By John Harwood
Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
Since the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk, politicians of good faith have implored Americans to shun violence and embrace peaceful democratic debate. As they should.
Unfortunately for everyone else, Donald Trump and members of his administration are not among them. If a staggered country can recover its moral balance, it will have to do so without the White House.
That is the grim reality of the United States in 2025. Trump’s twisted character cannot meet the moment.
History Offers Examples
In crises, we’ve always looked to national leaders for calm, reassurance, and unity. Presidents, in particular, use them to show they represent the entire country.
Kirk presented himself as a 21st-century counterpoint to Martin Luther King Jr., defending the interests of whites he deemed injured by societal changes following the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Kirk called the legislation “a mistake” and King a “bad guy.”
I’ll never forget King’s assassination in April 1968.
I was an 11-year-old delivery boy tossing newspapers with the shocking, large-type headlines onto front porches.
President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act with King standing behind him. Following the tragedy, Johnson urged Americans to “join together as never in the past to let all the forces of divisiveness know that America shall not be ruled by the bullet, but only by the ballot of free and of just men.”
Even more striking were the words of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, then running for president five years after the assassination of his brother. His remarks that evening to an Indianapolis audience (which included my father as a reporter covering the campaign) are worth quoting at length:
“For those of you who are Black,” Kennedy said, “you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country … Black people amongst Blacks, and white [people] amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another.
“Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love,” he said.
“What we need in the United States is not division. What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, [and] a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be Black,” he continued.
“We will have difficult times. We’ve had difficult times in the past. We will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence, it is not the end of lawlessness, it is not the end of disorder.
“But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of Black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.”
Political violence did not end. Two months later, another assassin killed RFK himself.
But the sentiment he expressed remains true today. An overwhelming proportion of Americans – white and Black, Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal – still want justice and better lives.
Unlike LBJ or RFK, however, Trump has seized the opportunity to inflame the country with alarming speed and zealotry. Anger fuels his movement, so his response to Kirk’s murder has been, as he boasts in another context, to drill, baby, drill.
Vice President JD Vance blamed not just the lone gunman but an unspecified “they” – a demagogic formulation smearing all administration opponents. He claimed the most recent political violence has come from “the far left,” precisely the opposite of the truth.
Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to prosecute anyone who reacted to the crime with what she called “hate speech.” She subsequently backtracked after legions called her out for explicitly trampling on the First Amendment.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth set out to identify and banish military members who, in his view, mocked or celebrated the tragedy. Stephen Miller, the disturbed xenophobe who is Trump’s top domestic adviser, promised government power would crush “a vast domestic terror movement.” He slaps that label on the Democratic Party itself.
In reality, Democratic leaders decry political violence and condemn Kirk’s murder. None have mocked it, as Trump did after the brutal attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and Republican Senator Mike Lee did after the murder of a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota.
New Weapon for Crushing Dissent
It is pointless to charge them with hypocrisy over their past complaints of “cancel culture,” “lawfare,” and the like. MAGA’s only principle is gaining and holding power to halt the cultural evolution that has lifted non-whites, women, gay people, and other previously disfavored groups. Kirk’s martyrdom provides a new weapon for crushing dissent.
Four years after inciting an unprecedented, deadly insurrection to overturn his election defeat, and eight months after setting the perpetrators free, Trump angrily condemns “radical left political violence” as “the problem.” For the next 40 months, America is stuck with an amoral president who exploits division for his personal benefit.
Only the rest of us can fill the moral void. Polling by the Public Religion Research Institute shows Republicans are more open to political violence than independents or Democrats. But among all three groups, large majorities are not open to it.
Most Americans disapprove of Trump’s presidency. As hard as he tries to consolidate power by force, with federal troops, masked paramilitary agents, and a corrupted Justice Department, his opponents still possess the power to resist peacefully through electoral and legal processes.
We can only hope today’s bleakness, when it feels as if democracy cannot survive lawless authoritarianism, propels the effort to save the American experiment.
“The self-denying prophecy,” as Larry Summers, a former Treasury Secretary and Harvard president, described it to me. “America is a country that has had a lot of dark late nights, followed by pretty good dawns.”
John Harwood is the former chief Washington correspondent for CNBC and White House correspondent for CNN. He has interviewed every president from George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden. Sign up for ‘The Stakes with John Harwood’ to get all of his columns in your inbox.
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