The suspect is not the stuff of rabid MAGA dreams. Thank God for that

This cannot be what President Donald Trump had in mind.

Authorities made an arrest in connection with the heinous assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The suspect is Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old white, male Utah State University student, the son of registered Republican voters from the southwest of the state.

Robinson’s appearance — just a regular-looking white kid in college — could not be further from what the MAGA’s mind’s eye would have loved to see. At least superficially, he doesn’t fit the mold of their preferred villains.

In a decent time, this of course would not matter. We should all as Americans deplore Kirk's murder, without qualification. It’s a moment that could bring us all together in revulsion, across the great political divide.

But that’s not happening because Trump would never stand for that. As you probably know, Trump didn’t even wait for the existence of a suspect to blame it on fictional “lunatics on the Left.”

On Wednesday night, Trump delivered the most vile and unpresidential statement ever uttered at a moment of national grief.

Here’s the transcript of Trump’s most significant comments:

“It is long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.

For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful 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.

My administration will find each and every one who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials and every one who brings order to our country.

From the attack on my life in Butler, PA last year which killed a husband and father to the attacks on ICE agents to the vicious murder of a healthcare executive in the streets of New York to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”

I think we can let it speak for itself that Trump indignantly called out “demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.”

The same can be said for Trump’s choices for examples of political violence in America. And, more importantly, his omissions.

But the key point — and it’s undeniable — is that all Trump cares about going forward is to exploit the Kirk tragedy to fit his own ends.

Just imagine what Trump and his MAGA acolytes would have done to exploit the Kirk tragedy had Tyler Robinson turned out to be a trans person. Or an undocumented migrant. Or a Black person. Or a Muslim.

So anxious was MAGA world to distort the murder for its narrative that someone leaked to the Wall Street Journal — well before Robinson’s arrest — that inscriptions found on shell casings related to the shooting contained messages of “trans ideology.”

It was confirmed on Friday that was empirically false.

So yes, Trump must have been apoplectic to learn that Kirk’s suspected assassin was just some white guy who grew up in a Republican household in deep-red Utah.

In dramatic contrast, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, did himself proud in the news conference announcing Robinson’s arrest.

“We can return violence with violence, we can return hate with hate, and that’s the problem with political violence — is it metastasizes. Because we can always point the finger at the other side. And at some point, we have to find an off-ramp, or it’s 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. There is one person responsible for what happened here, and that person is now in custody and will be charged soon and will be held accountable. And yet, all of us have an opportunity right now to do something different.”

Those off-the-cuff words from Cox came straight from the heart. The Republican Party needs more leaders like Cox, and so does the nation.

There’s a better path forward if we choose it, Donald Trump and his hatred notwithstanding.