Obama: Trump is manufacturing America’s worst-ever political crisis

 Donald Trump is pushing the US towards an unprecedented political crisis in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Barack Obama has suggested.

The former US president hit out at the administration’s rhetoric surrounding the killing while speaking in Pennsylvania on Tuesday.

He 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.”

Hours after Kirk’s death was announced, Mr Trump said in a televised statement that the “radical Left” was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we are seeing in the country today”.

The 31-year-old married father of two was shot in the throat with a single bullet while hosting a “prove me wrong” debate session at Utah Valley University last week.

Mr Obama suggested the US president had used the killing of the conservative influencer to push a political narrative, saying his failure to unite Americans across the public spectrum amounted to a “political crisis of the sort that we haven’t seen before”.

“What I’m describing is not a Democratic value or Republican value. It is an American value,” Mr Obama said. “And I think at moments like this, when tensions are high, then part of the job of the president is to pull people together.”

He contrasted Mr Trump to George W Bush, the former Republican president, and the two Republicans he defeated in presidential elections, John McCain and Mitt Romney, whom he said believed in bringing the country together.

Mr Obama also referenced Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine black people at a church in Charleston, North Carolina in 2015.

“As president of the United States, my response was not, who may have influenced this troubled young man to engage in that kind of violence? And now let me go after my political opponents and use that,” he said.

Mr Trump has said he wants the US to come together in the wake of the assassination, but blamed a “radical Left group of lunatics” for standing in the way of national unity.

Since the killing, the White House also announced a crackdown on “terrorist” Left-wing groups.

Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff, said on Monday that eradicating the apparent threat [from the left] was Kirk’s dying wish, pledging to “do what it takes”.

“The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven was he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical Left organisations in this country that are fomenting violence. That was the last message that he sent me … we are gonna do that,” he told Fox News.

Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old student, was charged with Kirk’s murder on Tuesday, with state prosecutors signalling they would seek the death penalty in his case.

Steve Bannon, a former top aide to Mr Trump, suggested the assassination was part of a broader political conspiracy.

“The biggest thing is to broaden the assassination investigation from a single murder to the broader conspiracy,” Bannon told Politico. “If we are going to go to war, let’s go to war.

Mr Bannon, a firebrand of the Maga movement, also cast doubt on the case built by prosecutors on his “War Room” podcast.

“You expect me to believe that?” he said of text messages allegedly exchanged between Mr Robinson and his transgender roommate. “I am absolutely not buying this.”

On Tuesday, FBI director Kash Patel did not rule out that Mr Robinson may have acted alongside an accomplice.

“There are a number of individuals that are currently being investigated and interrogated, and a number yet to be investigated and interrogated, specific to that chat room,” he told the Senate judiciary committee.