A Master Class in Rhetorical Interventions

ANGLO AMERICA, 8 Dec 2025

Oakley Thomas Hill - TRANSCEND Media Service

Utah Governor Spencer Cox Responds to Kirk Assassination

5 Dec 2025 – The days after a political assassination are critical. Victims require comfort, the people demand quick, competent action, and the threat of revenge killings looms large. It can be difficult for a leader to craft the right response to any killing, but it is especially difficult to respond to the death of a figure like Charlie Kirk, who was divisively loved and hated by many.

Immediately following Kirk’s death, U.S. political leaders stepped into a precarious situation. Unfortunately, those at the top used Kirk’s death to highlight the villainy of their opponents and advance their own political ambitions. President Trump presented a carefully crafted message listing several violent incidents in the U.S. carried out by the left, while failing to mention a single account of this year’s right-wing violence, such as the murder of Democratic state senator Melissa Hortman and her husband in June. Trump and Vice President Vance invoked Kirk’s name in their calls for a Republican victory in next year’s mid-term elections.

The heightened risk of revenge killings following an assassination is a feature of any intergroup conflict, whether the actors are U.S. political parties, Sri Lankan ethnic groups, or inner-city gangs. In his statement responding to Kirk’s death, Trump did the exact thing a leader should not do if they care about the lives of their fellow citizens—he expanded the circle of responsibility beyond the shooter to include many on the left.

For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful North Americans, like Charlie, to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.

This provided a strong justification for revenge killings at the precise moment they were most likely to occur. Had he not also promised to go after the left himself, we may have seen more than death threats forcing historically black universities to close temporarily.

While national leaders used Kirk’s death to advance their political agendas, Utah’s Governor Spencer Cox took an altogether different approach. Because the assassination took place in his state, Cox was thrown into the spotlight. The world was watching, and he did not disappoint. To exemplify how his response differed from those of national Republicans, consider the quotes below from his September 12 press conference:

I hear all the time that words are violence. Words are not violence; violence is violence. And there is one person responsible for what happened here, and that person is now in custody and will be…held accountable.

I was praying that if this happened here [in Utah] it wouldn’t be one of us…Sadly that prayer wasn’t answered…It did happen here, and it was one of us.

We can return violence with violence. We can return hate with hate…Because we can always point the finger at the other side. [But] at some point, we have to find an offramp or it is going to get much, much worse…History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country. But every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us.

Governor Cox’s remarks were a master class in responding to political violence. Where Trump expanded the circle of responsibility, Cox localized it. Where Trump ‘out-grouped’ the shooter as a “radical leftist”, Cox ‘in-grouped’ the shooter as “one of us.” Where Trump paved the rhetorical road for vengeance, Cox set up rhetorical barriers by appealing to our best selves. Localizing the circle of responsibility puts the blame exclusively on the abuser, mitigating the logic of revenge killings. Identifying Kirk’s killer as a member of the community facilitates moral reflection because it redirects blame from the ideological outsider to the community at large. In effect, Cox’s rhetorical strategy worked against the natural impulse to find blame in the outsider and justice in their harm while rationalizing moral reflection and communal cohesion.

Furthermore, Cox used his status as a Utah and Republican insider-partial to drive his message home. He used many of Kirk’s own words to justify peace and civility, and he utilized the Latter-day Saint leaders’ paternal style of preaching. He even integrated some of the more prominent themes of Latter-day Saint General Conferences like personal responsibility and the universal brother- and sisterhood of humankind. “Violence is tragic everywhere,” Cox said, “and every life taken is a child of God who deserves our love and respect and dignity.” In the moment of crisis, Cox used his platform to undermine the logic of reciprocal violence, and he associated his message with the sacred.

And yet, his words were not without political risks. In a state as deeply Republican as Utah, Governor Cox’s main vulnerability lies in primary elections; and that makes his resistance to right-wing animosity a risky move. States dominated by a single party can be a problem for peace for this very reason. If Cox wanted, he could villainize left-wing violence and celebrate right-wing violence, as Utah Senator Mike Lee demonstrated in June. Calls for peace and unity can even be a risk at the U.S. national level, as demonstrated by the 2024 Presidential Election. Bipartisan cooperation was a core theme of Vice President Kamala Harris’s losing strategy, while sectarian vengeance was a prominent feature of Trump’s winning strategy. “Unlike Donald Trump” She said, “I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table.” In the ‘yet to be United States,’ many citizens do not want to share a table with the other side, and the ones who do often fail to show up for primary elections. This suggests Cox’s rhetorical strategy may have been as politically risky as it was socially beneficial.

While the United States’ civil political culture seems long gone, the capacity to rebuild it depends partly on how its denizens collectively manage the present moment—and some moments matter more than others. Governor Cox met the moment, and he did so despite having electoral reasons to follow the lead of his fellow Republicans like Trump, Vance, and Lee. While Trump appealed to humanity’s vengeful impulses, Cox appealed to the better angels of our nature. While Trump risked North American lives for his political ambitions, Cox risked his ambitions for North American lives, and it seems to have paid off. For a brief moment, he made space for many in the U.S. to set aside their tribal loyalties and mourn together.

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Oakley Thomas Hill is a Ph.D. Candidate & Lecturer at Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution – Ohill@gmu.edu

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 8 Dec 2025.

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