Killing of Trump activist Charlie Kirk raises specter of political violence in the US

A specter is haunting the United States once again: that of political violence. The Wednesday assassination on the campus of Utah Valley University of Charlie Kirk — a prominent champion of the MAGA movement and founder of the conservative organization Turning Point USA who was shot in the neck as he was answering an uncomfortable question about the epidemic of gun violence before an audience of thousands — revived grim memories for a country that has seen four sitting presidents assassinated, and more recently witnessed a wave of ideological crimes fueled by a deeply polarized society.

Progressive columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein took stock on the social platform X a few hours after Kirk’s death: from the assault on the Capitol of January 6, 2021, to the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer months earlier for her Covid-19 measures during the lockdown as Democratic governor of Michigan; from the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to the murder of two Minnesota politicians; and from the execution of the CEO of United Healthcare to the two attempts last summer on the life of President Donald Trump, then still a candidate.

“Political violence is contagious. It is spreading. It is not confined to one side or belief system. It should terrify us all,” Klein added on X, joining the group of those who reacted to the murder by sharing blame for the tense climate between the left and the right.

With a recorded message from the Oval Office, delivered around 9:00 p.m. Washington time, Trump squandered the opportunity to join Klein and those on both sides of the political aisle who had been issuing calls to show restraint. It’s become a sad routine in today’s America: a political figure dies or suffers an attack, and ineffectual wishes calling for the review of the rules of public discourse follow, with the same lack of impact as the condolences sending “thoughts and prayers” to the victims every time a mass murder occurs.

In a speech lasting over four minutes, the U.S. president cited only a few precedents, all of them involving conservative victims: the attacks against himself, the attacks on immigration agents in recent months, the Luigi Mangione case, and the 2017 shooting of around 20 Republican congressmen, including Speaker Steve Scalise. He did so to attack the “radical left,” as he calls it. “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, and it must stop right now.”

“It is time for all Americans and the media to face the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those who disagree, day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable ways possible,” Trump added, vowing that his administration would find “those who contributed 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.”

Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace and billionaire Elon Musk expressed similar views. “The Left is the party of murder,” Musk wrote on X. For far-right influencers Steve Bannon, the national-populist ideologue; Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist; and Fox News host Jesse Watters, things go even further: Kirk’s murder is proof, according to broadcasts released just hours after his death, that there is a “war underway” against the MAGA movement.

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren replied to those comments by advising that, if the goal is to find those responsible, “why don’t you start with the President of the United States and every ugly meme he has posted and every ugly word.”

Warren, who is 76, witnessed the events that unfolded between the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and those of Bobby Kennedy and Reverend Martin Luther King in 1968. The other three presidents who were killed are Abraham Lincoln, in 1865, at the hands of a Confederate in a Washington theater, James A. Garfield, in 1881, and William McKinley, two decades later.

Those turbulent years of the 1960s continued until the early 1980s, when a man named John Hinckley Jr., who wanted to impress actress Jodie Foster, tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington. For historians, that failed assassination attempt marked the end of one of the most turbulent periods in U.S. history.

Given the intensity with which tragedies occur, and given the climate of tension in Trump’s America, perhaps those historians would do well to open a new chapter in the book of political violence in the United States, which does not seem to be coming to a close anytime soon.

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