When Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University in September, Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., recalled when an assassination attempt was made on his wife, former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, in 2011.
On this episode of Deseret Voices, journalist McKay Coppins asks Kelly about the health of our democracy amid this increasing trend of political violence. On Wednesday, Kelly held a bipartisan discussion with Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, at Utah Valley University, where the assassination of Kirk occurred in September.
Kelly explains how he sees members of the opposition party and how we can turn down the temperature as a country.
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Voiced intro:
Mark Kelly: “You need to be responsible for what you say because those words, some people act because of them.”
McKay Coppins: Standing side by side at the site of a political assassination that rocked the country, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly and Republican Sen. John Curtis took turns talking about the need for unity, healing, and a deescalation of political tensions in America.
But at a moment when political violence appears to be surging, that’s easier said than done.
John Curtis: “One of the problems is, the American people have to stop rewarding that kind of behavior.”
Welcome to Deseret Voices. I’m McKay Coppins.
On this episode, I’m joined by Mark Kelly, the senior senator from Arizona, for a conversation about political violence. Sen. Kelly brings uniquely personal insights to the subject. His wife, former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was nearly killed in an assassination attempt in 2011.
We explore what’s driving the increase in violence, a few simple things elected officials could do to turn down the temperature, and his take as a Navy veteran and member of the armed services committee, on how recent military actions are widening the divide in the U.S.
Note: Transcript edited by Steven Watkins
Transcript:
McKay Coppins: Sen. Kelly, thank you for coming on Deseret Voices.
Mark Kelly: Good to be on, McKay.
McKay Coppins: We are speaking the day before you are scheduled to hold an event with Republican Sen. John Curtis of Utah at Utah Valley University, which is, of course, where Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September. I wanted to start this conversation by asking you what was going through your mind when you first heard that Charlie Kirk had been shot?
Because obviously your wife, former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was the victim of an assassination attempt. You are more acquainted than most with the realities of political violence.
Mark Kelly: Much like what happened with my wife, Gabby. You know, my initial reaction was that, well, I imagine he’ll probably be OK. My initial reaction to her shooting in 2011 when her chief of staff called me and just very simply said, “Hey, I don’t know how to tell you this, but Gabby’s been shot.” I was like, well, she’s probably being shot in the arm. And then she told me that she’d been shot in the head. And, at that point, I realized that both of our lives have been, you know, changed forever. That day came, just kind of rushing back to me when one of my staff members showed me the video. At first, she says, “I don’t know if I should show you this because it doesn’t look real.” And then when I saw that video, my initial reaction was, well, if it is real, he’s not going to survive. That moment is when I just immediately thought back to what happened with Gabby. And, it’s just one more time in our country’s history. One of these things. I think there are other things, but just makes us stand out in the worst of ways.
McKay Coppins: To me, as somebody who has just been covering politics for a long time, it felt like a kind of blinking red warning light for the kind of health of our democracy, right? It feels like we are, and I think actually, statistics do bear this out in a moment where political violence is increasing. I’m curious what you think is driving it. Why are we in this moment where people seem to feel like the answer to our political problems and disagreements and dysfunction is to take up arms and try to murder people?
Mark Kelly: Well, I think, people are feeling desperate in a lot of different ways. It might be social change. It might be economic inequality. The wealthier folks in our country just keep getting richer. And then overlaid on top of that is social media and the ability to put a message out into the world in a rather anonymous way, where you can say things to a large, very large group of people that you would never say to them publicly, like if you were standing in front of them. And it just further takes us down a road where we become more divided. And I think people think this is them against us. And we’re somehow, marching towards, you know, some kind of civil war. I don’t believe that. I think we’ve got to figure out ways to turn down the temperature here. It’s up to us, people like myself and others, in leadership positions to help the country move forward. I think it’s also fair to say that we have a president who looks for every opportunity to divide us. He’s got the exact opposite instinct of every other president we’ve had in my lifetime. And I think it’s probably fair to say every other president this country has ever had. I mean, can anybody think of one time that when something major has happened in our country that Donald Trump became the unifier? I can’t.
McKay Coppins: I do feel like there’s kind of a frog in the boiling water thing going on with our political culture, where we’re now like a decade into the Trump era. And I think a lot of us have become desensitized.
Mark Kelly: Well, think about the young people that are starting to vote. And really, basically all they ever remember as presidents is Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
McKay Coppins: Yeah, no, of course, and people don’t remember a period before we had national leaders who were constantly dehumanizing those that they disagreed with. Vilifying them in every way imaginable. Not to say that there was some kind of perfect utopian period of politics where everybody was nice to each other, but it does feel like even in my adulthood, I’ve seen this kind of pretty dramatic shift in our political culture, and I think a lot of people have gotten used to it. And kind of stopped realizing how different things are now than they were about that long.
