President should set an example and change the rhetoric

After the tragic death of Charlie Kirk, President Trump stated “It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree.”

The awful truth is that rhetoric dramatically heated up with the emergence of Trump and it continues today because of his incendiary comments. Below are just a few of his over-the-top derogatory comments about his “enemies”:

• Immigrants have been described as “vermin” who were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
• “They [Democrats] are so bad and frankly, they’re evil.”
• Referring to four people of color in Congress, they should “go back” to “the crime infested places from which they came.” (Three of those Democratic lawmakers were born in the United States, and the fourth is a U.S. citizen born in Somalia.)
• “It’s the people that surround [Harris]. They’re scum and they want to take down our country. They are absolute garbage.”
• When asked about the possibility of violence on election day 2024: “I think the bigger problem is the enemy within” from the “radical left lunatics.”
• Now in his Second Term, Trump denounced a reporter as a “very evil person” for asking a question he did not like. The same week he declared that Democrats are “an evil group of people.”
• Trump described former President Biden as “an evil guy who wasn’t very smart” and ran a “very evil regime” surrounded by advisers and prosecutors who were also “so bad and so evil, so corrupt.”
• On May 12th of this year: “I knew that running was very dangerous, because I knew how evil these people were. I knew how they cheat, they steal, they lie. They’re a horrible group of people.”
• In June, the president said journalists at The New York Times and CNN have “evil intentions.”

So, Trump is absolutely correct. It’s long past time to confront the fact that violence is generated by demonizing those with whom you disagree. And President Trump should set an example by stopping his own demonization of others.