Donald Trump’s niece is calling out the president, saying he bears direct blame for the murder of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk.
After a shooter assassinated Kirk, 31, at a Utah university Wednesday, Trump called him a “martyr” and said the “radical left” was spreading rhetoric “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today” in an Oval Office address.
“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and other political violence,” he declared.
But Mary L. Trump said her uncle “should start with himself.”
“Political violence and the rhetoric that drives it are almost entirely on the side of the Republican Party, and no person is more responsible for it than Donald Trump,” Mary, 60, wrote Thursday in her The Good in Us Substack.
“We have arrived here in large part because this country has been purposefully and maliciously divided against itself because of the rhetoric coming from Donald Trump and the Republican Party.”
When reached for comment, White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson said, “These are disgusting comments‚” and asked the Daily Beast to include an excerpt from Trump’s remarks on Kirk’s murder.
“Tonight, I ask all Americans to commit themselves to the American values for which Charlie Kirk lived and died,” the 79-year-old president said Wednesday evening. “The values of free speech, citizenship, the rule of law, and the patriotic devotion and love of God. Charlie was the best of America, and the monster who attacked him was attacking our whole country. An assassin tried to silence him with a bullet, but he failed because together we will ensure that his voice, his message and his legacy will live on for countless generations to come.”
Mary, a longtime critic of the president, wrote that he “almost single-handedly created the conditions in which his grievance, his vengeance, and his cruelty extend to anybody that supports him.”
She pointed to the deadly Jan. 6 riot, in which Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol and attacked police officers, noting Trump’s blanket pardon of roughly 1,600 rioters: “He has incited violence against his perceived political enemies as well as against his own government and then pardoned those who committed it on his behalf. This is not a ‘both sides issue.’”
Mary, whose father was Trump’s older brother, Fred Jr., claimed, “The right does not condemn political violence, at least when it’s wielded against their perceived political enemies. In fact, they celebrate it.”
She cited “positively gleeful” reactions to the 2022 attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Trump joked about the assault, in which an attacker fractured Paul’s skull with a hammer, during a state party convention in 2023, saying, “We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco—how’s her husband doing, anybody know?”
Mary, a psychologist and writer, condemned Kirk’s assassination and said her argument that Trump drives political violence “does not mean rejoicing in what happened to Charlie Kirk.”
The search for Kirk’s killer is still ongoing and the FBI has released security camera photos of a “person of interest.” Authorities have not identified an official motive.
However, Trump and other right-wing figures have cast Kirk’s murder as a sign that the country’s “left” is responsible for pushing dangerous political rhetoric.
Following the shooting, tech billionaire Elon Musk wrote on X, “The Left is the party of murder.”
Mary argued those messages are “designed to pour gasoline on the already raging fire,” and added, “The fire was started by the Republicans.”
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