Bad Leadership on Display
Trump's response to the Kirk assassination is to try and further divide us.
I will start with the obvious, because even though it is obvious, it needs to be said lest there be any misunderstandings. What happened yesterday to Charlie Kirk was a tragedy. It was a tragedy for his friend and family, and it was a broader tragedy for our politics. The former is axiomatically obvious. The latter is a mix of what this latest assassination says about where we are in America at the moment, and, worse, what it allows for the evolution of this moment.
I fear two things very deeply.
I fear that this moment allows all of us to succumb to anger and hatred, and to see all of this in terms of “sides.” It is a moment in which Us and Them deepens. And so that I am not being too vague, I will note that in my view, US v. Them is the main element of fascistic politics in contemporary America. There is a cancer that can eat at our souls, the more we engage in such views personally.
I also fear that this moment will allow political leadership in the United States, and specifically in the Trump administration, to harness the anger, frustration, and grief into not only deepening Us v. Them, but to then use these events as excuses for further deployments of government forces against US citizens.
On the first count of fears about what the administration will do, it must be reported that Trump never misses an opportunity to divide us.
He made a statement from the Oval Office wherein he took several opportunities to blame the left (you know, Them) for all the violence and vitriol.
Here’s the whole thing in video form:
Here’s a transcript via Grok, since I cannot find a news organization that provides the whole text.
To my great fellow Americans,
I am filled with grief and anger at the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk on a college campus in Utah.
Charlie inspired millions, and tonight all who knew him and loved him are united in shock and horror.
Charlie was a patriot who devoted his life to the cause of open debate and the country that he loved so much, the United States of America.He fought for liberty, democracy, justice, and there’s never been anyone who was so respected by youth.
Charlie was also a man of deep, deep faith, and we take comfort in the knowledge that young, beloved children and his entire family who he loved more than anything in the world.We ask God to watch over them in this terrible hour of heartache and pain.
This is a dark moment for America.
Charlie Kirk traveled the nation joyfully engaging with everyone interested in good faith debate. His mission was to bring young people into the political process, which he did better than anybody ever.
To share his love of country and to spread the simple words of common sense on campuses nationwide.
He championed his ideas with courage, logic, humor, and grace.It’s a long past time for all Americans in the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.
For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.
This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.
It must stop right now.
My administration will find each and every one of those who contribute to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.
From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a healthcare executive in the streets of New York, New York, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others—radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.
Tonight I ask all Americans to commit themselves to the American values for which Charlie Kirk lived and died: 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.
Today, because of this heinous act, Charlie’s voice has become bigger and grander than ever before.
It is not even close.
May God bless his memory.
May God watch over his family.
And may God bless the United States of America.
Thank you.
Emphases mine.
At a moment of national tragedy (and a political assassination is such a moment), leadership matters. A good leader would seek to calm the nation. A good leader would seek to turn down the temperature. A bad leader, conversely, emphasizes how one side is to blame and turns up the temperature.
We don’t even know who did this or why, and yet Trump is laying blame.
Worse, he is only acknowledging violence committed against his version of “Us” and ignoring violence against “Them.”
As NPR notes in their write-up:
Trump did not include any examples of political violence against Democrats, such as the June attack in Minnesota that killed a state lawmaker and left another wounded or the 2022 hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She wasn’t home at the time, but was the intended target.
In regard to the attack on Paul Pelosi, here’s a trip down memory lane via Politico from roughly two years ago:
“We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco — how’s her husband doing, anybody know?” Trump said to a raucous crowd of California Republicans at a state party convention. “And she’s against building a wall at our border, even though she has a wall around her house — which obviously didn’t do a very good job.”
Trump does not aspire to be the leader of all Americans. He aspires to be the leader of those he sees as Us and not those he sees as Them (or, maybe more accurately, he is happy to weaponize Us v. Them dynamics for his own political gain–he cares little about those he leads, rather obviously). His response to the Kirk assassination just underscores this yet again.
And no, this is not a surprise. It still needs to be highlighted, however.
Allow me also to highlight this specifically:
It’s a long past time for all Americans in the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.
Let me just note that there has not been a politician of Trump’s stature who has engaged in more demonization of his opponents than has Trump. And he and his administration continue to do so.
We all know that Trump’s main rhetorical tool is to engage in schoolyard-level name-calling, you know, high-level discourse. Moreover, he frequently uses Us v. Them rhetoric, as he does in the statement above.
Leadership matters, and Trump continually illustrates this fact by being a bad leader.
I am going to agree with Trump when he says, “This is a dark moment for America.”
It is. And it is made all the darker that he sees this moment as a chance to further divide us.
********************@
When all El Taco has is bad leadership, you can be sure he’ll use it regardless of the consequences.
