Charlie Kirk’s killing requires Trump to soothe, not inflame

By Ronald Brownstein

Moments of tension and tragedy are when presidents usually try hardest to speak to, and for, the entire nation. But following the horrifying assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump on Wednesday responded with angry, divisive and conspiratorial remarks that captured his distorted view of the presidency.

Instead of trying to heal a country fractured by political violence, Trump once again demonstrated that he fundamentally views himself as the leader of a faction, not a nation. The president instinctively assumed the petty job of mobilizing his base for retribution against another group of Americans — the “radical left” — whose rhetoric he blamed, before anything was known about the shooter’s identity or motives, for the murder and for political violence in general:

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.

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 difficult to overstate how profoundly Trump’s remarks inverted the typical approach of previous presidents at times of loss. In those crucibles, presidents almost without exception have tried to encourage unity as the nation’s “mourner in chief.”

Those include moments when Ronald Reagan, summoning the wisdom of a poet in his most fatherly intonation, said the astronauts killed in the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle had “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God”; when Lyndon B. Johnson, responding to the murder of Martin Luther King, declared that “men who are White — men who are Black — must and will now join together as never in the past to let all the forces of divisiveness know that America shall not be ruled by the bullet, but only by the ballot of free and of just men”; when Bill Clinton, comforting survivors and mourners of the Oklahoma City bombing, implored Americans to “let our own children know that we will stand against the forces of fear”; when George W. Bush, visiting an Islamic center days after the Sept. 11 attack, urged Americans even “in our anger and emotion” to treat “our fellow Americans…with respect”; and when Barack Obama, in the most spiritually transcendent moment of his (and maybe any modern) presidency, sang Amazing Grace at the funeral for the victims of the Mother Emanuel church shooting in South Carolina.

When forced by events into the mourner-in-chief role, presidents have virtually all struck similar notes, said George Edwards III, a professor emeritus of political science at Texas A&M and a leading scholar of presidential rhetoric. “Of course, they express horror at the killings, they honor the victims, they try to provide some comfort for the survivors,” Edwards told me. “But the most important thing that the most successful ones do is emphasize consensual values” including decrying violence, overcoming differences and uniting as a country.

Jeff Shesol, a historian and former White House speechwriter for Bill Clinton, points to two other common threads that weave through previous presidential speeches at such moments. “In the spirit of the physician doing no harm, they try not to inflame an inflammatory situation,” he said. And often, he says, presidents accept “the quasi-religious role” of helping grieving Americans “to locate some meaning in what just happened.”

In his speech Wednesday, Trump appropriately honored the victim and comforted his family. But rather than encourage unity or temper emotions, he inflamed an inherently explosive situation by castigating the left, lamenting violence solely against Republicans and conservatives while ignoring attacks on Democrats — including the assassination of a Minnesota state representative in June — and ominously threatening investigations and other actions against his political opponents.

“It’s not just that he fails to do what he should do here,” Shesol said, “but he eagerly, aggressively does exactly the opposite.”

The closest recent precedent for Trump’s bellicose tone after Kirk’s killing is probably President Richard Nixon’s response to the National Guard shooting of four student anti-Vietnam War protesters in May 1970. In private, Nixon raged against the protesters and said, in a conversation captured by his secret White House taping system, that the best way to stop “radicals” was to “kill a few.” Nixon also allowed his Vice President Spiro Agnew to continue vitriolic attacks on student demonstrators and other administration critics after the shooting.

But even Nixon, who shared much of Trump’s affinity for division, recognized that the aftermath of such a tragedy was no time for a president to publicly escalate conflict. In the days after the shooting, he met with university presidents and Kent State students at the White House and made an early morning trip to exchange views (albeit awkwardly) with student demonstrators at the Lincoln Memorial. And when he denounced violence, Nixon was careful to acknowledge the right to peaceful protest.

Even the most eloquent words from US presidents have not stopped the country from growing more divided. But almost all modern presidents at least sought in their own ways to narrow the country’s differences, especially in these moments of shock and loss. “They want to calm, they want to soothe,” said Edwards. “Instead of giving a soothing, comforting talk, Trump gave an angry one.”

It was a characteristic decision. Previous presidents may have failed to reverse polarization, but Trump is virtually unique among them in believing that he benefits from stoking it. He betrayed no sense of irony Wednesday in insisting that the left tone down its rhetoric, even though he’s accused Obama of treason, described Democrats and liberals as “Communists, Marxists, fascists, and…radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin within the confines of our country,” said that Democrats “hate our country,” insisted immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America, and, just days ago, posted an image of himself promising to rain down “Chipocalypse Now” on the nation’s third-largest city, as flames flickered across a skyline.

Trump is trying to change America in ways that require — even demand — forceful argument from each party. But if he wants to slow this accelerating cycle of recrimination and political violence, he should start with the man in the mirror.

Robert Caro famously wrote of LBJ that power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals. So does crisis. Many presidents have never stood taller than when they sought to comfort the country after hardship and loss. Trump has rarely seemed smaller than in his response to Kirk’s tragic murder.