President Donald Trump and the GOP are going all out to honor right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, after he was shot and killed throughout a Utah school occasion on Wednesday.
It is a marked distinction from how the appropriate behaved in June, when Trump supporter Vance Boelter assassinated former Minnesota Home Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and wounded Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman and his spouse.
On Thursday, Trump announced that he’s going to posthumously award Kirk with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and ordered flags to be flown half-staff in Kirk’s reminiscence. Notably, Trump did not do the same when Hortman was killed.
Trump additionally called former GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, who was on the occasion the place Kirk was killed, to see how he was doing. After all, Trump didn’t prolong the identical courtesy to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz after the assault on Hortman and Hoffman, saying that calling him could be a “waste of time” as a result of Walz “is so whacked out.”
And different Republicans are treating Kirk’s homicide considerably otherwise than they produce other shootings.
Home Speaker Mike Johnson requested a prayer on the Home flooring for Kirk—however not for the victims of a school shooting in Colorado that occurred that very same day. The prayer erupted right into a shouting match, with GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida blaming Democrats for Kirk’s homicide.
That is distinctly completely different from Luna’s response to the Minnesota assassination, when she provided no condolences and as an alternative blamed Walz for the murders.
“I advised you this was irresponsible Gov. Tim Walz. Rhetoric has penalties. It is best to have listened,” she said, referring to Walz’s plan to talk at a “No Kings” rally protesting Trump’s shredding of the Structure.
Luna can be circulating a letter searching for assist from her GOP colleagues to get a statue of Kirk positioned within the U.S. Capitol. The letter baselessly blames “the Left” for the capturing, though the shooter has nonetheless not been discovered nor recognized. She stated that the statue could be “a reminder that political disagreement mustn’t ever be answered with violence.”
And she or he appears to have some assist, with Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia—who’s notorious for his fetish for semiautomatic rifles—telling political reporter Reese Gorman {that a} Kirk statue is sensible as a result of “we now have a statue of MLK within the Capitol, don’t we?”
After all, evaluating Kirk—who spent his life spreading hate and racism—to civil rights chief Martin Luther King Jr. is past offensive.
It’s unclear whether or not Luna shall be profitable in getting her Kirk statue within the Capitol. But when she is, it’s actually greater than Republicans did for the officers who have been killed or injured defending the Capitol from the hordes of Trump-supporting insurrectionists on Jan, 6, 2021.
Congress passed a law mandating {that a} plaque be positioned within the Capitol to honor these officers, however Johnson has refused to hang it up.