Trump is big on citizenship. To hear him claim free speech, rule of law, patriotism, and God is nauseating.
I read so much centrist drivel asking why we are so divided. We are divided because Republicans have worked long and hard to divide us.
“Divisive rhetoric” is too polite a term. This sounds more like a set-up for escalated oppression.
Don’t let wishful thinking about normal politics close your eyes to what he’s talking about, and who the “organizations” are. He’s already going hammer and tongs against universities and law firms. Who else, and at what higher level of forcefulness?
@Kingdaddy: There is a a definite threat in there. I focus here more on the rhetorical power and his division of the population.
But yes, there is an inherent escalation, which I really only touched on.
Roy Cohn was Trump’s political mentor. Cohn went to the grave pretending he was straight and not dying of AIDS. Saying Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person or pretending that the GOP isn’t in favor of attacking Capitol Hill and pardoning a convicted murderer who killed left-wing protester is like Cohn’s obituary saying he died of cancer. Everyone who read that knew it was a lie.
Trump’s politics are divisive because that’s what he says: live a lie. And it’s becoming apparent that they are planning to take people who out–just like Cohn would sue anybody for telling the truth–who don’t go along with the lie.
@Kingdaddy:
My guess is the president is bloviating. The Epstein-bestie pedo’s address isn’t reverberating across the news or on socials today. Because for him, divisive hatemongering is boilerplate.
Such normalization is by no means positive. But his predictability does limit his ability, at this point, to make a discrete rhetorical impact with these tasteless, unpresidential screeds.
Contrast that with Biden’s pre-2022 midterm speech on the rightwing threat to democracy. It shocked people because for Biden its dark, foreboding, negativistic tone was and out of character for Biden. Thus critics and supporters talked about it for days, and it landed: exit polls had ‘threats to democracy’ as a main issue behind inflation/economy — defying pundits who wrongly claimed voters didn’t care, that Joe had misread the moment.
Donald would’ve gotten more traction from defying expectations to deliver the unifying, healing, hopeful speech he is incapable of projecting, given his unsolveable personality defects.
And of course, Charlie was raising money for the Pelosi attacker on his show.
I don’t think this was a tragedy at all. Kirk was a man who dedicated his life to making other people’s lives materially worse. He was incredibly successful at it and he was generously rewarded for it. I also don’t care about his kids. I don’t care because on August 24, 2025, I looked my daughter in the eye and thought to myself, “I should kill myself before I ruin her life.” I am suicidal because of Kirk and the people who follow him. Respectfully to you Dr. Taylor, you would feel a whole lot differently if you were one of the targets of Kirk’s evil. It is one thing to be called a faggot or a tranny in a locker room as a kid or just some jerk on the street. It is another to watch a man mobilize a whole movement and then the United States government against you and people like you. Gavin Newsom said that we need to continue Kirk’s work. Kirk’s work was to make life unlivable for people like me.
What I am seeing now is a whole bunch of white men decrying “political violence” while having a cabined view of what political violence is. Is it only political violence when a rich white man gets murdered? It’s not political violence when the United States government murders a boatload of people? It’s not political violence what the government is doing to Mr. Abrego Garcia? It’s not political violence when, with bipartisan support, the House of Representatives votes to take more rights away from trans americans.
The UK government is working to allow an equality code to pass into law without debate in Parliament that will ban trans people from bathrooms and make life completely unlivable for us. Is the terror I feel when I use the bathroom not the exact kind of political violence Kirk advocated for? How about the slaughter of children while in school? Kirk found that kind of political violence not only acceptable, but necessary. The two children who were shot at nearly the same time as Kirk are a tragedy.
What I find to be upsetting about this whole thing are the distressing number of people, particularly white men, saying that this marks a change for the worse, and is implicit in calling this “political violence” is that for me, for immigrants, for black people for women, is that we are just expected to absorb the violence of men like Kirk, or Trump, or the US/UK governments and that’s just normal. I’m watching my rights be stripped away and people are talking about how much of a good guy the bigot is. My children are terrified that their mom is going to get taken away, but that’s acceptable. It’s not violence, it’s just a wednesday.
Charlie Kirk’s murder is not a tragedy. It is just the next inevitable step for a country that abhors violence for straight, white, Christian, men of property, and expects everyone else to not only accept violence (physical, economic, political), but to also laud the men that cause the violence.
@Beth: First and foremost, I just want to reiterate that you are a wonderful, lovable woman, whom I want to what I can to keep safe and whole. If I didn’t use the word “woman” before, it’s because it never occurred to me that you would need to see me write it.
It has occurred to me.
