There is an old saying that politics is the opposite of violence. But warnings keep coming about President Trump’s political motives in sending armed troops into American cities. And more alarms are sounding as he threatens to go beyond Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. by putting military boots on the ground in Memphis, Chicago and elsewhere.
On Friday, a federal immigration agent killed a man in the Chicago area. Even before that shooting, the governor had a warning.
“This is a part of his plan to do something really nefarious, which is to interfere with elections in 2026,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) claimed last week. “He wants to have troops on the ground to stop people from voting, to intimidate people from going to the voting booth. Take note, that is what this is all about”
“The only crisis here is Donald Trump, and he wants a crisis because he wants an excuse to cancel elections down the road,” said Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s district attorney. “He’s talking about the cancellation of elections because of a crisis where there is no crisis. America needs to wake up.”
The use of armed troops in cities that vote heavily for Democrats, along with rising political violence in the U.S., is adding to fear about the cancellation of the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential elections.
Trump fueled more concern last week after the chilling assassination of one of his biggest supporters, the college-crowd influencer Charlie Kirk.
Before any suspect had been arrested, Trump blamed the “radical left.” Later he added, “We have radical left lunatics out there and we just have to beat the hell out of them.” He made no comment on findings that two-thirds of political violence comes from the right-wing, according to a study by the Anti-Defamation League. Instead, he called for cracking down on his political critics by blaming them for all violence.
Did he forget his supporters’ violent attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, putting their trust in violence, not votes? One of his first acts back in office was to pardon about 1,500 people involved in the Jan. 6 riot, which injured many police officers. Not a word passed his lips about agreeing to a more than $4 million settlement with the family of one of the rioters who was shot and killed as she tried to break past the doors of the Speaker’s Lobby.
He didn’t say a word about the June murder of a Minnesota Democratic state legislator and her husband. He said nothing condemning the 2022 hammer attack on the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
He offered no regret for enflaming the nation’s political polarization and anger. Trump has a record of damning his political rivals as “horrible people.” He said President Joe Biden ran a “Gestapo administration.” He accused President Barack Obama of “treason.” He called for a protester at one of his 2016 rallies to be “carried out on a stretcher, folks.”
After winning his first presidential race, Trump watched the spread of lies tying Hillary Clinton, his defeated opponent, and her aides to a nonexistent child sex ring operating out of a D.C. pizza parlor. He was silent about the shots fired at the building in 2016 by a man who believed the bizarre conspiracy theory.
Instead of standing to condemn all political division and violence, from the left and the right, Trump last week highlighted left-wing criticism of Kirk. He specifically called out people who compared Kirk to the Nazis. He blamed that rhetoric for the killing.
Talk about sidestepping reality. Trump had to overlook heated political rhetoric from Kirk himself, including especially his denigration of Democrats as people who “stand for everything God hates.”
Also absent from Trump’s remarks was Kirk’s history of dismissing concern about gun violence. In defending gun rights, Kirk said it was, in his opinion, worth it to have some gun deaths “so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
During the 2016 presidential race, Trump famously offered gun rights supporters a puzzling comment, saying of Clinton, “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”
That kind of talk had no place in our politics then, and it should have no place in our politics now. And canceling elections should be out of the question.
Trump is more than a witness to the sharp rise of primitive violence in 21st-century American politics. He fueled the polarization and anger.
Kirk, despite his odious views about Martin Luther King Jr., must be credited as a free speech advocate. And violence has been the rule, rather than the exception, for most of human history in how people have resolved their political disputes and claims to power.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) recently said of on Trump’s actions as president, “I don’t think Donald Trump wants another election.” Trump is creating a “private police force” by increasing funding for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Newsom has noted. The governor portrayed ICE agents as a threatening presence to deter voters.
A new generation of Democratic leaders must be clear-eyed about the task ahead of them: defeating extremism by winning elections.
Kirk’s murder is more than a tragedy for one political party. It is a low point for a nation lovingly described by President Ronald Reagan as a “shining city upon a hill.”
The best time to stop the hate was last week. The second-best time is right now.
Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.”
