President Donald Trump's remarks following the slaying of far-right activist Charlie Kirk could be interpreted as a declaration of war against the American left, according to one columnist.
In a Thursday essay for the New Yorker, Susan Glasser — the spouse of New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker — argued that Trump's promise of a crackdown on "radical left political violence" should be seen as an ominous sign for Trump's critics for the remainder of his second term. She grimly noted that despite the shooter remaining at large and authorities still determining a motive, Trump exploited Kirk's murder to target Democrats.
"Trump’s remarkable threat somehow did not get much attention. It should have," she continued. "Not only was the President not even trying to unite the country but he seemed to be blaming the large chunk of the nation that reviles his racially divisive policies and those promoted by Kirk as surely as if they had pulled the trigger."
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According to Glasser, Trump's comments are also in line with what Deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller wrote in his manifesto — which he authored shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks when he was a college student. The New Yorker writer observed that Miller's chief enemy was "radical Islamic jihadist ideology" that had been "steadily growing in this country" and "hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved."
"How striking it is, then, to read Miller’s manifesto about what he considers to be today’s chief threat, which, like much of Trump and his MAGA movement’s current rhetoric, is focussed not against external adversaries such as Russia and China but on the scary prospect of a violent enemy within," she wrote.
Glasser differentiated Trump's response to Kirk's assassination with former President Joe Biden's response to the attempt on Trump's life last year. After a bullet nearly struck Trump, Biden talked about "the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics." The New Yorker columnist opined that unlike his predecessor, Trump seemed to show no interest in encouraging cooler heads to prevail.
"The President doesn’t care one bit about all those sanctimonious calls for healing," she wrote. "It is not a dialogue about the crisis of political violence in America that he wants right now but an aggressive new policy of political vengeance."
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Read Glasser's full New Yorker column by clicking here (subscription required).