He was young and vibrant, the spokesman for a new generation. But when he was gunned down, there was some cheering amid the widespread shock.
I’m not talking about Charlie Kirk, who was murdered on a Utah college campus last week; I’m talking about John F. Kennedy. But the fact that similar words can be used to describe both political assassinations underscores this point:
Resorting to violence to further political goals is not a partisan disease. It never has been, and it certainly isn’t today.
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Unfortunately, not everybody understands that, notably the president of the United States, who saw Kirk’s murder as a reason to blame his opponents on the left.
But just months before Kirk was gunned down, prominent Minnesota Democrat Melissa Hortman, her husband and dog were murdered in their suburban Minneapolis area home.
And before a progressive activist shot Louisiana Republican Rep. Steve Scalise on a northern Virginia baseball practice field in 2017, a man with misogynist views shot Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords at a Tucson constituent meeting.
Earlier, two Kennedys, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X were murdered by political opponents, while two other Democratic presidents — Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman — and three Republicans — Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump — narrowly escaped assassination attempts.
In an age where too many political rivals are routinely portrayed as enemies, many American politicians in both parties understand what should change.
“We can return violence with violence; we can return hate with hate. That’s the problem with political violence. It metastasizes,” Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said. “We can always point the figure at the other side. At some point, we have to find an off ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse.”
“We must stand together in rejecting violence, lowering the temperature of our politics and recommitting ourselves to the values of civility, respect, and community that American democracy requires,” said Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs of Kirk’s home state of Arizona.
But not President Donald Trump. Speaking from the Oval Office, he blamed his — and Kirk’s — political opponents for this killing and the proliferation of violence in general.
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” said Trump, who routinely derided 2024 opponent Kamala Harris as a “radical left lunatic.” “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now,” he added.
On Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” Friday, Trump doubled down, after host Ainsley Earhart asked: “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?”
‘Couldn’t care less’
“I’ll tell you something that is going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less,” he replied.
“The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They don’t want to see crime. Worried about the border. They’re saying, ‘We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street,’” Trump said.
“The radicals on the left are the problem,” he continued, “and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy, although they want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders.”
In other words: radicals on the right seek beneficial goals, which justifies whatever they do; radicals on the left seek bad goals, which doesn’t.
In the six decades I have covered American politics, I can’t think of a single other president who would have reacted that way. Whether liberal or conservative, they would all have responded to Kirk’s killing with words of unity and reassurance.
“Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together,” former President Barack Obama said after Giffords’ shooting.
“There’s no place for this kind of violence in America,” former President Joe Biden said, after a gunman shot and wounded Trump at a 2024 Pennsylvania political rally. “We must unite as one nation to condemn it.”
But that’s not how Trump sees things.
He was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that he was the target of an assassin’s bullet, and because Kirk was not only an important ally but close to him and his family.
But that doesn’t justify his unequal reactions to the two most recent political assassinations — of an ally and a Democratic opponent.
Double standards
For Kirk, Trump made an Oval Office speech, lowered flags to half-mast, announced he would award Kirk posthumously the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and said he’d attend Sunday’s Arizona funeral.
When Hortman and her husband were murdered, he took no official notice, stating without mentioning her name on Truth Social there was “a terrible shooting… in Minnesota, which appears to be a targeted attack against State Lawmakers” and adding, “Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America.”
And in talking about political violence after Kirk’s murder, Trump mentioned neither Hortman’s killing nor the fire an arsonist set at the Pennsylvania governor’s residence while Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family slept inside.
Instead, he seems undeterred from using Kirk’s killing for political ends.
While he’d “like to see it (the nation) heal,” he told NBC News in a phone interview, “We’re dealing with a radical left group of lunatics, and they don’t play fair and they never did.”
Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. ©2025 The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.