Donald Trump is a terrible leader his incendiary rhetoric is stirring up the entire nation when his job is to call for healing- God Bless Erika Kirk

Editorial echo published by the Baltimore Sun newspaper:

If the Charlie Kirk memorial last Sunday in Arizona was a test of faith — if all those in assembly wanted to demonstrate their support for the slain conservative activist, for his religious beliefs he held, for the causes he espoused and for his grieving family — then it was mission accomplished. 

HELLO❗With one notable exception❗ 💥When the final speaker took the podium to eulogize the 31-year-old head of Turning Point USA and father of two young children, the man so many before him had praised for his commitment to his family and his Christian faith, that individual was clear and unambiguous in his views on forgiveness and redemption and second chances.

He was having none of it.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first fill with hate.

“He did not hate his opponents,” Donald Trump said of Kirk. “He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. 🙄I’m sorry.”😕😠

Hate, as Captain Ahab discovered in Moby Dick, is ruinous. It metastasizes like cancer, reproducing itself at warp speed. And to hear Trump embrace it, even as thousands prayed, sang to Christian contemporary music and spoke of better days ahead at the combination religious service and political rally, was deeply disappointing. Not entirely surprising, but disappointing nonetheless.
What a contrast to Kirk’s widow. Erika Kirk 😢echoed Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, in expressing forgiveness, not hate, for her husband’s assassin. Tearful, sometimes shaking and looking upward as if to meet her late husband’s gaze from heaven, she spoke with the magnanimous spirit of Jesus in Luke 23:34, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

It was jarring, appalling and churlishly rude (add "sinful") that Trump would reject that spirit of the moment — and the will of the Kirks — in celebrating hate. So unabashedly. So myopically. 

So narcissistically. Trump fulminated at Charlie’s funeral. Given this remarkable opportunity to bind the nation’s wounds, as a certain president once sought to do, he instead spoke of hate.

Such hatred is unbefitting of anyone. It is especially unbefitting for a president who is supposed to be a role model for the country.

Do many of Trump’s opponents reciprocate his hate? Absolutely, but that is no excuse. President Abraham Lincoln was reviled unmercifully by many during the Civil War. Yet in his second inaugural address, the great man preached, “With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Hate engendered the climate that provoked Kirk’s assassin. Continuing down that path risks more of the same. 

Where is the adult in the living room who will tell Trump, “No,” even with the high risk of provoking retribution❓ No nation can survive without courage. It occupies the summit of virtues because it makes all others possible.

We strongly urge Donald Trump to retract his embrace of hate. His stated ambition is to surpass George Washington as the greatest U.S. president. He can start by following Washington’s admonition at the constitutional convention: “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest may repair.” Let us at least attempt to have a civil conversation about our disagreements — or at least not boast about our hatred for each other.

Baltimore Sun editorial writers offer opinions and analysis on news and issues relevant to readers.