Trump’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination shows all of his worst traits

The shooting of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk should have provided a moment of national unity, writes Jon Sopel. But Trump has turned it into yet another point of division – and there may be worse to come

Was it murder or was it an assassination? We still don’t know the motive of the killer of the right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk. But let us assume that it was indeed politically motivated. In that context, the president was right to condemn in the most forthright terms this latest piece of political violence to roil the United States. It is a stain on democracy. Differences should be resolved at ballot boxes, not via a sniper rifle.

But in his address from the White House, the president did not seek to reach out; he did nothing to calm tensions. Instead, he put the blame for all America’s problems on the “lunatics” of the far left. “We have a radical left group of lunatics out there, just absolute lunatics, and we’re going to get that problem solved,” he intoned with great purpose.

Would that it were that simple. Let’s be frank about this – America has always had a problem with political violence. And though some try to frame it that way, it didn’t start with the assassination of John F Kennedy either. America’s “loss of innocence”, as some tried to portray the events in Dallas in 1963, had happened a good deal earlier. What about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in the Ford Theatre in Washington DC a century earlier, over the abolition of slavery?

And is it really the lunatics of the far left? What about the Democratic state representative gunned down in her home back in June? What about the firebombing of the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania’s home, while Josh Shapiro’s family slept inside? What about the brutal hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, just because he happened to be the husband of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi (and which Donald Trump Jr joked about on social media)? Or the shooting of Democratic congresswoman Gabby Giffords back in 2011? And what about the right-wing quasi-militias like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who fomented such chaos back on 6 January 2021?

The point I’m making is that this violence isn’t a one-way street. However, President Trump appears to be blind in his right eye on this. And there are many in the US distinctly uneasy with the president’s promise to “get the problem solved”. It’s almost as though he thinks the Democrats lack legitimacy in opposing him. There are many in Maga-land making that argument following the Utah shooting. Some are even calling for civil war and saying the Charlie Kirk killing is the spark, the casus belli.

The president also blamed the far left for its attacks on judges, which, as a piece of chutzpah, takes some beating. One, who tried to block the deportation of two planeloads of Venezuelan men to a supermax prison in El Salvador, was described by the president as – wait for it – a “radical left lunatic”. The judge who presided over the president’s hush money trial, Juan Merchan, was described by Trump as “psychotic” and “corrupt”.

There was something else that Trump said after the Charlie Kirk killing. He talked about how people like Kirk had been called Nazis, and that “this kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now”.

I agree. But isn’t saying this rhetoric has to stop right now an infringement on the sort of free speech that led those on the right in America (and the UK) to see Lucy Connolly as some sort of political martyr when, during last summer’s disturbances against asylum seekers here, she was charged after saying “mass deportation now, set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the bastards for all I care”? Vice-president JD Vance lambasted the British for their backsliding on freedom of speech.

The principle is vitally important, as enshrined in the first amendment. We should all be free to express opinions. But if rhetoric – whether from the left or right – is inciting political violence, then it should be controlled.

The trouble in the US is that the confluence of the country’s first two amendments is creating the circumstances that lead to the murder of people like Kirk. Unfettered free speech to whip up whatever hatred you want, bumping into the second amendment, allowing everyone the right to bear arms.

He won’t, but maybe Keir Starmer during next week’s state visit to the UK of Donald Trump should be lecturing him in the same way that JD Vance lectured the PM in the White House. It could be the perfect occasion to stress to his friend the importance of public order legislation that curbs incitement to hatred, and on laws that mean we in Britain have a couple of dozen gun deaths per year, as opposed to the roughly 50,000 annually in the US. So, just the 2,000 times more. But in line with what Charlie Kirk said before his death, many Americans still believe that gun deaths in the US are a price worth paying for the right to bear arms.