U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with reporters from the South Lawn of the White House, Sept. 16.Alex Brandon/The Associated Press
The evening of April 4, 1968, will live as one of the darkest days in U.S. history. When an assassin’s bullet pierced the head of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., it was as if the country had declared war – on itself.
Riots broke out across the nation in what some called the greatest eruption of social unrest since the Civil War. President Lyndon Johnson would deploy nearly 60,000 National Guardsman and Army troops to assist the police in quelling the violence. At least 43 people were killed and 27,000 arrested.
President Johnson appealed for calm, saying he felt the pain of many of the protesters.
Robert F. Kennedy would be assassinated a few months later. Simmering rage over the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war, meantime, began boiling over on American college campuses. Student protesters were being shot and killed by police.
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As a 13-year-old watching this all unfold on our family television set in Ontario, I was scared. We had relatives in the U.S. who were distraught by what was taking place. They wondered if their nation would survive the upheaval.
It did, of course, thanks largely to appeals by U.S. political and religious leaders for reason and peace. When order was eventually restored there was a feeling that the U.S. had escaped a close call. The anger that had been festering in America for years had nearly devolved into an all-out war.
Which brings us to today and the perilous times in which our southern neighbours again find themselves in the wake of the murder of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk.
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America once again finds itself on the brink. And while we have not yet witnessed the kind of violence that the country endured during the race riots of 1967 and the hostilities that broke out after the killings of King and Kennedy, there is something far more ominous about this moment in American history: the country is governed by someone who has no interest in healing a broken, angry and sad nation.
President Donald Trump has made it clear that Mr. Kirk’s death has only fortified his desire to seek retribution and anyone in the U.S. who identifies with leftist ideology should be scared.
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Mr. Trump said in an Oval Office address after Mr. Kirk’s murder. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we are seeing in the country today and it must stop right now.”
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This from a President who leads a far-right administration and has repeatedly called his political opponents fascists or worse. This from a President who sanctioned the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol and ended up pardoning 1,500 people who were charged and sentenced for their part in the riot, including some who assaulted police officers. This from a President who insists it’s the far left that is the problem, the violence stokers.
It would be less concerning if there were rational minds around the President to constrain his worst impulses. But there is no one like that. On the contrary, arguably the most influential member of his staff is Stephen Miller. He spent the day following Mr. Kirk’s death seemingly readying the country for an all-out assault on progressive institutions in America.
The deputy chief of staff declared that a leftist ideology thrives in America, one that hates everything that is “good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved.”
He went on: “It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious and soulless … the fate of millions depends upon the defeat of this wicked ideology. The fate of our children, our society, our civilization hinges on it.”
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Doesn’t sound like someone preparing to help Mr. Trump dial the temperature down to get America through this tumultuous epoch.
Steve Bannon, the right-wing agitator and godfather of the MAGA movement, has declared that in light of Mr. Kirk’s killing, President Trump is “a wartime President now focused on eradicating domestic terrorists like Antifa.”
Political extremism is eating away at the fabric of America, a cancer rapidly metastasizing thanks to social media. Far from wanting to be a healer-in-chief, Mr. Trump’s instinct is to stoke tension and discord. This is the milieu in which he feels most comfortable.
The death of Mr. Kirk, now being canonized by the right, gives Mr. Trump the opportunity to expand his far-right agenda. He might declare war on his own people to do it. In fact, it sounds like he already has.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Robert Kennedy Jr. was assassinated a few months after Martin Luther King Jr. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated.