The key and the pickaxe

Assassinating Donald Trump or his far-right cheerleaders is not the answer, nor eliminating the Ayatollahs. The response to the Holocaust is not the genocide of Palestinians, but diplomacy, dialogue, fairness, and empathy. That moral baseline must not shift, no matter how turbulent the times.

Edward Luce wrote in Financial Times: “Even in a country with a grim history of political violence, Donald Trump certainly seems to attract a higher share than others of would-be assassins.”

Speaking to the press after yet another failed attempt on his life, Trump could not resist a self-congratulatory flourish. Only great figures like Abraham Lincoln, he suggested, are marked out by assassins, placing himself in that rarefied company.

History is less flattering. Both saints and tyrants have been targets. The assassin’s bullet is indifferent to virtue. A haunting reminder comes from a 1968 cartoon by Bill Mauldin, published in the Chicago Sun-Times after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. It imagines a conversation in the afterlife between King and Mahatma Gandhi, who was felled by a fanatic’s bullets in 1948: “The odd thing about assassins, Dr King, is that they think they’ve killed you.”

The message is both simple and profound. Gandhi and King embraced non-violence and moral resistance; their ideas outlived their bodies. Assassination can end a life, but it cannot extinguish a philosophy.

By the same token, even if Trump and his war-mongering colleagues – alongside Israel’s hardline leadership – target and eliminate leaders in Iran or Palestine, new ones will rise. You cannot snuff out the struggle of people seeking self-determination, nor can you bomb away aspirations for dignity. That is the root of the West Asia conflict: land, identity, and the refusal to recognise the rights of others. Genocide cannot be the answer to historical trauma. It is its betrayal.

Equally, the logic of violence rebounds. It follows, ipso facto, that a radicalised individual may again target the US President. The previous attackers were, after all, American citizens. But such acts, however dramatic, will not erase Trumpism: its hostility to immigrants, its flirtation with white supremacism, and its reduction of politics to spectacle and division.

America already grapples with a grim normalisation of violence, seen in mass shootings in schools, stadiums, concerts, and crowded boulevards. When a society witnesses not just sporadic violence but the spectacle of political power embracing force—of leaders who speak the language of domination—it risks legitimising the very impulses it claims to condemn.

If the head of the world’s most powerful democracy turns rogue, or appears to sanctify violence, the consequences ripple far beyond its borders. It invites imitation. It lowers the threshold of what is acceptable. Killing Trump, morally abhorrent in itself, is not the way to eradicate Trumpism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, reflecting on Napoleon, observed: “Every organ is made up of similars... if Napoleon is France, it is because the people whom he sways are little Napoleons.” The insight is unsettling. If Trump rose to power through popular mandate, it is because many who supported him saw themselves reflected in him – “little Trumps,” as it were. The problem, then, is not merely the man, but the milieu that sustains him.

The antidote cannot be violence; it must be engagement. Those who believe in dialogue and democratic values must reshape the political climate – not just in the United States, but wherever authoritarianism and intolerance are on the rise. A stable and peaceful world rests on recognising diversity, pluralism, and the sovereign rights of nations, as envisioned in the UN Charter.

History offers sobering lessons. When the hungry asked for bread, emperors answered with bayonets. When indigenous communities demanded justice against exploitation, they were met with brutality instead of empathy. When people sought sovereignty over their lands, bombs often replaced negotiation. Each time, power chose force over wisdom – and each time, it deepened the crisis.

Rabindranath Tagore captured this failure with characteristic elegance: “The clumsiness of power spoils the key, and uses the pickaxe.”

That clumsiness defines much of our present moment. Wars are waged with the detachment of video games; lives reduced to statistics; retaliation mistaken for resolution. Yet beneath the noise, the truth endures: violence begets violence, while justice, however slow, alone sustains peace.

In a Trumpian world where assassination becomes spectacle and statecraft risks sliding into vendetta, the real challenge is not eliminating enemies, but re-humanising politics. The choice is stark. We can continue down a path where power pulls the trigger – or we can reclaim one where it extends a hand.

The writer builds bridges, sometimes by tearing down walls. He is a soldier, farmer, and entrepreneur.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)