On 10 September, fiercely conservative and influential Donald Trump supporter Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University – just 31 years old and the father of two small children. When something like this happens, the president usually acts as ‘Consoler-in-Chief’, expressing the nation’s abhorrence of such violence and directing everyone’s thoughts and prayers to the family. It’s what former presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden all did.
Not Trump. Speaking from the Oval Office Trump took a different stance: “Those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
It seems you can count on the current POTUS to use every possible occasion to be America’s ‘Divider-in-Chief’.
Americans at war
America is deeply divided in 2025, without debate. But this is not the first or worst such time in the nation’s history. For half the 19th century, the country was bitterly divided over slavery. In 1858, the future president Abraham Lincoln said: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The division led directly to the Civil War, 1861–65, in which an estimated 618,000 died, according to the National Academy of Sciences.
Yet those four years, bloody as they were, were neither the first nor the last violent episode.
It had taken an eight-year-long war for the US to become an independent country, with an estimate of around 100,000 dead on all sides. The American west was ‘won’ between the early 1800s and the 20th century, using modern firearms against the indigenous peoples and forcing them into ‘reservations’. The 1960s saw a number of high-profile assassinations, including Medgar Evers, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, and Robert Kennedy.
One theory is that the current state of affairs began 60 years ago in 1964, when the Beatles and their music culture invaded the USA. Some believe that this climactic moment heralded the decline and fall of America.
In 1964, conservative Barry Goldwater delegates drove out supporters of the moderate Nelson Rockefeller during the Republican Party presidential nominating convention. The GOP had already had its conservatives and moderates for some time. There were even some liberal Republicans back then believe it or not. But after 1964 and the Goldwater takeover, the GOP began to veer more to the right.
Changing the ‘Solid South’
This GOP shift was further helped along when President Lyndon Johnson pushed through Congress the Civil Rights Act of 1964. For 100 years, the backbone of the Democratic Party had been conservative white southerners. So dependable were votes from the old Confederacy that Democrats called it ‘the Solid South’. With a stroke of Johnson’s pen, the Solid South began to liquefy, then evaporate. Within a few years the South had turned GOP as these examples show:
- In 1964 Texas had 23 House Representatives – two Republicans and 21 Democrats (91%); by 2024 it had 38 – 25 Republicans and 13 Democrats (34%).
- Alabama in the Deep South is even more telling – in 1964 all eight Representatives were Democrats; in 2024, six out of seven were Republicans.
- Finally looking at my own state, Missouri – in 1964 it had eight Democrats and two Republicans; in 2024 there were two Democrats and six Republicans.
In 1994, along came Newt Gingrich and the ‘New Right’ who took over the GOP – moderate Republicans became an endangered species. When the staunch Reagan conservative John McCain ran against George W Bush for the 2000 Republican nomination, the Bush camp labelled McCain as “dangerously moderate”.
Conservative and ultra-right Republicans
Once again there were two wings of the Republican Party – not moderate and conservative, but conservative and ultra-right. The ultras see politics as a battle between good and evil. Anti-regulation, anti-tax, anti-choice, anti-immigrant, anti-science. Any deviation from the dogma is heresy. Compromise is treason.
Republican conservatism became more rabid when Barack Obama was elected president. They were now an oppressed white, Christian minority. This spawned an even more radical right Tea Party Movement within the GOP in 2009. Their only aim was to win at any cost, by hook or by crook, fair means or foul. (Some of us believe their obsession originated in no small part from Obama being mixed race, although the bigots would not fully come out of the closet until 2016 when Trump took over.)
The Tea Party has since morphed into the current Freedom Caucus. They are so far right they sometimes think that Donald Trump is dangerously moderate.
Trump’s cult of violence
Trump has inspired, even encouraged, violence among his followers from the start. In November 2024, The Atlantic listed 40 examples and I doubt it’s exhaustive.
To a crowd at one of his rallies in November 2015: “If you see somebody about to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them.” To a protester at another rally: “I’d like to punch him in the face.” In a 2017 TV interview: “I’d like to bring back waterboarding.” Seeing protesters outside the White House in 2020, he asked General Mark Milley: “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” And then, 6 January 2021: “If you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
To misquote Trump’s comment after the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville turned violent, there are bad people on both sides. However, Jonathan Freedland writes in The Guardian that all extremist killings in the US in 2022, 2023, and 2024 came from the far right.
The murder of Charlie Kirk
Before his murder, I paid no attention to Charlie Kirk. I knew there were two Charlies – Charlie Kirk and Charlie Sykes. One was a very conservative Trump supporter and the other was anti-Trump. That’s it. I don’t follow the blovisphere; I have no interest in bloviators.
Since Kirk’s killing, the blovisphere has gone into overdrive, with those on the left celebrating his death (‘He got what he deserved’) and those on the right calling for revenge (‘The entire Democrat party needs to [f-bomb] hang now!’).
I’m an independent and have never belonged to a political party. I very definitely have no use for Trump. I didn’t pay much attention to politics at all until Watergate. After Nixon, I stopped paying attention again until the Trump era of ‘American Carnage’. He said he wanted to stop it; he’s made it much worse. And here we are.
To my fellow Americans and everyone else for that matter: let us follow the advice of the Buddha and the Three Bears. The Buddha said: “Avoiding extremes, the Perfect One has realized the Middle Path; it gives vision, gives knowledge, and leads to calm, to insight, to enlightenment and to Nirvana.”
And as Goldilocks learned in The Three Bears: things must be not too hot, not too cold; not too hard, not too soft. We all need to start trying harder to get it ‘just right’.
