America, land of hate
Charlie Kirk’s murder shocked the nation. So did some of his eulogies — particularly the contrast between the message from Kirk’s widow, Erika Lane Kirk, and that of President Trump.
“That man. That young man,” Mrs. Kirk said, referring to her husband’s alleged killer. “I forgive him. … The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the Gospel is love and always love.”
Trump disagreed.
“I hate my opponent,” he said, “and I don’t want the best for them. … That’s where I disagreed with Charlie.” Asked about this later, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump was “authentically himself” in saying this.
Leavitt was correct, and that is profoundly disturbing. The leaders we elect should bring out the best in us. Instead, Trump uses his bully pulpit to encourage hatred, intolerance and violence. He has done this on the national stage since entering politics in 2015, and none of the guardrails that have served us in the past — the Constitution, tradition or common decency — have stopped him.
The FBI defines a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.” Last year, 14,243 Americans were victims in 11,679 hate crimes. Between Trump’s trip down the escalator in 2015 and the end of last year, the number of reported hate crimes has doubled.
We can’t blame any single person for this perverse trend, of course, but we also can’t deny that Trump has fanned the flames. His words over the last decade, and his actions now, encourage violence and hatred.
“One of the defining features of Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy was his willingness to defy social norms with his use of explicitly racist rhetoric and his association with white supremacists,” according to a study published in Elsevier.
In 2019, a gunman posted an anti-immigrant message online and shot 45 people, killing 23 at a Walmart in Texas. Critics cited Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Trump said, “I think my rhetoric brings people together.”
In 2020, ABC News identified 54 criminal cases in which Trump’s name had been invoked by people who committed or threatened violence.
In 2021, Vox assembled a timeline of remarks in which Trump encouraged violence against protestors, immigrants and reporters. He called attacks on protesters “very, very appropriate” and the kind of action “we need a little bit more of.”
In 2023, researchers concluded that political elites can influence people’s views on race. They called it “trickle-down racism.” Studies found that “racially dehumanizing beliefs” about Black people increased after Trump won. Critics blamed Trump’s “xenophobic rhetoric” for a dramatic increase in online threats against Asians after the 2024 election.
Now, “Trump and his allies have laid out a broad plan to target liberal groups, monitor speech, revoke visas, and designate certain groups as domestic terrorists,” The New York Times reports. Trump argues, falsely, that American cities led by Democrats are wastelands of crime and violence, so lawless that he is justified in violating the longstanding taboo against using military troops against American citizens. Last week, he told the nation’s top military leaders that they could use these cities to train troops for combat.
Depending on how you define “mass shooting,” America has experienced 341 mass shootings this year — an average of 1.5 every day. Those motivated by ideology are considered quite rare. The Anti-Defamation League considers 62 mass killings since 1970 to be ideologically motivated; more than half of those have happened since 2012.
From 2015 through 2019, during Trump’s first presidency, the annual total of extremism-related murders in the U.S. ranged between 47 to 78 overall.
Unfortunately, the response to hatred and violence has become a political blame game rather than a national soul-searching. It’s not as though hatred and political violence have gone unstudied. For example, a study just published by The Lancet suggests that “Racism, hostile sexism, homonegativity, transphobia, xenophobia, antisemitism, and Islamophobia increase risk for perpetration of interpersonal violence generally” to produce “support for and willingness to commit political violence in the United States.”
However, if experts have cracked the code, leaders have done little about it. As Jon Stewart pointed out after a recent cluster of mass shootings, we are not analyzing this “complex fusion” of factors. Instead, we are politicizing it by keeping score on whether the shooters come from the right or left.
We need to confront the tough questions. Why have we allowed America to become a theater of heavily armed hatred and political violence? With less than 5 percent of the world’s people, do we need to own 46 percent of its guns? Must they include assault weapons engineered to kill people with superlative efficiency?
What is the “well-regulated militia” envisioned by the Second Amendment? Is it weekend warriors dressing up and practicing military tactics in the woods, including groups advocating another civil war? Or is it the National Guard?
Is Trump’s false portrait of lawless cities a pretext for authoritarianism? An overwhelming majority of Americans value diversity and favor a multi-cultural society. So why are we letting haters, separatists and accelerationists in the White House lead us down an un-American path? What is the social and moral cost of electing and tolerating leaders who invoke our worst impulses rather than our better angels?
And how do we turn this around?
William S. Becker is co-editor of and a contributor to “Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People,” and contributor to Democracy in a Hotter Time, named by the journal Nature as one of 2023’s five best science books. He previously served as a senior official in the Wisconsin Department of Justice. He is currently executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project, a nonpartisan climate policy think tank unaffiliated with the White House.