Why We’re Not Doomed to a Cycle of Violence After Charlie Kirk

It took only a few hours after the shooting of Charlie Kirk for President Donald Trump to go from urging retribution against the “radical far left” to flogging his new White House ballroom on national TV.

And it might be the best thing he’s ever done for this country, even if accidentally, according to experts on political violence.

They unanimously agree that the livestream killing of the 31-year-old Turning Point USA founder in Utah on Wednesday has the potential to unleash a wave of further violence — especially if the White House essentially gives the green light for reprisals. A lack of focused attention, though, might inadvertently serve to lower the temperature in the country.

“If you would’ve asked me six months ago, I would’ve been much more optimistic about the risk of political violence to our country. Today, I think we are at an inflection point, potentially, where we can come together or we can further divide,” says Sean Westwood, an associate professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College and the director of the Polarization Research Lab. “Unfortunately, because of a lot of the messaging that’s coming through social media, and from leaders like Trump … we’re being nudged toward greater division.”

Contrary to the assertion of Trump and some Republicans — particularly those seeking to create a committee to “uncover the force” behind the “radical left” by probing a slew of “entities driving this coordinated attack” — Westwood says there’s no evidence the shooting was “coordinated” at all or even that there’s a “national appetite” for coordinated political violence.

The Kirk killing, he says, is part of a trend of “lone wolf” violence that lacks any organizational backing and often plays out with an “isolated individual” struggling with mental-health issues and “without a coherent ideology.” The suspect, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, is said to have scrawled messages on bullet casings that express anti-fascist sentiments but may double as references to video games and online trolling culture.

“The worst thing that we can imagine is our political leaders inflaming rhetoric and then giving mentally unstable individuals justification to commit additional acts of violence,” Westwood says, warning of a “false sense of mandate” to carry out attacks.

“I think President Trump was correct in his diagnosis that incendiary rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing, but I think he needs to turn that diagnosis on his own house,” he adds.

The typically short attention span of the media and those driven by the news cycle, according to West, might ultimately help to ease tensions.

“I think if we can get through the next few weeks, the risk dramatically decreases until a major event happens,” Westwood says, but “it’s going to be much harder to stop” a downward spiral if there is an act of retaliation over Kirk in the near future.

“It’s really concerning to see that kind of rhetoric” coming from the White House, says Dalya Berkowitz, a senior research analyst in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Calls for retaliation tend to lead to “regular people getting pulled into this violence” because it is somehow portrayed as “righteous.” That is especially true, she says, “in the context of National Guard deployment,” when many people are already “fearful.”

While Trump himself has created an “us vs. them” mentality — declaring on Fox & Friends early Friday that the “radicals on the left are the problem” while the “radicals on the right” are not — Berkowitz says the best thing for ordinary people to do is ignore messages like that and instead “focus on where we have agency.”

The most dangerous thing to do, she says, is “giving violence a direction.”

So if Trump wants to rant about tariffs and his White House ballroom, perhaps the country should welcome that and, in the meantime, heed the advice of Utah governor Spencer Cox, who urged Americans to “choose a different path” in the wake of Kirk’s killing, even if “it feels like rage is the only option.”