US President Donald Trump. Photo / Elizabeth Frantz, The New York Times
After the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, United States President Donald Trump released a four-minute video from the Oval Office in which he condemned the killing as the “tragic consequence of demonising those with whom you disagree day after day”.
Then, instead of calling for Americans of all political stripes to lower the temperature, Trump rattled off a list of political violence only targeting Republicans or perpetrated by those he views as on the left.
The list included assassination attempts against him; attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers; the assassination of a healthcare executive in New York; and the mass shooting of Republicans at a congressional baseball practice that nearly killed Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana.
Even though authorities had not identified a suspect or motive, Trump placed the blame squarely on his political opponents.
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said.
“This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
Missing from Trump’s list was any reference to political violence targeting Democrats or perpetuated by those on the right.
The President made no mention of the recent killings in Minnesota of a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband, who were on a hit list of dozens of left-wing figures.
Also not mentioned was the arson attack on the home of Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania while he and his family slept; a shooter’s attack on the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention; a hammer assault on the husband of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi; the shootings at an Arizona campaign office of Kamala Harris; or the January 6 pro-Trump mob attack on the Capitol that injured roughly 150 police officers.
In doing so, experts said, Trump captured the raw sentiment of his conservative base — the feeling of being under constant threat from the left in a country that is abandoning them.
However, the remarks addressed only part of the seemingly endless cycle of political violence America is experiencing.
“Mostly what that speech was doing was reflecting the complex mood inside Maga, which is the twin feelings of sorrow and anger,” said Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago who has closely tracked attitudes about political violence in the US.
“Historically, those feelings go together hand in hand in communities when they feel under attack. And sorrow is often the taproot that morphs into anger.”
That anger was plain to see on social media yesterday even before Trump released his statement. Several Maga influencers, some with enormous online followings, called for war against the left, identifying a target for their outrage even before authorities had identified a suspect.
Pape said that kind of emotional response increased the threat of violence, likening it in some ways to the national mood that followed the 9/11 attacks.
“After 9/11, we had sorrow that quickly morphed into anger, such that within a year, much of the country supported going to war in Iraq, even though we had no evidence of weapons of mass destruction,” he said.
Similar scenes of anger played out on Capitol Hill.
Representative Nancy Mace, (R-South Carolina), told reporters that Democrats “own” the assassination of Kirk. When a reporter questioned her about attacks on Democrats, she cut him off.
“Democrats own this,” she said. “We’re talking about Charlie Kirk right now.”
Representative Thomas Massie, (R-Kentucky), was among those who called on Trump to tone down his rhetoric.
“It doesn’t offend me that he’s over the top with the rhetoric, but some people take it literally, and he should probably tone that down himself,” Massie told The Hill.
In recent years, American politics have become a powder keg. In a country awash with guns, the practice of demonising political rivals has created large followings for some politicians and influencers on social media.
Experts say Americans must now become familiar with the concept of “stochastic terrorism”, the idea that the constant demonisation of a public figure, party or group can increase the likelihood a lone actor will carry out a horrific crime against a member of that group.
“There’s been, obviously, an increase in not just demonising your political opponents, but also in dehumanisation, where the rhetoric that you’re using to describe those whom you disagree with comes to the point of taking away their humanity,” said James Forest, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell School of Criminology and Justice Studies.
“That tends to lead to a type of extremism that makes a person feel it’s okay to use lethal violence against them.”
Speaker Mike Johnson said last week that threats against members of Congress were up considerably this year — to 14,000 from 9000.
“In the US, we’ve seen a troubling and steady rise in violent threats against elected officials,” Johnson said during a Group of 7 industrialised countries meeting in Canada. “It’s almost daily now.”
Johnson did not focus solely on threats from the left. “The uptick in violence against legislators is not confined to just one party or one nation. It’s a common challenge for all of us,” he said.
A New York Times analysis of threats against members of Congress found that they came in every conceivable form: Republicans threatening Democrats, Democrats threatening Republicans, Republicans threatening Republicans.
Many of them were fuelled by forces that have long dominated politics, including deep partisan divisions and a media landscape that stokes resentment.
Forest said that data collected from police chiefs across the country indicated there was a large problem with violent extremism on the right. He pointed to the racist mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Charleston, South Carolina, as examples.
Trump is “refusing to acknowledge that there is a major extremism problem on the far-right in the US,” he added.
“He’s done this consistently, and he’s also been responsible for ratcheting up the very kind of rhetoric that he’s now telling others that they shouldn’t do.”
While there have been several high-profile attacks in recent months in which suspects have identified with left-wing causes, experts in political violence have often noted that those who espouse violence or use violent language on the left are generally not mainstream politicians but instead exist on the fringes of the left-wing spectrum.
That seemed to hold true after Kirk’s assassination, which was quickly and loudly condemned by many establishment Democrats, including Governor Gavin Newsom of California and Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who have frequently criticised Trump.
In some ways, Trump’s reaction to the killing of Kirk echoed how his aides and allies reacted when he was the target of an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year.
Not long after authorities identified a 20-year-old named Thomas Crooks as the shooter, Trump’s proxies blamed the left for the attack, even though Crooks had not left behind an explanation for the shooting and had no clear political leanings.
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vice-President JD Vance wrote on social media. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Senator Tim Scott, (R-South Carolina), echoed that sentiment, saying, “Let’s be clear: This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.”
Ryan Griffiths, a professor of political science at Syracuse University who recently published a book on secessionist movements in the US, compared Kirk’s assassination to a possible forest fire.
“You take a dangerous situation — it’s kind of a dry forest — and you’re starting a little spark over there,” he said.
“Whether that really begins to ignite or not, we don’t know. But it’s not a good thing.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer
Photographs by: Elizabeth Frantz, Adriana Zehbrauskas
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