Presidents rarely address the country from the Oval Office, reserving that rite for moments of extraordinary triumph or tragedy. Their remarks are scripted accordingly, with an awareness of the weight each word carries.
So I listened carefully on Wednesday night, when President Trump spoke from the Resolute Desk, directly to the camera, about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I hoped against hope — silly, stubbornly optimistic me — that he’d say something calming, something healing, something that not only recognized this profoundly dangerous juncture but also sought genuinely to move us beyond it.
His condemnation of “radical left political violence,” which touched off days of perversely lopsided and recklessly opportunistic jeremiads from him and his allies, was the opposite of that.
Not because such violence doesn’t exist. It does. Along with radical right political violence. And political violence that doesn’t fit neatly into either of those boxes. And violence divorced from politics. We’re a violent country through and through, a land where passions run disastrously high, disaffection spreads ever wider, communities are fractured, traditional support systems are crumbling, individuals are isolated and guns are everywhere.
Calling out and vowing to pursue and punish the “radical left” doesn’t make any of that better. It just perpetuates and exacerbates a related disease: the insistence on evaluating every major upset or minor misfortune in American life through a partisan lens, assigning blame in a disingenuously tidy fashion and trying to score points.
Trump, senior officials in his administration and public figures supportive of the MAGA movement have been doing that with a shocking, chilling intensity. More than a few of them have essentially declared war against an entire, vaguely defined group of individuals with political orientations contrary to their own. While they remembered Kirk as a champion of civility and open debate, they preached vengeance and silencing.
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The post The ‘Demonic’ Hypocrisy of Trump’s Plea for Peace appeared first on New York Times.
