Trump is the reactor core of America's escalating political violence

Charlie Kirk should not be dead. And Charlie Kirk should not be famous.

Donald Trump is not personally responsible for either of these unfortunate facts. Kirk’s murderer, who remains free as I type this, is entirely culpable for the murder. And Kirk has been somewhat famous for more than a decade, first as the closest thing the right could find to a college student who opposed Barack Obama.

But no one has done more to stoke political violence and elevate the kind of toxicity that fueled Kirk’s stardom and usefulness in the right-wing message machine than Donald Trump.

And no one is going to say this better than Senator Warren did on Wednesday:

The intentional degradation of our political rhetoric was Donald Trump's big innovation as a birther when he was the only famous person willing to run with that racist garbage. He escalated that attrition of decency as a candidate and weaponized it as a president, culminating in January 6th.

Without Trump, you don’t get the rise of eliminationist rhetoric that preoccupies Elon Musk so much that he spent tens of billions to normalize it on Twitter, and hundreds of millions put the champion of the Great Replacement antisemitic myth back in the White House.

In Trump’s first term, we had one of his fans sending what he hoped were bombs to dozens of Trump’s enemies. We had a mass shooter basically crib Trump’s anti-immigrant hate for a manifesto. We had a monster shoot up a synagogue as Trump was screaming about George Soros importing a caravan from Mexico.

In the second Trump regime, after the pardon of more than a hundred men who assaulted police on his behalf, Trump’s rhetoric has gone nuclear, burning hotter and faster while creating radioactive waste that cannot be disposed of in any ethical way.

Political violence, and the threat of such, are now the primary mode of communication of this regime that spent the week before Kirk’s murder bragging about shooting a small civilian boat in the Caribbean that had apparently turned back to avoid the menace America has become.

Something is "broken," as Utah's Republican governor Spencer Cox said.

We should not be afraid to say who has done his best to break it and who benefits most from the shattering of any pretensions to decency in America.

Of course, none of this would be possible without all the guns, nor without America’s history of racism enforced by political violence that normalized the worst and largest carceral system in the developed world and allowed us to go generations with an intentionally Kafka-esque immigration system.

But Trump doesn’t see those failings as failings, but rather as tinder to be sparked.

And that's how he sees Charlie Kirk’s death, going on television to incite hate and threaten revenge against America’s left, even as—AGAIN—we have no idea who committed this murder.

And Donald Trump is responsible for that. He alone. No honest person should have any problem saying that. Unfortunately, one of the first virtues political violence kills off is our ability to be honest.