Charlie Kirk’s assassination is a pretext for a concerted attack on Trump’s enemies.
President Donald Trump walks on the South Lawn of the White House after arriving on Marine One in Washington, DC, on Sunday, September 14, 2025. (Francis Chung / Politico / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The phrase “national healing” is always more aspirational than real in the United States, a nation whose blood-stained history of ethnic genocide, racist pogroms, and assassinations gives the lie to any pious words of comity. But the best American politicians have been able to use their platform to, at the very least, offer a path to a more peaceful future. In 1865, while delivering his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln created the template for the deployment of presidential eloquence in the face of strife when he spoke of the need “to bind up the nation’s wounds.” The reconciliation Lincoln called for never emerged, but here was a politician trying to find a way out of civil war, rather than a way in.
Since Lincoln’s day, national healing has been a staple of American political discourse, most recently revitalized by Barack Obama in his famous 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention, where he declared that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America.” At some point in their tenure, every president is eventually called upon to issue these kinds of platitudes in moments of national strife.
In the wake of last week’s killing of Charlie Kirk, President Trump is currently being asked to take up the “healer in chief” role.
On Sunday, Yahoo! News carried the headline, “Trump Hopes for National Healing After Charlie Kirk Shooting.” This headline suggested Trump was adopting the reassuring voice used by predecessors such as Lincoln and Obama.
There’s just one problem with this narrative: it has nothing to do with reality, as anyone reading the article beneath that headline would know. Asked by NBC News about national healing in an interview released Sunday, Trump responded, “I’d like to see it [the nation] heal,” the president said in a brief telephone interview. “But we’re dealing with a radical left group of lunatics, and they don’t play fair and they never did.” So much for healing.
The comments underscore what anyone can plainly see: that, for Trump and his followers, only left-wing violence is a threat, while right-wing extremism is merely excessively enthusiastic conservativism. Trump has consistently painted the problem of political violence in this one-sided way—not just blaming the left but exonerating right-wing violence.
There’s no ambiguity about this. On Friday, Trump was asked by Fox News if “radicals on the right” were also a problem. He curtly pushed back, saying, “I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.”
Trump returned to this theme on Sunday, telling reporters, “The problem is on the left. It’s not on the right, like some people like to say. When you look at the agitators—you look at the scum that speaks so badly of our country, the American flag burnings all over the place—that’s the left, not the right.”
This is no surprise, coming from a man who not only incited the January 6 attack on the Capitol but also granted pardons or clemency to nearly 1,600 rioters convicted that day.
The natural upshot is that the Trump administration is using the Kirk assassination as justification for attacking political enemies.
On Saturday, The New York Times reported: “President Trump and his top advisers are escalating their attacks on their opponents in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, placing the blame for political violence on Democrats alone and signaling a broad crackdown on critics and left-leaning institutions.”
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
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Of course, Trump’s claim that only left-wing political violence is a threat is a lie. On the very day Kirk was assassinated, a school shooting in Denver left two students wounded. Investigators found that the alleged shooter, who killed himself before he could be captured, had posted neo-Nazi views online. The Denver shooting follows a pattern of terrorist violence from the extreme right going back decades, which includes the 1995 bombing of a federal government building in Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 which killed 188. A comparative analysis of political violence in the United States since 1975, conducted by the libertarian Cato Institute, concluded that left-wing violence is less frequent than either right-wing or Islamicist violence. Depending on whether 9/11 is included in the data or not, left-wing violence amounts to either 2 percent or 10 percent of political violence.
Because of this reality, some Republicans have shied away from Trump’s incendiary rhetoric. On Sunday, Utah Senator John Curtis told ABC, “I think you need to take the word ‘radical’ and remove right or left. And radical, if coming from any direction, is not good. It’s not healthy, and it should be called out.” This nonpartisan approach is echoed by many Democrats such as Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and independents such as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
But Trump can’t make such a nonpartisan argument because his core political instinct is to divide the world into friends and enemies. New York Times reporter Peter Baker offers a compelling analysis of how Trump’s entire approach to politics puts him at odds with the idea of national healing:
In an era of deep polarization in American society, he rarely talks about healing. While other presidents have typically tried to lower the temperature in moments of national crisis, Mr. Trump turns up the flames. He does not subscribe to the traditional notion of being president for all the people. He acts as president of red America and the people who agree with him, while those who do not are portrayed as enemies and traitors deserving payback.
For Trump, polarization is not something to fear but a tactic for gaining and keeping power. Hence, “national healing” no longer has any force even as an aspiration. The true goal of the current administration is not to bind the wounds of division but to use the power of the state to keep pummeling its enemies. This ultra-partisanship makes the call for national healing by other politicians irrelevant. There can be no national healing unless Trumpism is defeated politically.
Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.