If there was ever the faintest hope that the gruesome assassination of the political activist Charlie Kirk last week might shake the nation from its current spiraling state of division, it has quickly been dashed by the events of the last week.
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President Trump and his allies invoked Kirk’s killing as a reason to pursue a crackdown on political opposition with the punishing power of the federal government.
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The F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, came to testify on Capitol Hill and wound up trading insults and shouting with senators.
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In the House, lawmakers moved to censure one another, with open attacks on the nationality and religion of Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who is also the first Somali-American and one of the first Muslim women to serve in Congress.
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The administration ignited a firestorm over the future of free speech after ABC appeared to bend to government pressure by suspending Jimmy Kimmel, a late-night host, and Trump threatened to revoke broadcast licenses when television hosts criticize him.
It all added up to an exceptionally ugly stretch just a week after an assassination upended the political world and punctuated the increasing and unnerving cadence of political violence in America.
Tempers are always flaring in Washington. But the current level of vitriol has felt especially nasty and intense at a moment when the threat of using the full powers of the federal government for retribution has become more clear and present.
Even former President Barack Obama sounded more downbeat than usual during an appearance on Tuesday in Pennsylvania where he reflected on the two decades since his breakout speech declaring there was not a red America and blue America, but “one people.”
“I deeply believed, and I still do, that we’re just less divided than our politics would indicate,” he began. But Obama soon pivoted to say that “this nationalized ideological struggle” had deepened and “seeped into us through our phones and addled our brains.”
Trump has long since dispensed with the notion that he sees his job as president to serve as a healer or seeker of unity.
“I couldn’t care less,” Trump said on Fox News last week when asked how the country comes back together, acknowledging the statement would “get me in trouble.”
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