TRUMP TURBO-CHARGED THE WAR ON DEMOCRATS, BUT HE DIDN'T START IT, AND IT WON'T END WHEN HE'S GONE

I'm pleased to see two prominent articles in The New York Times that express alarm about President Trump's decision to attack Democrats in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting. One -- "Trump Escalates Attacks on Political Opponents After Charlie Kirk’s Killing" by Tyler Pager and Nick Corasaniti -- unambiguously focuses on the one-sidedness of Trump's rhetoric, staring with its subhead:

President Trump has promised to bring the killer to justice while using the moment to blame the left — and only the left — more broadly.

Tyler and Corasaniti write:

Mr. Trump blamed the “radical left” almost immediately after Mr. Kirk was shot, before the authorities had identified a suspect. He promised to find those responsible for political violence, as well as the “organizations that fund it and support it.”

Mr. Trump has an expansive view of those he deems radical, applying that term to almost all of his political adversaries. In his second term, Mr. Trump has pushed the boundaries of his authority to exact retribution on political opponents and institutions....

America in recent years has seen a wave of violence across the political spectrum, targeting Democrats and Republicans, but Mr. Trump has focused only on attacks against conservatives and his allies. On Friday, he appeared to excuse right-wing radicals by arguing they were motivated by a desire to reduce crime.

The second piece -- Peter Baker's "In an Era of Deep Polarization, Unity Is Not Trump’s Mission" -- makes similar points:

Mr. Trump has long made clear that coming together is not the mission of his presidency. In an era of deep polarization in American society, he rarely talks about healing. While other presidents have typically tried to lower the temperature in moments of national crisis, Mr. Trump turns up the flames. He does not subscribe to the traditional notion of being president for all the people. He acts as president of red America and the people who agree with him, while those who do not are portrayed as enemies and traitors deserving payback.

Every other recent president has said that he saw his role as transcending partisanship at least some of the time, to serve as leader of all Americans — even those who disagreed with him....

... none of them practiced the politics of division as ferociously and consistently as Mr. Trump, for whom it has been the defining characteristic of his time on the national stage.

I'm grateful that Baker is pointing this out to Times readers who might still believe that we haven't veered far from the path of normality. But what I don't like about these stories, and Baker's piece in particular, is the portrayal of the war on Democrats as primarily Trumpian.

Baker writes:

[Trump] sees a country riven into two ideological and political camps: one that supports him and one that does not. He governs accordingly. In recent days, he has vowed to order troops into cities run by Democrats, while sending money in the form of disaster relief to states run by Republicans.

This viewpoint reflects Mr. Trump’s own history and personality, born out of an us-against-them, winners-and-losers approach to life that carried him through decades in business, reality television and eventually politics. He is not comfortable as a comforter. He prefers a fight; he needs an enemy.

This feeds the comforting fantasy that "the fever will break" when Trump is no longer in politics. It won't.

Republicans might not have seen the goal of neutralizing liberalism and the Democratic Party as realistic until recently, but they've demonized us for decades, and the demonization has only increased in recent years. They do this independently of Trump, and there's no reason to believe that they'll stop hating Democrats, or stop seeking to purge Democrats from public life, when Trump leaves office.

Here was J.D. Vance in 2022, accepting Marjorie Taylor Greene's endorsement in the Ohio Senate primary, years before he joined Trump on the presidential ticket:

Honored to have Marjorie’s endorsement. We’re going to win this thing and take the country back from the scumbags. https://t.co/tKFWOvRvq3

— JD Vance (@JDVance) January 25, 2022

Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, wasn't speaking for Trump, or even proposing a course of action for Trump, when he recommended in July that Republican state legislators should "de-charter" cities run by Democrats.

Commentator Mark Levin published a book in 2023 called The Democrat Party Hates America in 2023, when it was not at all clear that Trump would ever return to the White House.

Stephen Miller may have been working for the Trump White House when he said last month that "the Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization," but many on the right who don't work in government agree with him. Here, for instance, is the CEO of The Federalist:

The Democrat Party Is A Domestic Terrorist Organization https://t.co/L8sFqBL5u8

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) September 10, 2025

Charlie Kirk himself called for President Biden's imprisonment or execution in 2023.

I hadn’t seen this. Kirk, the moderate free speech guy who did politics the right way per some liberals (!), called for Biden to be executed. Meanwhile Joe Biden put out a very strong statement condemning Kirk’s killing. Both sides!

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— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan.bsky.social) September 13, 2025 at 9:14 PM

Trump may have had a habit since his real estate days of treating life as combat, but that's not what's driving his allies. They hate us, and they would have hated us if Trump had never entered politics. Trump's willingness to kick down the guardrails makes their dream of a Democrat-free America seem attainable, but they always wanted Democrats eliminated or neutralized, and they'll continue to want that long after Trump is gone.