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One small relief in an awful week is that Utah Governor Spencer Cox was the man leading the official response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. In any other state, local politicians might have either become targets for President Donald Trump or leapt to inflame the situation. But the Beehive State’s governor is perhaps the most consistent voice of calm and conciliation in the GOP.
Cox’s impulse to appeal to what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” was on display this morning in a press conference, where, flanked by FBI Director Kash Patel and local leaders, he announced the arrest of Tyler Robinson, the suspect in Kirk’s killing, on Wednesday.
“This is certainly about the tragic death, political assassination of Charlie Kirk. But it is also much bigger than an attack on an individual,” Cox said. “It is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on the American experiment. It is an attack on our ideals. This cuts to the very foundation of who we are, of who we have been, and who we could be in better times.”
This kind of language was once common among mainstream politicians responding to a tragedy; now Cox is a notable and praiseworthy outlier in his own party. Trump’s response has been mercurial. At times, the president has seemed to call for a calm, measured reaction to the shooting. “He was an advocate of nonviolence,” Trump said of Kirk on Thursday. “That’s the way I’d like to see people respond.” In the next breath, however, he cast blame and demanded forceful reprisal. During Cox’s remarks this morning, the governor seemed almost to be trying to speak to Trump—or at least to those who might be swayed by his rhetoric.
“We have radical-left lunatics out there, and we just have to beat the hell out of them,” Trump said yesterday.
“To my young friends out there, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage,” Cox lamented. “It feels like rage is the only option.”
“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence,” Trump said in a brief speech Wednesday night, “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.”
And here’s Cox today: “There is one person responsible for what happened here, and that person is now in custody and will be charged soon and will be held accountable.”
This morning on Fox & Friends, Trump told the hosts, “I’ll tell you something that’s gonna get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime.” He added: “The radicals on the left are the problem. And they’re vicious, and they’re horrible, and they’re politically savvy.”
Later that morning, Cox said, “Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now, not by pretending differences don’t matter, but by embracing our differences and having those hard conversations.”
“Social media is a cancer on our society right now, and I would encourage—again, I would encourage people to log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member, go out and do good in your community,” Cox said. This advice might be particularly valuable to Trump, who has his own social-media network, which he uses to blast out invective at all hours of the day.
But if Cox and Trump represent two rival impulses within the Republican coalition, Trump is undoubtedly winning. “Democrats own what happened today,” Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina said on Wednesday. “Y’all caused this,” Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida told Democrats on the House floor. “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization,” the influential Trump adviser Laura Loomer posted on X. “We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.”
Other influential figures on the right have been equally or more strident. “The Left is the party of murder,” Elon Musk declared on X before a suspect had even been identified. Andrew Tate, the misogynist who has been charged with sex trafficking in two countries (which he denies); Alex Jones, the conspiracy-theorist broadcaster; and Libs of TikTok influencer Chaya Raichik all invoked “civil war.”
(Notwithstanding accusations of stoking violence, prominent Democrats have consistently condemned Kirk’s assassination. That’s a vivid contrast to the mockery from many on the right—including Donald Trump Jr.—after a man attacked the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the muted reactions, disinformation, and silence that followed the assassination of the Democratic Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband, this summer.)
No other politician can really hope to compete with a president’s influence (though California Governor Gavin Newsom is certainly willing to try), and that is especially true of Trump, who is so omnipresent that a few days’ absence from the spotlight led to rumors of his death. Even Cox has partly succumbed to Trump’s gravitational pull. Although for a long time he distanced himself from the president—one of the most notable Republicans to neither endorse Trump nor leave the GOP—he eventually got behind him in the last election. As he told my colleague McKay Coppins, in a somewhat-pained interview, he understood Trump’s character but thought that public criticism was useless. Instead, he hoped that Trump might at least modulate his tone if given sufficient positive reinforcement.
Cox was right to call for conciliation and peace today, but by now, he must surely know that his hopes for Trump were in vain. Perhaps other Americans are still redeemable.
Related:
- The last man in America to change his mind about Trump
- Jonathan Chait: Trump’s dangerous response to the Kirk assassination
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- Jonathan Chait: Leading Democrats are condemning Charlie Kirk’s murder.
Today’s News
-
The suspect in Charlie Kirk’s shooting has been identified as 22-year-old Tyler James Robinson, Utah Governor Spencer Cox said at a news conference this morning. Robinson confessed to a family member before turning himself in to the police, Cox said.
- The FDA is reviewing reports of deaths and birth defects possibly tied to COVID-19 vaccines, including about two dozen child fatalities, according to people with knowledge of the reviews. The reviews are being conducted under pressure from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies, who are pushing for more public disclosure.
- President Donald Trump said he will deploy the National Guard to Memphis, calling the city “deeply troubled.” The Memphis Police Department said this week that overall crime in the first eight months of 2025 has hit a 25-year low, compared with the same period in previous years.
Dispatches
- The Books Briefing: Lee Lai’s Cannon offers a raw depiction of what panic feels like, Emma Sarappo writes.
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Evening Read
How Teacher Evaluations Broke the University
By Rose Horowitch
At the close of the fall semester, professors across the country will grade their students. Based on recent trends, those grades will be higher than ever. Around the same time, students will hand grades right back to their professors in the form of teacher evaluations. Those grades, too, will likely be higher than ever.
These two facts are very much related. American colleges, especially the most selective ones, are confronting the dual problems of rampant grade inflation and declining rigor. At Harvard, as I wrote recently, the percentage of A grades has more than doubled over the past 40 years, but students are doing less work than they used to. Teacher evaluations are a big part of how higher education got to this point. The scores factor into academics’ pay, hiring, and chance to get tenure. But maximizing teacher ratings is very different from providing quality instruction. In fact, those aims are largely opposed. Faculty are incentivized to lighten students’ workloads and give them better grades, lest they be punished themselves. “To some extent, we are all afraid of our students,” one Harvard history professor told me.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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