President Donald Trump has called for national healing, following the fatal shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, while in the same breath blaming his death on “radical left lunatics.”
Speaking to NBC News on Saturday, the president said left-wing ideologies stand in the way of reconciliation in the United States.
“I’d like to see [the nation] heal,” Trump said. “But we’re dealing with a radical left group of lunatics, and they don’t play fair and they never did.”
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The president was doubling down on earlier comments, but his suggestion that Kirk’s suspected assassin, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, is of a left-wing persuasion is at odds with the known facts.
Robinson’s family are self-proclaimed MAGA supporters, though it has been reported that he did not share their beliefs. He is an unaffiliated voter who has not cast a ballot in the past two general elections.
Writings on bullet casings found at the scene of the shooting appear to be anti-fascist, but also contain online cultural references that make a definitive meaning difficult to ascertain.
While it was initially reported in some outlets that Robinson was left-wing, there have been several notable retractions and corrections made concerning his political views.
Claims have also been made that Robinson was part of an even further right group with a history of trolling Kirk.
In a video shared by the White House on Wednesday night, Trump said “radical left” rhetoric was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.”
Vicious public debate has raged since Kirk was assassinated while speaking at Utah Valley University on Wednesday. An army of keyboard warriors, including elected officials and MAGA leaders, is currently working toward the public exposure and ostracizing of anyone they deem to have “celebrated” Kirk’s killing.
Amid simmering tensions in the wake of the shooting, Utah Governor Spencer Cox has called for calm, saying Kirk’s death represents a fork in the road for America.
“Is this the end of a very dark era, or is this just the beginning of something far, far worse?” Cox asked Anderson Cooper on CNN on Friday. “It‘s incumbent on every single one of us to look into our souls and decide: Do we want this to continue, or are we going to try something different?”
Speaking to NBC News on Saturday, Trump said, “We’ll see what happens. They [the left] don’t like what’s been happening. We’ve been winning very big.”
