Kirk’s body was not yet cold before Donald Trump took advantage of the occasion, not to tone down the violence, or call for national unity and reconciliation, but to take the ideological conflict to a yet higher level, placing the blame squarely upon “those on the radical left”.
“Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people, and taken too many lives,” the president said, referencing the attempt on his own life last year, and the 2017 shooting of the Republican Congressman Steve Scalise. He failed to mention the 2023 attack on the home of Nancy Pelosi – at the time the Speaker of the House and the most senior Democrat in Congress – which left her husband with a fractured skull, or the assassination just three months ago of Melissa Hortman, the leader of the Democrat caucus in the Minnesota legislature.