Politics / Trump Has Destroyed Any Hope of National Healing Charlie Kirk’s assassination is a pretext for a concerted attack on Trump’s enemies. (Francis Chung / Politico / Bloomberg via Getty Images)The phrase “national healing” is always more aspirational than real in the United States, a nation whose blood-stained history of ethnic genocide, racist pogroms, and assassinations gives the lie to any pious words of comity. In the wake of last week’s killing of Charlie Kirk, President Trump is currently being asked to take up the “healer in chief” role. News carried the headline, “Trump Hopes for National Healing After Charlie Kirk Shooting.” This headline suggested Trump was adopting the reassuring voice used by predecessors such as Lincoln and Obama. Asked by NBC News about national healing in an interview released Sunday, Trump responded, “I’d like to see it [the nation] heal,” the president said in a brief telephone interview.