Mark Kelly: I think saying dramatic shift is an understatement. I mean, it is like the continents, you know, moving here. Think about this for a second. At a memorial service for Charlie Kirk, Erica Kirk says she forgives the shooter. And Donald Trump follows that up with I hate my political enemies.
McKay Coppins: I want to return to President Trump in a second. But before we move off this point, I’m curious from your vantage point on Capitol Hill, talking to your colleagues, talking to other elected officials, not just in the Senate, but around the country. To what extent are they afraid of political violence targeting them? I have spoken to people who are in high elected office who don’t want to say this publicly, but will acknowledge privately or anonymously, you know, that they are now thinking much more than they ever thought they would have to think about their personal safety, the safety of their families that they are walking around with this kind of knowledge that somebody could try to kill them at any given moment, which I think was not the case 20, 30 years ago. But I’m curious if you are seeing that same thing.
Mark Kelly: Yeah, we talk about it. And the death threats to members of Congress are up dramatically from what I’ve learned, being the spouse of Gabby. And after she was shot, just my discussions with the Secret Service and the FBI, you learn that there’s not a lot you can do, and it’s usually not the person that makes a threat. We always focus on these people who make the threat. You know, Charlie Kirk’s shooter didn’t threaten him. My wife, Gabby’s shooter, never threatened her. So folks are really, really concerned about it. We’re trying to do some things to make us a little bit safer.
McKay Coppins: But this is a situation where when you think about what would actually have to change, from, like, a logistical and security standpoint to really ensure everybody’s safety. It’s not really a scenario anybody should should want, right? Like, Charlie Kirk was killed on a college campus debating political ideas with other students. You don’t really want a situation where events like that are heavily guarded, and you have to go through metal detectors to get to a political discussion on a college campus. Same with Capitol Hill. I mean, I think a lot of people who come to Washington for the first time are actually surprised by how accessible their congressmen and senators are, right? You can you go through a metal detector to get into the office buildings, but then you can just walk right up to an office. And I actually think that’s a beautiful thing about American democracy. But if we don’t want to forfeit that because we can’t figure out how to keep people with guns or, you know, people who want to harm elected officials away from them, right?
Mark Kelly: We don’t need to live in that kind of world, and we don’t want to discourage people from serving in elected office because they’re afraid of being harmed. That’s not a good environment. I would say that in my view, the No. 1 thing that could happen right now to reduce the amount and the threat of political violence would be for the president to say, hey, we’re all Americans. We are all in this together. We’ve got differences of opinion. But, you know, Democrats are not my enemy, and the Republicans are not the enemy of the Democrats. You know, that is definitely true here on Capitol Hill, where I’ve got great relationships with my Republican colleagues. We don’t agree on everything. And we often have to like now, verbally fight it out on the floor over policy. But to have somebody who is leading this country to, you know, focus on that as a mission to bring us together and unite us and talk about, you know, values and what has created this great cohesive country. That would be huge. Now, I don’t hold my breath, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.
McKay Coppins: Well, so President Trump might not say that. And I think given the evidence we have and the record we have, it’s probably unlikely. But it does seem like the case that most elected officials in both parties, the vast majority, really do want to figure out how to solve this problem for the sake of the country and, if nothing else, for their own personal safety, right? This is where your event at UVU comes in. You and Sen. Curtis disagree on a lot, right? You belong to different parties. You decided to hold this event together. Talk a little about what you hope to accomplish with this event and why you’re doing it.
Mark Kelly: I’m a Democrat. He’s a Republican, and we have differences of opinion. And sometimes, you know, those differences could be pretty significant on policy. But we’re friends and I enjoy serving with him. The relationships between senators are not what people think they are. Let me give you an example. As somebody who’s a pretty sophisticated person who I was talking to about, you know, Washington, who is engaged very politically, who said to me, “Hey, do you ever see Ted Cruz when you’re in D.C.?” And I said, “Yeah, I see him basically every week”. And then she said, “Do you ever talk to Ted Cruz? You don’t talk to him, do you?” And I said, “Yeah, I pretty much talk to him, like maybe not every day, but every week. I’m like, I’m friends with Ted Cruz.” And they found this almost unbelievable. That a Democrat in the United States Senate could be friendly with a Republican colleague. And I’ve told Ted Cruz this story. And I’m like, “Ted, we got to figure out a way to, you know, not him specifically, but just in general, to show that we work together.” We can disagree, but we do get along and we have respectful relationships. I mean, across the board, I mean, I’m talking about all 100 of us. Now, you might have specific people you’re not like, you know, besties with, right? But we have strong relationships. And I think if the American people saw that a little bit more and understood that, I think that would also have a rather positive effect. Coming back to John and I doing this at UVU. You know, that’s part of the goal here.
