Dear President Trump,
I am writing this as I ride through the night on a train from the Poland-Ukraine border to Kyiv. I should be thinking about the Ukraine war, but I am thinking about you and why the aftermath of the awful murder of Charlie Kirk may be the most important turning point in your presidency — depending on how you turn.
Let me put this bluntly: You are not going to win the Nobel Peace Prize, which you so covet, by mediating between Ukrainians and Vladimir Putin or in Gaza between Israelis and Palestinians. Neither of these conflicts is ripe for a solution right now. But you have a chance to win something much more significant and historic:
The American peace prize.
Make peace at home. Make peace between Americans. That is the peace prize that you don’t have to wait for anyone to confer on you. It is there for your making and the taking. This American peace prize will not be awarded by Scandinavians. It will be awarded by history. It will say that when Americans came closer to civil war than perhaps any other time since the Civil War, President Donald Trump surprised everyone on the upside: He called Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George and Laura Bush, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate and House and all nine Supreme Court Justices and said: Come to the White House and let the country see us standing together against political violence and vowing that we will model civil discourse and disagreement — in our speeches and online — and we will call out the opposite when we see it among our supporters as well our rivals.
Getting through the next week is important, Mr. President. The challenge is starting today to try to make peace and then to keep going.
Even on this train to Kyiv, I can hear the voices in America saying: Donald Trump will never, ever do that. It is not in his character. He has never surprised us on the upside.
Just the opposite. On Wednesday he said that he plans to unleash the full weight of his administration against those who contributed to an environment of “radical left political violence.” On Friday he said more of the same.
Mr. President, if you treat the cancer of political extremism eating away at the soul of our country as coming only from the far left and not also the far right, you will destroy your legacy, and you will destroy the country.
After the signing of the Abraham Accords, you called me and told me that I surprised you — that you thought The Times would never let me write such a supportive column for your Middle East peace breakthrough. Well, I am begging you now, Mr. President: Surprise me. Surprise all of us and make peace in America. Nothing, absolutely nothing, would isolate the extremes on the left and the right more than if you did that. And nothing would be better for the country than to attempt to calm and unify people.
As unrealistic as it may sound, I refuse to foreclose the possibility that you will elevate the country, not just divide it even more — because the stakes are so high.
Do not kid yourself: If you go after only the far left voices, you will be ignoring what I consider to be Abraham Lincoln’s best piece of advice to all of his successors, delivered in his address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Ill.:
At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? … I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.
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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
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