In 1972, no American was more associated with white supremacy and racial segregation than George Wallace, then the governor of Alabama and a candidate for president. But after an assassination attempt that spring left him paralyzed, an unlikely visitor turned up at his hospital bedside.
Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, stayed there for about 15 minutes. They prayed together, and he wept. But the governor also seemed concerned that Ms. Chisholm’s supporters would be unhappy she was kind to him. “What are your people going to say?” he asked.
Indeed, Ms. Chisholm would later recall that the hospital visit nearly cost her re-election. But that was beside the point.
“I wouldn’t want this to happen to anybody,” she remembered telling Wallace.
In times of national trauma or crisis, political leaders have tended to make appeals for unity and to a collective sense of values, hoping to bring down the temperature even when some Americans lust for revenge. In the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, for instance, President George W. Bush vowed to bring the attackers to justice but also visited an Islamic cultural center and declared, “Islam is peace.”
It strains the imagination to picture what the analogue of that declaration or the Wallace-Chisholm moment would be today, as another spasm of political violence this month ripped open old cultural and political divisions. On Sept. 10, the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated as he spoke on a Utah college campus. A sniper carried out a similar attack two weeks later in Dallas, the authorities said, firing indiscriminately at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office and killing one detainee.
Even as there is open fear about further violence, President Trump has displayed little interest in fostering unity. He has ratcheted up his pugilistic rhetoric, drowning out the few gestures of humility and calls for healing that occasionally break through.
At the memorial service for Mr. Kirk, Mr. Trump even brushed aside Erika Kirk’s expression of forgiveness toward her husband’s killer. “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them,” he said, adding, “I am sorry, Erika.”
It seems to be more than rhetoric. On Thursday, a federal grand jury indicted James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director who had infuriated Mr. Trump by investigating his ties with Russia. The president responded to the news by attacking Mr. Comey as “one of the worst human beings this country has ever been exposed to.”
Experts in civic discourse say Mr. Trump’s give-no-quarter language is unmatched by other modern American presidents.
Democrats have certainly insulted and ridiculed the opposition. Hillary Clinton never lived down her comment that Trump supporters were a “basket of deplorables.” But a defining feature of the Trump presidency is that “there’s no off switch,” said Peter Wehner, who served as a speechwriter for Mr. Bush and has criticized the devotion many conservatives show for the president.
“There’s always been this language of mercy — except with Trump.”
The pattern of choosing words that suggest an absence of humanity in his adversaries — calling them “evil” and “monsters” and “vermin” — is particularly worrisome, Mr. Wehner added, because many of the president’s followers take their cues from him.
“It seems that almost all the incentive structures are in favor of it,” he said, referring to this coarser rhetoric. “It’s what rewards them, what gets them points in their own subculture, in their own tribe.”
Republicans, for their part, have blamed Mr. Kirk’s assassination on those liberals who accused him of being a white nationalist and a homophobe for his remarks opposing the Civil Rights Act, gay marriage and affirmative action, among other issues. And conservatives were furious when some Democrats continued to criticize Mr. Kirk after his death, seemingly indifferent to the grief of his followers.
Stephen Miller, the senior White House adviser, eulogized Mr. Kirk by denouncing “the forces of wickedness and evil.” Then, addressing these antagonists directly, he said: “You are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred. You are nothing.”
Pro-Trump podcasters and political commentators have sometimes gone even further. An editor for the right-wing publication The Daily Caller implored conservatives this week to “choose violence” and declared that civility was only holding them back. “I want blood in the streets,” he added.
For as long as Mr. Trump has dominated American politics, vitriol has been the norm, grace the exception.
In moments of national crisis during his first term — the Covid pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, the attack on the Capitol by his supporters — Mr. Trump hardly ever responded with words of harmony and common cause. A display of power sometimes accompanied his harsh words, as with Mr. Comey this week. In the summer of 2020, for instance, Mr. Trump denounced demonstrators as “looters, thugs, Radical Left, and all others forms of Lowlife & Scum,” the day after he sent the police to disperse a large protest outside the White House.
Missing from national politics today are vivid examples of friendship and civility across deep partisan divides. Eboo Patel, president of Interfaith America, a group that works to encourage dialogue, pointed to a few recent examples as templates, including work by Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, a Republican who earned bipartisan praise for urging Americans to pull back from the brink of anger and hate after Mr. Kirk’s death.
More of that sentiment, Mr. Patel added, would go a long way toward restoring trust in political institutions and leaders.
“This is a moment where there is an awful lot of pressure on the democratic experiment,” he said. “And you cannot have a democracy where existential disagreements are the major way in which you engage with your fellow citizens.”
Mr. Patel said that Americans were eager for leaders who are capable of a gesture of kindness like Ms. Chisholm’s more than 50 years ago. “You’re the hero if you do that.”
As hard as it may be to imagine today, Ms. Chisholm’s visit to the governor’s hospital room turned out to be more than a photo op. “There was just something that came over him,” Peggy Wallace Kennedy, the daughter of Governor Wallace, recalled.
His politics changed. A few years after he was shot, Mr. Wallace traveled to a church in Birmingham, Ala., where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. He apologized to the congregation.
Jeremy W. Peters is a Times reporter who covers debates over free expression and how they impact higher education and other vital American institutions.
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