Former US President Barack Obama has warned that Charlie Kirk’s assassination could spark a “political crisis of the sort that we haven’t seen before”.
Kirk, a conservative activist, was fatally shot on September 10 while speaking at Utah Valley University.
Speaking at an event in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, Obama admitted he did not know Kirk and disagreed with many of his views but described his killing as “horrific and a tragedy”.
“He’s a young man with two small children and a wife who obviously – and a huge number of friends and supporters who cared about him. And so, we have to extend grace to people during their period of mourning and shock,” the former president added.
He said President Donald Trump had further divided the country rather than worked to bring people together.
“There are no ifs, ands or buts about it: the central premise of our democratic system is that we have to be able to disagree and have sometimes really contentious debates without resorting to violence,” Obama said.
“When I hear not just our current president, but his aides, who have a history of calling political opponents ‘vermin,’ enemies who need to be ‘targeted,’ that speaks to a broader problem that we have right now and something that we’re going to have to grapple with, all of us.”
Kirk became a confidant of Trump after founding Turning Point USA, one of the nation’s largest political organisations.
Trump has escalated threats to crack down on what he described as the “radical left” following Kirk’s killing.
The White House responded to Obama’s remarks by blaming him for animosity in the country, calling him “the architect of modern political division in America”.
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