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Photo: YouTube/TheWhiteHouse

Donald Trump’s Oval Office statement on the assassination of Charlie Kirk was the most remarkable presidential address to the nation that I can recall from a long life of watching them. On Thursday night, the president didn’t just mourn the killing of the 31-year-old conservative political organizer and podcaster, who was his friend and supporter. He raged at the “radical left” (his preferred term for the entire Democratic Party) as responsible for all political violence in the country and bluntly asserted that rhetoric comparing Kirk and others like him to totalitarians like the Nazis was directly responsible for his murder:

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 day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.

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.

Trump then issued a vague but menacing threat to hunt down and stop those who engage in such rhetoric or who “fund or support it”:

My administration will find each and every one of 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.

It’s hard to know how to process these remarks. Trump has never been capable of filtering his impulses, and he described this as a “dark moment for America,” admitting he was filled with “grief and anger.” So perhaps the hints he dropped that he was about to outlaw political opposition were just a boiling over of emotions he probably shouldn’t have shared with the whole nation.

Obviously, political violence comes from the right as well as the left, and from people with mental illnesses and incoherent politics or no politics at all. Similarly, rhetoric attributing evil intent and extremist motives to those on the other side of partisan and ideological barricades comes from all directions. Over the years, a lot of it has emanated from Trump himself and his supporters, many of whom are now baying for vengeance on social media in the wake of the Kirk assassination. Had Trump chosen this moment to call for a general de-escalation of political warfare, as almost every other president would have done at such a moment, it might have done some real good. Instead he escalated the fight against his perceived enemies.

Whether Trump follows up on his threats may depend to a considerable extent on what we learn about the identity and motives of the assassin. MAGA world quickly became convinced, without evidence, that Kirk’s murderer is an agent of the political left, the Democratic Party, or one of Trump’s regular targets like transgender people. And wild demands for some sort of crackdown (or, as conservative agitator Christopher Rufo put it, a “reckoning”) against political opposition to the causes Kirk cherished are everywhere, including Congress.

So this is indeed a “dark moment for America” and not just because of another horrendous act of violence against someone whose political activism and celebrity made him a target. Retaliation for this sort of act is always a terrible mistake that dignifies murder as political expression and invites a downward spiral into the abyss of glamorized evil. When the search party for objects of vengeance is led by the most powerful man in the world, we’re all in deep trouble.

Trump Declares War on the Opposition After Charlie Kirk Shooting

Trump Declares War on the Opposition After Charlie Kirk Shooting