Ok, going forward with “Jay wants his daughter and Beth and all the other wonderful trans people he knows and who have enriched his life to be safe and whole” idea…
It’s hard for me to see that killing Charlie Kirk moves that goal forward. It’s much easier to see the retrograde happening. Is it a coincidence that just before he was shot, a questioner asked him “how many trans people do you think own guns?” Is that going to be more fuel? There is chatter that some DOJ official or another said that they are thinking about taking away the guns of trans people?
The people of Ukraine overthrew Yanukovych by getting in the streets. It got violent on the Maidan at times. Nobody assassinated Yanukovych, though.
Marcos was chased from office by the “People’s Revolution” which was non-violent. Marcos was not assassinated.
This can happen here. I keep my faith alive that it will happen here. I take note of things:
For instance, a theater group at the Oklahoma Central University was preparing a play about young boys playing leading ladies in Shakespeare’s plays, which was a done thing that everyone knows about. The University cancelled support for them. They needed $10,000 to continue.
This happened next:
There are some (not many, to be sure) very conservative folks out there with trans children who love and support those children. This gives me hope.
Maybe his children will learn that living a life of spewing hatred and lies does not end well. This might inspire them to dedicate their lives to not having a significant portion of the country be glad when they die.
To echo @Beth, for a lot of America, we’ve already been there. I am very periphery to targeted groups, but there has been a very sharp rise in violence and threats and performative assholery.
We’ve been here ever since the right wing started bringing guns to demonstrations with the intent to intimidate with the threat of imminent violence.
We’ve been there since the right wing celebrated a lunatic with a hammer attacking Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
And any escalation would have been inevitable anyway — we are a country awash with guns, and there are pretexts for escalation nearly every day. School shootings, for instance. Or someone will burn a flag. Or one of the masked thugs abducting people off the street will get shot. At least this pretext removes Charlie Kirk.
My guess is that it will turn out that the killer was a White Supremacist Bugaboo Boy trying to start a race war* — an entirely plausible scenario that we’ve seen play out several times in recent memory — and that this fact won’t matter at all.
——
*: having seen the picture of the ‘person of interest” they are looking for this morning, my immediate thought was “that’s a white supremacist.” Maybe I’m wrong, but my white-supremacist-radar went off.
@Jay L. Gischer:
It doesn’t. And that doesn’t change my thesis. Now it could happen that there is going to be some groundswell of non-violent change that sweeps the country. But there’s absolutely no evidence that’s going to happen. All the evidence available to us points to the fact that many more people are going to die to satisfy the dreams and demands of men like Kirk, Vaught, and Trump. People need to understand that slashing Medicaid, prohibiting trans people of all ages to get appropriate medical care, terrorizing immigrants, or forcing black people out of work is political violence the same as Kirk’s murder. The only difference is that the former is done under the cover of law (or norms) and the latter is not.
If I don’t get Estrogen because the government prohibits it I will die an unpleasant, osteoporosis riddled death in short order. If a diabetic is denied insulin because the government refuses to reign in price gouging corporations they will die an unpleasant death. Are our deaths any less violent? Any less destructive? Or is it only violence when it’s a rich white man?
@Gustopher:
I repeatedly tell my children that my most important rule for them is that they not live their lives in such a way that makes other people’s lives materially harder. They don’t have to be perfect, they just need to not make things worse.
Charlie Kirk explicitly, intentionally, and joyfully, lead a life that made things harder for millions of people. He rejoiced in their suffering. He don’t need to. He chose to.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Speaking of potential threat escalation, it would not be too difficult to connect this statement in your OP…
To Trump’s “rhetorical” flourish here…
Egotist that he is, Trump is surely is projecting himself as a fellow victim in Kirk’s tragic assassination.
I have seen people online claiming that Trump’s speech is obviously AI generated because his mouth is weird and his hands don’t look right and his speech is weirdly paced.
I love this country.
He’s a weird, lumpy man who was reading a teleprompter. Which is horrifying enough, given what was apparently on the teleprompter (I hold out the possibility that his eyesight and reading comprehension are poor, so he could only make out a few words and mostly winged it)
@Beth: I think that any such assassination makes our entire political situation more tenuous and creates greater permission structures for greater authoritarian crackdowns. Regardless of what one thinks about Kirk, that makes this a tragedy.
@Beth:
To be clear, I am not saying that.
Axios is reporting that the “State Department warns immigrants not to mock Kirk’s death”
Obviously this is a violation of their first amendment rights, the same first amendment rights that allowed Kirk to spew hatred and vitriol for anyone who isn’t a white Christian nationalist for years.
(Note: the first amendment protects against government actions to interfere with an individuals free speech, not the actions of corporate behemoths, angry crowds online or people with rifles on roofs. Other laws may apply to non-governmental bodies.)