To everyone left and right, the assassination of Charlie Cook is a tragedy, but to Trump, it’s a welcomed opportunity to invoke anger and deepen the divide in the “us/them” siege mentality he has created. He is exploiting the opportunity, for his two favorite things, money and revenge, he is raking in unorecedented donations and he’s vowing to go after “the radical left”, and “groups that contributed to this atrocity and other political violence”. This assassin played right into Trump’s little hands, and Trump will use his violent rhetoric to insure the violence increases, and that it is aimed at his opponents.
There has been a lot of condemnation of those who are cheering it, but frankly, I haven’t actually seen anyone cheering or gloating about this. There has certainly been nothing like the joyous celebrational way that Trump and his MAGA followers responded to the maniac who tried to kill Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer, there has been no jubilant reveling with mocking conspiracies about nudity and gay lovers. The MAGA insistence that the left is cheering Charlie Kirk’s death is about like Trump’s assertion that he saw Muslims in the streets of New York cheering the 911 disaster, a typical MAGA lie to create outrage at the people they hate.
Biden, Obama, both Bush’s, Clinton, all of our previous presidents would be consoling the country and presenting a healing, unifying message, but Trump lacks the empathy to even understand anything less anger and hatred, and the only thing he knows how to express his vow to go after the "radical left.", he wants to be seen as a warrior, not a conciliator, he’s a populist, and populists dwell on anger, Trump crafts his follower’s rage like an artist, and he sees Charlie Kirks death as an opportunity, nothing more.
We are told “the radical left” killed Charlie Kirk, and Trump and his MAGA people are vowing violent revenge against the “groups” on the left who are responsible. This is all predictable, and it is a bald-faced lie. The assassin, Tyler Robinson was not a democrat, he has never had any affiliation with any left “groups”, he has registered as unaffiliated, hasn’t voted, but friends and neighbors say they thought he was an avowed Trump supporter. In 2017 he dressed as Trump for Halloween, and his grandmother has said that the entire family are Republican, and that they don’t even know a single democrat.
Tyler Robinson’s hatred and violence were developed in the pressure cooker of right-wing vitriol of their own self-created media echo chamber; he lived in lie-filled and toxic MAGA universe and that is what killed Charlie Kirk, the left had nothing to do with it.
This horrible act, and many others like it, are a direct result of the hate mongering and violent rhetoric that the right has been engaging in for years now. Trump and his far-right fascist allies have worked hard to empower and normalize a dangerous set of antisocial, anti-civil, retrograde and anti-democratic values and beliefs, creating an environment where political violence is seen as an acceptable way to accomplish ideological goals. His speech condemning the killing of Charlie Kirk, was the ultimate hypocrisy from the man who sent his followers on a murderous rampage into the capital on Jan 6th, calling them heroes, patriots, and of course pardoning all of them while characterizing their vicious attack as a day of love.
In the sharp difference in his response to the killing of Charlie Kirk and Melissa Hortman, he is explicitly encouraged the public to apply a partisan lens to the value of human life. He has excused right wing terrorism as justified because it is “fighting crime” and called on his base to avenge Kirk’s death with violence against the left. In context, it’s easy to see how right-wing extremists could reasonably expect political violence against the left to be appreciated and even pardoned.
The dramatic increase in political violence is a direct result of Trump’s vitriolic rhetoric and glorification of violence. That is what killed Charlie Kirk, it was not the “left”, it was Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.
