The reaction by Trump to the horrendous assassination of Charlie Kirk has been as irresponsible as anything Trump has done to date to divide our nation.
When bad things happen, presidents traditionally use the highest office in the land to calm and reassure the public. The best of our presidents appeal to the better angels of our nature, asking that we harbor “malice toward none.”
Trump consistently appeals to the worst of our demons, as he did Wednesday night after the shooting when he said:
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
I don’t know at this writing who was responsible for Kirk’s death, and Trump certainly didn’t know when he made these remarks Wednesday night. But for Trump to blame the “radical left” — a term he often uses to describe the whole Democratic Party — is an unconscionable provocation that further polarizes Americans at a time when we badly need to come together.
It’s also a vehicle for silencing criticism of Trump’s own authoritarianism, advancing the presumption that if you criticize someone for being an authoritarian, or the member of an authoritarian political movement, you’re a terrorist who’s inciting murder.
Trump continued:
“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”
It’s unclear what Trump is calling for here, but it sounds as if he may use the Kirk assassination as a pretext for unleashing the FBI and other federal law enforcement on every organization that could possibly be seen as contributing to the “radical left.” This becomes clearer from what he said next:
“From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a health-care executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical-left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”
Trump is attributing America’s rising tide of political violence to the “radical left,” ignoring the significant if not larger amount of political violence perpetrated by Trump supporters on the far-right.
The latter includes the shootings of two Minnesota Democratic legislators at their home earlier this summer, the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro in April, the series of shootings at the homes of four Democratic elected officials in New Mexico in 2022, the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, the attempted pipe bombings at the homes of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in 2018, and the attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022.
Trump’s list of so-called “radical-left” violence included attacks on ICE agents — which did not involve gunfire — but conveniently failed to mention the shooting a month ago at CDC headquarters, in which a man protesting Covid-19 vaccines fired more than 180 shots at the building and killed a police officer.
Nor, obviously, did Trump include the violence he himself incited at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, by over 1,500 followers who received prison terms — all of whom Trump subsequently pardoned.
There is no excuse for political violence in America. Nor is there any excuse for provoking even more of it by blaming it on one side or the other.
And no excuse for a president of the United States using a heinous killing as an occasion to treat his political opponents as accomplices to murder and threatening to use the full power of the government to attack them.
We have had enough violence, enough carnage, enough blame. We must do whatever we can to reduce the anger and hate that are consuming and destroying so much of this nation.
It is time for all of us, including a president, to take some responsibility.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/."