| Sometimes history offers a split screen of the forces that are animating an era. The memorial service for Charlie Kirk on September 21 was one such moment. |
| Before a huge crowd of the devoted MAGA following, Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, moved the audience when she said about the person who shot her husband, “That man, that young man…I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did and is what Charlie would do.” |
| She offered an appeal to the entire nation: “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.” |
| But almost before her words could land, President Trump offered a different message. He explained that while Charlie Kirk “did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie.” |
| The president went on to say, “I hate my opponent(s) and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry Erika.” |
| Trump’s words were shocking, though not surprising. |
| That he would admit to hating his opponents suggests that the gloves are coming off and that hatred will be, even more than it has been, the animating spirit of the Trump administration. He made that clear the day before Kirk’s memorial service when he posted a message to Attorney General Pam Bondi. |
| “Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, 'same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam 'Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done. There is a GREAT CASE….We can’t delay any longer.” |
| This direction came after Erik Siebert, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, resigned when he concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge New York Attorney General Leticia James with mortgage fraud. |
| The president’s statements to Bondi and at the Kirk memorial put another nail in the coffin for the idea that America is an exceptional nation, what Ronald Rasgan called a “shining city upon a hill.” |
| If Trump has his way, we will no longer be the world’s “last, best hope” or the “land
of
the
free
and
the
home
of
the
brave.” |
| Instead, Trump’s America is the land where hatred finds a home. |
| As MSNBC’s Jarvis DeBerry put it, Trump is offering not only a “bold and unrepentant defiance of a command directly out of the mouth of Jesus, but… it is an equally bold declaration that he doesn’t think of himself as the president for all Americans. Every president of the United States has opponents, but have we ever heard a president declare his hatred for them?” |
| Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Reagan, each of them provided an uplifting vision of the nation they led. Each built a larger-than-life presidency. |
| On September 20 and 21, Trump tore the presidency to shreds right before our eyes. |
| When asked about Trump’s embrace of hatred, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, unknowingly delivered a stinging indictment of the man for whom she works. The president, she observed, was being “authentically himself.” |
| She went on the say, “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.” |
| This is another don’t believe your lying eyes moment. “Support”? |
| Trump went out of his way to distance himself from her embrace of forgiveness and warning about hatred. |
| At the same time, he distanced himself from the traditional role that presidents have played in times of crisis. As Sarah Matthews, who was Trump’s deputy press secretary in the first term, explained, “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.” |
| “It just goes to show,” she added, “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.” |
| Ironically, Trump’s statement at Kirk’s memorial service vindicates what ABC’s Terry Moran said last summer, when, after interviewing the president, he called Trump and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller “world-class” haters. Moran observed that the president’s hatred “is only a means to an end, and that end [is] his own glorification.” |
| ABC suspended him for his remarks. |
| Law Professor William Miller argues that hatred of the kind Moran attributed to Trump is not well understood. He notes that it is hard to distinguish from anger. |
| “Both anger and hatred,” Miller says, “accompany and inform relations of hostility, but not in quite the same way…. [T]he usual view is that anger is tied up with claims for redress against a particular person for particular wrongs, whereas hatred need no personal involvement; we can hate a person for what or who he or she is even without knowing them. Thus, whole groups can be hated.” |
| Unlike anger, which is “curable and can be repaired via compensation, revenge, or apology…, hatred decays slowly if at all; it endures.” |
| To say one hates one’s opponents registers what Miller labels “an intense passion of all-consuming detestation.” |
| Such passion has no place in a pluralistic and democratic society. A president driven by hatred of his opponents will “target innocent people, shut down dissent, intimidate critics into silence, violate democratic norms, act without any statutory authority, sweep away checks and balances, spread disinformation and conspiracy theories, ignore court orders, and even declare martial law.” |
| Sound familiar? |
| That is bad enough, but the greater danger posed by the president’s open embrace of hatred is, as The Atlantic’s Peter Wehner explains, “that the habits of his heart become the habits of our hearts; that his code of conduct becomes ours. That we delight in mistreating others almost as much as he does. That vengeance becomes nearly as important to us as it is to him. That dehumanization becomes de rigueur.” |
| No one can thrive if Trump’s ways become our ways. No one can thrive in a land that gives hatred a home. |
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