The US has a long history of presidents using their rhetorical powers to try to overcome political fissures.
Instead, the tenor of his response to the Kirk shooting has been hyper-partisan and grounded in retribution.
In Friday’s comments, he threatened the philanthropist George Soros with a Rico investigation of the sort normally reserved for organised crime.
In an Oval Office address delivered hours after Kirk was pronounced dead, Trump made menacing remarks indicating he would seek revenge against “organizations that fund and support” political violence.
He laid blame for the current plight entirely on what he called the “radical left”.
Donald Trump has declined to call for the US to come together as a way of fixing the country’s divisions in the wake of the assassination of his close associate, the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, preferring to cast “vicious and horrible” radicals on the left of US politics as the sole problem.
