In one of the pinnacles of American rhetorical art, President Abraham Lincoln called for national reconciliation in his first inaugural address in 1861, invoking a powerful image: “The mystic chords of memory” of what once bound his countrymen together, he said, will resonate again “when touched by the better angels of our nature.” Five weeks later, the Civil War broke out. In 1865, Lincoln inaugurated the list of the four presidents who have been assassinated in the history of the United States.

The speech with which Donald Trump first assumed the presidency in 2017 will be remembered for its somber rhetoric and two words: this was the day, he promised in the same apocalyptic tone he had used during the campaign, ending “the American carnage.”

This Friday, Utah Governor Spencer Cox invoked Lincoln's"better angels." He did so at a press conference confirming that the alleged killer of ultraconservative activist and MAGA leader Charlie Kirk, a 22-year-old named Tyler Robinson, had turned himself in.

Cox, who called for reconciliation and warned against the"cancer of social media," evoked Lincoln about an hour after Trump, on Fox News, promised that the"radical left" would pay for the death of Kirk, a close ally of his and a key player in his strong 2024 election showing among young voters. He also called for the death penalty for the killer and ignored the Democratic victims of the recent surge in political violence in the United States. That macabre list includes the two assassination attempts Trump survived last summer.

In one of those moments of mourning that invite unity, the president of the United States and his main allies chose to turn it into a new argument for the political persecution of their adversaries: they announced reprisals against the so-called"radical left" - in which, according to initial indications, Robinson, raised in a Republican home and a gun lover in Utah, was not a member - and promised purges of public officials, as well as threats to foreign citizens who celebrated or justified Kirk's death. The MAGA activist was a controversial figure for his critics due to his staunch defense of the right to bear arms and his xenophobic, Islamophobic and anti-LGBTQ+ discourse, as well as his activism in an exclusionary Christian nationalism.

Millions of followers

He was also an extraordinarily influential figure, not only in the United States and not only in his lifetime: his accounts and those of Turning Point, the conservative campaigning organization he founded when he was just 18, have added millions of followers since a bullet fired from a hunting rifle hit him in the neck in the middle of an outdoor debate on the campus of Utah Valley University.

His widow, Erika Kirk, remembered her husband this Friday with a speech in which she extended the blame beyond Robinson, who, according to authorities, acted alone. She said that “the criminals responsible” for her husband’s murder “have no idea what they’ve done.” “They killed Charlie because he preached a message of patriotism, faith, and God’s merciful love. Let me be clear: If you previously believed my husband’s mission was powerful, you have no idea what you have just unleashed across this country and the world.”

The following day, it was announced that Kirk's funeral, who died at age 31, will take place next Sunday at a stadium in Glendale, Arizona, near where his wife and two children live. It has a capacity of 63,000, and Trump has confirmed his attendance.

His death has once again highlighted the dialogue between the deaf between the two Americas. Republicans blame Democrats for the tense climate that led to his assassination (or, more simply, for the assassination itself, as South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace did in a meeting with reporters at the Capitol).

Democrats, for their part, are calling for recognition that the problem stems from both sides, as well as the president's responsibility for the confrontational rhetoric that floods public discourse in the United States with the help of social media. Elon Musk, owner of one of these platforms, X, said this week on his account that"the left is the party of murder."

Given the current state of affairs, members of Congress from both sides seem to agree on only one thing: concern for their safety and the anxiety they feel about participating in public events.

Leading liberal columnist Ezra Klein on Friday defended, in a conciliatory spirit, Kirk's"correct" approach to politics, and highlighted his willingness to"talk to anyone" in the debates he organized at universities across the country, events like the one in which he lost his life in Utah.

Meanwhile, the progressive base of the Democratic Party is demanding that it be understood that mourning his death “is not the same as celebrating his life,” as Elisabeth Spiers writes in The Nation, and they demand that the left not fall into the trap of “moral superiority.”

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people have been fired by private companies for making comments celebrating or apologizing for the murder. And a website called Charlie Kirk's Killers invites citizens who celebrated the crime to come forward. It also promises that the page, a marvel of fact-finding,"will soon become a database with more than 30,000 entries, filterable by location and profession" to name the "radical activists instigating violence." "This is the largest purge in history," reads its welcome message.

And amid the fierce debates that have surfaced these days, there's one that has been surprisingly sidelined: gun control. Perhaps because the country, or at least the part of it that advocates for a reinterpretation of the Second Amendment, has lost hope for change. Or perhaps because on the same day Kirk, a staunch defender of that amendment, died, there was also a shooting at a high school in Colorado. A 16-year-old boy,"radicalized by an extremist network," according to investigators, shot two classmates, leaving them in critical condition.

David Corn, a columnist for the left-wing magazine Mother Jones and a MAGA movement theorist, recalled in his newsletter this Saturday that there are an estimated 500 million guns in the hands of civilians in the United States. “There are 340.1 million of us in the country. All it takes is 0.00000029% of the population—that is, one person—to own one of those 500 million guns to change our world,” he argued.

Given the impossibility of"preventing every extremist or deranged person with a desire to kill from doing so," Corn proposes "adopting safety measures and restrictions on firearms, and providing more and better social services to those who need them." "We can also try to adjust the tone of our policy to counter or curb the factors that accelerate violence."

In short, to make Lincoln's famous"better angels" once again touch the "mystic chords of memory." Those angels are flying low these days in the United States.