Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty Images News / Getty Images
"I hate my opponents," the president said, "and I don't want what's best for them."
And with that, some five hours of praise and tears took a hard turn from the divine to the profane.
I voted for Trump, all three times, and most days I agree with his policies, but there's a tone deafness to him, a hole in his cultural heritage, that sometimes rears an ugly and divisive head.
Like Sunday.
In a stadium ringing with praise music, where Charlie Kirk's pastor had invited people to accept Jesus as their Savior, where Marco Rubio explained the need for a Redeemer, where Ben Carson and JD Vance spoke of their personal belief in Jesus Christ, and where a grieving widow said that her Christian faith led her to forgive the man who had slain her husband, Donald Trump gave a stump speech.
About how the 2020 election was stolen from him, about how crooked Joe Biden was, about how unfair the media was to him, and about how he had a big announcement coming about autism.
And about how he hated his opponents.
I presume that would include the 75 million Americans who voted against him in the last election. And anybody else who has earned his ire along the way.
To say that you hate your opponents -- at a service dedicated to a Lord who commanded his followers to love their enemies -- is almost a desecration, it is an uncaring blindness to the faith shared by the large majority of the millions looking in on this fundamentally religious memorial service.
It is reminiscent of the time I asked Donald Trump his favorite Bible verse and he responded: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
That is, indeed, a Bible verse -- it's in Exodus Chapter 21 -- but it is a verse which was specifically denounced by Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount. It is known by most Christians for the fact that it's the way we're specifically told not to do things.
Certainly, nobody is obligated to have some specific faith, or any faith at all, and Trump isn't required to be conversant in Christian thinking or theology, but it's hard to be an American and never have come across these teachings.
And it's hard to be an American and not know that what the country needed at Charlie Kirk's memorial service was a president who brought people together, not pushed them apart.
While almost every speaker touched in one way or another on a Lord who offered love and salvation to all, who called his followers to brotherhood and unity, it was staggering to have the climax of the event be personality-based political division centering on the victimhood and grudges of Donald Trump.
What America needed was a reminder that we are one, that we can talk across partisan lines, that we have common cause and common humanity. That we should love one another, that we are Americans first. That's what a president should have said.
But that's not what this president said.
This president spoke of a world of us and them, of opponents, and his assurance that he hated his opponents. And that he did not want what's best for them.
And such is the imperial nature of this president that there is no one in his circle or in his administration who can tell him how out of synch he was, or to have warned him away from his impulses in the first place. And such is the moral construction of this president that his own conscience didn't warn him away either.
I voted for Donald Trump, all three times, and most days I agree with his policies. But sometimes he plays fast and loose with things that matter. And yesterday he failed to read the room. He failed to understand what was all around him.
Charlie Kirk was successful, distinctive and eventually martyred because he was a disciple of Jesus Christ. And everybody at that service understood that.
Except the president.
Donald Trump knew Charlie Kirk, but he apparently didn't listen to him.