A reaction that shows all of this president's worst traits

Was it murder or was it an assassination? We still don't know the motive of the killer of the rightwing influencer Charlie Kirk. But let us assume that it was indeed politically motivated. In that context, the president was right to condemn in the most forthright terms this latest piece of political violence to roil the United States.

- JON SOPEL

It is a stain on democracy. Differences should be resolved at ballot boxes, not via a sniper rifle.

But in his address from the White House, the president did not seek to reach out; he did nothing to calm tensions. Instead, he put the blame for all America's problems on the “lunatics” of the far left. “We have a radical left group of lunatics out there, just absolute lunatics, and we’re going to get that problem solved,” he intoned with great purpose.

Would that it were that simple. Let’s be frank about this - America has always had a problem with political violence. And though some try to frame it that way, it didn’t start with the assassination of John F Kennedy either. America’s “loss of innocence”, as some tried to portray the events in Dallas in 1963, had happened a good deal earlier. What about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in the Ford Theatre in Washington DC a century earlier, over the abolition of slavery?