The president’s comment Sunday was in keeping with his pugilistic style of politics, although the context was striking: He spoke just minutes after Kirk’s widow, Erika, said she forgave her husband’s killer.
“I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it is what Charlie would do,” she said. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the Gospel is love and always love.”
Trump could not feign forgiveness. “I am sorry, Erika,” he said before contradicting her.
“He did not hate his opponents,” the president said of Charlie Kirk. “He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie.”
Trump has been fueled by grievance and animosity over the course of his political career, and even in the years before, when he was a public figure in New York. After five teenagers were accused of assaulting and raping a young female jogger in New York City in 1989, Trump called for New York state to bring back the death penalty and told reporters, “I want society to hate them,” according to a book on the president by Maggie Haberman, a New York Times reporter. (The men were later exonerated.)
When asked about the divergent messages from the president and Erika Kirk, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Monday that the president was “authentically himself.”
“I think that’s why millions of Americans across the country love him and support him, including Erika Kirk, who you saw so beautifully, was onstage with the president in an unthinkable moment, in the midst of an unthinkable tragedy, and was leaning on the president for support during that time, and he was there to give it to her,” she said.
The president’s critics pointed to the rising political violence that has affected both Democrats and Republicans to argue that Trump should seek to heal the country’s political divides.
“At a time where the nation desperately needs to be bringing down the temperature, you’re saying he authentically doesn’t want to bring it down, or you’re saying that he authentically hates half of America,” said Sarah Matthews, who was Trump’s deputy press secretary in the first term until breaking with him over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. “It just goes to show that’s what his mantra has always been. It’s just all about division and feeling like a victim and wanting to hate his opponents and get retribution.”
Some conservatives expressed support Monday for the seemingly conflicting messages from Erika Kirk and government officials including the president.
“It is our job to forgive, not the government’s,” Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative commentator, wrote on social media. “Christians give grace; the government wields the sword (Romans 13). We turn the other cheek; the government punishes evil.”
Almost immediately after Charlie Kirk was killed, Trump promised vengeance. Even before the suspect was caught, the president said that language from the “radical left” had contributed to Kirk’s killing and vowed to find those responsible for the violence, as well as “organizations that fund it and support it.”
“We have radical-left lunatics out there, and we just have to beat the hell out of them,” he said.
The suspect, Tyler Robinson, 22, had a “leftist ideology” that was “very different” from that of his conservative family, according to Utah Gov. Spencer Cox.
Although authorities have said Robinson is believed to have acted alone, the White House has signaled a broad crackdown on liberal groups, with Trump using Kirk’s death as justification for measures to stifle his political opposition.
ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel off his late-night television show after the chair of the Federal Communications Commission criticized Kimmel’s remarks about Kirk and said his agency was “going to have remedies that we can look at.” (On Monday afternoon, Disney announced that Kimmel would return to his show Tuesday.)
Even as Trump suggests that he allows his hatred to drive his agenda, at times he has shown some awareness of potential celestial consequences.
“I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” he said on Fox News last month.