The ‘Demonic’ Hypocrisy of Trump’s Plea for Peace

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

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.

Stephen Miller, who has been tripping over his adjectives to describe the evil he sees in his opponents,   denounced   “an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved.” Elon Musk, in a post on X,   proclaimed : “The Left is the party of murder.”

They were simply taking their cues from Trump himself, who, in an appearance on “Fox & Friends” on Friday,   sold   a laughably benign take on the right. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime,” he   said . “They don’t want to see crime.” In contrast, he added, “The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.”

In his Oval Office address, Trump provided a litany of justifications for his promised prosecution of the left, comprising only these examples, in this order: the assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pa.; assaults on ICE agents who are rounding up immigrants; the killing of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, on a Manhattan sidewalk last December; and the shooting of Steve Scalise, a prominent House Republican, during a congressional baseball practice in 2017.

“Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” Trump said.

He made no mention of the assassination this year of   Melissa Hortman , the Democratic former speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, and her husband by a gunman who also shot and seriously injured a Democratic state senator and his wife. No mention of an assailant’s   attempt to burn down   the house of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, as he, his wife and their children slept inside. No mention of the plot in 2020   to kidnap   Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat whom Trump then reveled in vilifying. No mention of the man who broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home in 2022 and struck her husband, Paul, with a hammer, an incident that many of Trump’s allies — including his son Donald Trump Jr. —   made fun of .

Reality is a whole lot messier than Trump’s MAGA-under-siege message. To the extent that researchers have sought to get a handle on the political violence of recent years,   many   have   determined   that more has come   from the right   than from the left. But I’m hesitant to note that, because the point here is the violence itself, with its unacceptable casualties, and how it savages civil society and threatens a democracy that seems to me less steady and more vulnerable by the hour. Radical right, radical left: The blood spilled is blood regardless.

Also, motive is a tricky thing. Inchoate rage or other emotional crises often drive assailants whose actions are interpreted politically because of the circumstances, not because of any definitive proof. In fact, a year after Trump was shot in the ear in Butler, investigators looking into the background of the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, were coming to the conclusion that he was “socially isolated, educated but friendless” and propelled “not by politics or ideology but by a sense of insignificance and a desire to become known,” Carol D. Leonnig   wrote   in The Washington Post.

Trump on Wednesday night pantomimed high-mindedness: “It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree.”

President, edit thyself. “Demonic forces” are   actual words Trump used   at a rally in 2023 to smear his political opponents. That year or the next, he also   described them   as the “ enemy from within ,” “Marxist, fascist and communist tyrants who want to smash our Judeo-Christian heritage,” “a sick nest of people,” “thugs, horrible people, fascists, Marxists, sick people,” “ vermin ” and “ radical left lunatics .” Those are highlights from just the past two and a half years. He was whipping up hatred long before then, and he whips up hatred still.

In his Oval Office remarks he also pledged to root out “those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials and everyone else who brings order to our country.” That would be new for him. On Jan. 6, 2021, a violent mob attacked and injured law enforcement officials trying to maintain order at the defining theater of American democracy, the U.S. Capitol. Trump didn’t punish them. He pardoned them — and repeatedly celebrated them as great American patriots.

Tributes to Kirk that sweep all of that aside won’t bring us together. They’ll just drive us farther apart. And they don’t honor Kirk. They dishonor the truth.