Trump Has Destroyed Any Hope of National Healing

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.