WASHINGTON — The first few minutes of President Donald Trump’s Oval Office address after the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week followed the conventional presidential playbook. He praised the victim, asked God to watch over his family and talked mournfully of “a dark moment for America.”

Then he tossed the playbook aside, angrily blaming the murder on the American left and vowing revenge.

That was stark even for some viewers who might normally be sympathetic. When Trump appeared later on Fox News, a host noted that there were “radicals on the right,” just as there were “radicals on the left,” and asked, “How do we come back together?” The president rejected the premise. Radicals on the right were justified by anger over crime, he said. “The radicals on the left are the problem,” he added. “And they’re vicious. And they’re horrible.”

Trump has long made clear that coming together is not the mission of his presidency. In an era of deep polarization in American society, he rarely talks about healing. While other presidents have typically tried to lower the temperature in moments of national crisis, Trump turns up the flames. He does not subscribe to the traditional notion of being president for all the people. He acts as president of red America and the people who agree with him, while those who do not are portrayed as enemies and traitors deserving payback.

“The left has declared war on America,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and a leading voice in the MAGA movement, said in a text message Saturday. “Trump is a wartime president now focused on eradicating domestic terrorists like ANTIFA,” Bannon added, referring to the anti-fascist movement.

Trump’s Second Term Acts of Retribution

The notion of Trump as a wartime president in a war against some of his own people speaks to just how different his presidency is. Campaigning last year to reclaim power four years after his reelection defeat, Trump dispensed with the usual bromides about national unity, and instead declared that the biggest threat to the United States was “the enemy from within.”

He vowed “retribution” against those who in his view have betrayed him or the country, and he has spent the first eight months of his second term exacting it against Democrats, wayward Republicans, estranged allies, law firms, universities, news outlets and anyone else he considers disloyal or excessively liberal.

He sees a country riven into two ideological and political camps: one that supports him and one that does not. He governs accordingly. In recent days, he has vowed to order troops into cities run by Democrats, while sending money in the form of disaster relief to states run by Republicans.

This viewpoint reflects Trump’s own history and personality, born out of an us-against-them, winners-and-losers approach to life that carried him through decades in business, reality television and eventually politics. He is not comfortable as a comforter. He prefers a fight; he needs an enemy. And with Democrats fractured and leaderless, he is positioning himself as the scourge of an American left that has, he contends, grown radical beyond recognition.

“This has been consistent from the beginning,” Jeff Shesol, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, said of Trump’s escalatory reaction to the assassination of Kirk. “It’s not a tactic. It’s not a stratagem. It’s who he is and how he sees the world, in this Manichaean way. The left — the ‘radical left’ as he always wants to call it — is evil, and this is another opportunity to establish that, no matter what the facts are.”

Plenty of left-wing voices online have fueled the divisions. Within hours of Kirk’s death, Americans of all stripes began pointing fingers at each other, even before a suspect had been caught or any motivation had been firmly determined. Trump and other allies of Kirk’s, who were distraught at the senseless killing of a 31-year-old rising star on the right they knew and liked, expressed roiling indignation at comments that gave the impression of cheering or rationalizing the murder of someone over political views.

Most national Democratic elected leaders joined Republicans in denouncing the killing and calling for an end to the political violence that has erupted across the ideological spectrum in recent years. But while Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, made a pained plea for Americans to come together, the president expressed anger, declaring that “we just have to beat the hell” out of “radical left lunatics,” though he also made a point of urging “nonviolence.”

Our Nation Can No Longer Be Healed by Politician’s Words

“I’m afraid the ship has sailed, at least for now, over an era in which politicians could heal a nation with their words,” said Ari Fleischer, who was White House press secretary on Sept. 11, 2001, when President George W. Bush faced his greatest crisis and pulled the nation together against a common foreign enemy.

Fleischer, who supports Trump, said the current president has been the target of so much hatred that no one would credit him for a calm response, were he to offer one. “The vitriol against President Trump from the left is so deep that there is not a syllable, word, sentence or paragraph Donald Trump could say that would mollify them,” he said. “Trump’s mantra is ‘fight, fight, fight,’ so no one should be surprised by his reaction.”

Every other recent president has said that he saw his role as transcending partisanship at least some of the time, to serve as leader of all Americans — even those who disagreed with him. George H.W. Bush talked of ushering in a “kinder and gentler nation.” Clinton vowed to be the “repairer of the breach.” The younger Bush spoke of being “a uniter, not a divider.” Barack Obama rejected the idea of a red America and blue America, saying there was only “the United States of America.” Joe Biden called for ending “this uncivil war.”

None of them succeeded at achieving such lofty aspirations, and each of them to different degrees played the politics of division at times. Politics, after all, is about division — debating big ideas vigorously until one side wins an election or carries the vote in Congress. But none of them practiced the politics of division as ferociously and consistently as Trump, for whom it has been the defining characteristic of his time on the national stage.

It was Bannon, after all, who said after Trump’s 2016 victory that unity was not the goal. “We didn’t win an election to bring the country together,” he said then.

And Trump, who has never had the support of a majority in any of the three campaigns he has run or in any approval rating by Gallup, has long focused on catering to his own core supporters. When he talks about his poll ratings, he often cites approval just among Republicans.

“If I take care of the base, everything else will take care of itself,” he once told Anthony Scaramucci, a former ally who briefly served in Trump’s first-term White House.

While he made few nods toward working across the aisle in his first term, Trump has all but abandoned any efforts at bipartisanship in his second. He does not invite Democratic leaders to the White House for talks, nor does he brief them on major national security events.

The Fear Is Trump Will Use Kirk’s Murder to Further Crack Down on Left

His critics fear that Trump will now use the Kirk assassination to go further on liberal organizations and institutions, a view encouraged in ominous social media posts by Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff and a leader of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

“In recent days we have learned just how many Americans in positions of authority — child services, law clerks, hospital nurses, teachers, gov’t workers, even DOD employees — have been deeply and violently radicalized,” Miller wrote Saturday, suggesting that their responses to Kirk’s killing were unacceptable. “The consequence of a vast, organized ecosystem of indoctrination.”

Trump is certainly right that his opponents have called him a “fascist” and “Nazi.” But his outrage at incendiary rhetoric is situational. In the same Fox News interview last week in which he complained about excesses by the left, he referred to Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist and front-runner for mayor of New York, as a “communist.” Even more than in his first term, Trump lately has referred to political rivals and journalists as “evil.”

Even his anger at being called a fascist depends on who says it and whether they take it back. His own vice president, JD Vance, once called him “America’s Hitler,” a remark that he later disavowed and managed to overcome to win his way onto Trump’s ticket.

In Trump’s World, Violence Is Excused When It Suits Him

Likewise, the president’s concern for security against political violence has depended on who was threatened. He pardoned some 1,500 supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including those who assaulted police officers and called for the execution of his own vice president, Mike Pence. At one point, he declined to rule out pardoning the people convicted of a plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat.

He complained during last year’s campaign that he needed more Secret Service protection, then took office and stripped government security for people he disliked, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former national security adviser John Bolton. Just last month, Trump rescinded extended Secret Service protection for former Vice President Kamala Harris.

But with so much menace in the air, even Trump at times in recent days tried to make a distinction between violence and retribution of another kind. With some of his supporters anxious for revenge after Kirk’s death, Trump offered a caveat. “Well,” he said, “you want revenge at the voter box.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Peter Baker/Loren Elliott/Doug Mills

c.2025 The New York Times Company