Capitol. Trump didn’t punish
them. He pardoned them — and repeatedly celebrated them as great American
patriots. Tributes
to Kirk that sweep all of that aside won’t bring us together. They’ll just
drive us farther apart. And they don’t honor Kirk. They dishonor the truth. |
