The blame game goes on. On Friday morning, US president Donald Trump visited the set of Fox & Friends, the morning talkshow on Fox News, in Manhattan. He had attended a Yankees game on Thursday night, a commemorative appearance in his hometown on the 24th anniversary of 9/11. The Yankees won; pictures of Trump in the Yankee dressingroom afterwards as he spoke about the bittersweet night.
It was, he allowed, “like the old days”, sitting with the Steinbrenners, the owners of the Major League Baseball team. The appearance provided another example of Trump’s peerless instincts for the television medium. He sat down on that sofa in possession of the most burning piece of breaking news available: the suspect in the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk was in custody.
He waited until his hosts asked for an update and then delivered the information quietly: the suspect had handed himself in after an intercession from a family friend, a pastor, and the young man’s own father. It was clearly the best outcome possible to another shocking act of political violence.
As in the case of Luigi Mangione, the young man who awaits trial for the early-morning killing by gunshot of Brian Thompson, the former chief executive of Healthcare United, the manhunt for the lone gunman who assassinated Kirk, the 31-year-old youth conservative activist, as he addressed a college crowd in Utah Valley, played out almost as a live television event.
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Closed-circuit television cameras caught blurry images of a lone figure jumping off a flat-roof building; ring bell cameras captured him as he walked through a nearby residential street and the close-up pictures, although blurry, were enough to identify him. He was slender, he wore jeans and low-cut Cons; features common to millions of young American men. On Friday, the suspect was named as Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old from Utah.
The news drew the curtain on a frenzied 24 hours in American political life. Kirk was a phenomenon. His death illuminated his unique, irreplaceable influence within the Trump-Maga movement, not only in delivering millions of young devotees but as a political savant.
His lasting contribution may be his championing of JD Vance, who in many eyes is likely to become the next president of the United States. In his death, Kirk’s own leadership potential was evaluated: he was amassing a nationwide cohort of supporters, was a proven debater and was just 31 years old. Robert Draper, whose New York Times profile offers a definitive account of Kirk’s rise, told The Daily podcast that Kirk saw a presidential run in his future. Instead, he will become an enshrined figure in Maga mythology.
Kirk’s murder is tragic. His political ideology was objectionable and reprehensible to many Americans. He was a polarising figure and he knew this. In the immediate aftermath of his death, Trump’s Oval Office address contained a vow that is potentially alarming as he placed the blame on the rhetoric of “the radical left”.
“This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism we are seeing in our country today and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organisations that fund it and support it as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”
Trump alluded to the attempt on his own life last July in Butler, Pennsylvania, to the shooting of Thompson, and to the 2017 shooting of House whip Steve Scalise – all terrible atrocities. But he did not see fit to include the recent atrocities inflicted on Democratic political figures.
Earlier that afternoon, representative Nancy Mace had placed responsibility for Kirk’s death on her colleagues in the House. “Democrats own what happened today,” she said.
Pressed on whether, by that logic, Republicans should or must “own” the fatal shootings of two political representatives in Minnesota over the summer. Mace was unyielding.
“Are you kidding me? Some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through his neck and you want to talk about Republicans right now? No ... Democrats own this a hundred per cent.”
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief-of-staff, took to X to condemn “an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth”.
The US is a nation of talkers. Charlie Kirk was one of the most prominent and skilled, an old-style evangelist who had mastered new media. His viewpoints inspired and dismayed in equal measure. Words travel. Trump was right when he said in the Oval office that Kirk’s “voice, his message, his legacy will live on”. On the Fox News sofa, his hosts pressed him for a further denunciation of the “radical left”. He resisted.
The obvious and widely articulated fear is that this brutally public slaying of a cult hero of the American right will drag the United States through a new corridor of violence. Kirk’s legacy is complex. But open communication with Americans who loathed everything he stood for was a vital part of his message. The reasonable hope must be that his death and the eulogies to come can bring about a pause and a moment of clear reflection through a frenzied political time.
