By Josh Marshall

Copyright talkingpointsmemo

Fire poured out of my eyes when I sat down at my computer and saw a Semafor email with the subject line “National Reckoning”. They cooled when I opened the email and saw the top item was a PPRI poll from March 2025. (“National reckoning” turns out to be from an Atlantic Monthly article about Kirk’s close relationship with the Trump family which was quoted in the email.) The poll contains the worrisome news that only 53% of Americans “completely disagree” with the statement that “political violence is sometimes necessary.” The story comes into clearer focus when the result is broken down by people’s view of Donald Trump. Only 39% of Trump supporters (those who with a favorable view of him) believe this while 66% of his opponents do.

In other words, people who hold a favorable view of Donald Trump are overwhelmingly more likely to believe that political violence has a legitimate role in our society. The number of Trump supporters who believe this is 27% higher than that of his opponents. This is of course the least surprising thing imaginable to anyone who has lived in the United States or on earth for the last decade. But we live in a media ecosystem of ideational bullshit. So it yet comes as a breath of fresh air, a sublime encounter with reality.

One thing to remember is that part of the current moment is sustained by the entirely fraudulent impression that “they” – the left, the Democrats, the lunatics, pick depending on how much spittle Trump is spewing on a given day – were beyond the very real assassination attempt on the now-president’s life one year ago. That is purely the work of drowning-out-volume-level insistence by the president’s supporters going back a year. Thomas Crooks didn’t really leave much trace of his political beliefs at all. But to the extent he did he was a registered Republican and a diehard firing range gun nut. He may not have left a clear trail of articulate (in the poli-sci sense) right wing beliefs but he was clearly not a liberal or a member of the left. The belief that Trump and his supporters are besieged by threats of violence from the left – to the extent it isn’t a performative claim the people don’t actually believe – is based on the assumption that any violence directed at Trump supporters must be the work of his opponents toward the left. Left wingers are certainly capable of political violence, though at dramatically lower numbers than their opposites. (Did you even know that a guy radicalized against COVID vaccines shot up the CDC a month and killed a cop? Did I mention this PPRI poll I just saw?) But the truth is that Trump and his movement incite, perpetuate and provide permission for political violence in a way that is consistent, across-the-board, at saturation level in our society and some of it laps up on them.

This is a fact, whatever we may find out about who was behind Kirk’s murder.

“It remains unclear just what sort of national reckoning Kirk’s murder will prompt,” was the full quote from the above-mentioned Atlantic Monthly article and they further note that Trump “is often spurred to action by events that affect people he knows.”

This is actually a consistent theme of numerous major media articles about the White House in the last 24 hours. It’s clear that Kirk had insinuated himself deeply not only into the functioning of the Trump White House – recommending, vetting appointees, etc. – but very much into the Trump family. That statement that Trump is spurred to action most directly by things that affect people he knows is such a consistent them because it’s clearly true. We are all like this to some degree. We are more acutely affected by events that are most proximate to us. But in many of these articles this statement of Trump’s nature blends into something more like justification. Or to put it more directly, who knows what Trump might do because he’s super mad. Watch out! This afternoon he told reporters that in response to Kirk’s murder “we have to beat the hell” out of the “radical left lunatics.”

Needless to say this libelous and criminal threat is something a president should never say but which comes easily to President Trump and is treated as mostly expected by the elite political class. To say that Trump is “often spurred to action by events that affect people he knows” is just a more baroque way of saying that he views the presidency and indeed the country as his personal property and that he uses his vast powers based on his angers, emotions and whims.

This is not the role of a president. Did I mention that?

The final two sentences of The Atlantic piece somewhat redeems itself in the final sentence which notes how Kirk fell back into line after a call with Trump after briefly breaking ranks on the Epstein files. “That approach, even more than his incendiary statements about American culture, represents the brand of politics that Kirk practiced, and that Trump most appreciated: loyalty to the leader.” Not to be too cutesy. But I will assume this reference what is usually known as the ‘leadership principle’, or translated into the ‘leadership principle’ was a coy tell rather than something the authors stumbled onto but who knows.