As President Trump announced on television this morning that the authorities had caught the man believed to be Charlie Kirk’s killer, he was quick to lay the blame for America’s gruesome tally of political violence on his political opponents.
“The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime,” he said. “The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious, and they’re horrible, and they’re politically savvy.”
In the days since the open-air assassination of Kirk, a 31-year-old right-wing youth activist whom the president treated like family, an already divided nation has been further cleaved by a fight over who is responsible. Trump has led his supporters in blaming “the radical left” and those who criticized Kirk’s polarizing politics.
Into this cauldron of grief and vengeance stepped Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, another Republican, on Friday morning, pleading for something different.
“We can return violence with violence,” Cox said. “We can return hate with hate, and that’s the problem with political violence — is it metastasizes. Because we can always point the finger at the other side. And at some point, we have to find an off-ramp, or it’s going to get much, much worse.”
It is usually the job of a president to unify the nation in moments of rupture and sorrow. But on Friday, it was Cox who decided to give it a try.
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The post After Kirk Assassination, a Republican Governor Tries to Stop the Blame Game appeared first on New York Times.