McKay Coppins: No, I mean, I just think that conversation you just described is emblematic of why the political incentives flow the other way, right? Like there are not as many political incentives to senators, showing their constituents, especially the constituents in their base, their political base, that they are friendly with, quote unquote, the enemy, right? People would be astonished by it. Also, probably some people would be offended by it.
Mark Kelly: Yeah. Well, because people view them as the enemy, but I don’t.
McKay Coppins: Yeah, right.
Mark Kelly: You know, they’re opposition, you know.
McKay Coppins: And this is what, what has to change. We have to start thinking about people who disagree with us even in very profound ways about very important issues as the political opposition, not political enemies. How do you fix this? I mean, how do you show Americans that as high stakes as these issues are, they are not existential. They don’t have to permanently divide us, and they certainly don’t have to lead to civil war.
Mark Kelly: Yeah. How do you show them? Not many people watch C-SPAN, so they’re not focused in on the floor of the United States Senate at 10 o’clock at night on a Friday, right? When we might be.
McKay Coppins: I mean, I am, but I understand that’s not normal.
Mark Kelly: Yeah, not many. It’s tens, tens of people are watching C-SPAN 2, the floor of the U.S. Senate. So how do we do it? We do events like this, and we go on TV together. I’ve done that, you know, a number of times with my Republican colleagues. We try to say nice things about them and we try to be respectful. And you can you can disagree. We’re going to win some political fights and we’re going to lose some, but you don’t have to go after people’s character and you don’t have to refer to them as, you know, enemies and call them awful names. Because people see that and they model that behavior.
McKay Coppins: The thing that always frightens me about political violence, aside from the obvious, is that everyone who studies this issue will tell you that political violence begets more political violence, right? You know, there’s that famous quote from Martin Luther King: “Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars,” right? I’ve been thinking about that a lot in recent months because we’ve been talking about political violence of a certain kind. But we are also in a moment where the imagery of violence, the threat of violence kind of looms in our politics. And just one example I’ll give is, you know, President Trump earlier this year pretty controversially began deploying troops to American cities to impose public order, to crack down on crime, he says. We have also seen ICE raids targeting undocumented immigrants, various confrontations, often violent, have gone viral on social media. What do you make of this moment and how President Trump is using troops, the National Guard, to address these domestic issues like crime?
Mark Kelly: Well, I’d say it’s not helpful. I get it, I’m the son of two cops. We want safe communities. We want safe streets. But to use the United States Army and the National Guard, you know, in this role just sends a message about the purpose of the military. In Donald Trump’s first term, he asked if the National Guard could shoot people that were protesting. Just can we just shoot them in the legs? People remember that. And now they see these troops deployed in their communities, whether it’s here in Washington or Chicago or Los Angeles. And they are wondering, what’s next? I always question, what’s his motivation? I mean, is it really about crime in safer communities? Or is he trying to send a message that he has this political tool that he is willing to use against the American people?
McKay Coppins: Do you think that there’s been a lot made of this idea that there has been less activism, fewer protests, fewer demonstrations in the street in Trump’s second term compared to his first term. Are you saying that you think that the presence of the National Guard and the kind of imagery that’s been invoked is part of the reason there haven’t been as many anti-Trump demonstrations in the second term?
Mark Kelly: Well, I haven’t seen that statistic. So I’ll take your word for it that that is accurate. Yeah, I think it could be. Or maybe folks are just exhausted and just are starting to check out. And that’s probably the worst thing that could happen. So people to check out politically and say, hey, I’m just tired of all this. Our political world we’re living in, it’s just tiring people out. And my worry is they check out and then maybe they don’t vote, they don’t get involved. They’re afraid to go to a peaceful protest because they’re afraid it’s going to turn into something else. So I am concerned about the chilling effect that these deployments will have on the American people.
McKay Coppins: There are some who believe Democrats allowed for too much public disorder and crime to spread. Setting aside questions about enforcement of the border, etc., and that, as a result, political space was created for Trump to come in and be the strongman. What do you think of that line of criticism? Do you think there’s any validity to that?
Mark Kelly: Yeah, I think that’s fair. I mean, people don’t like crime. My wife was the subject of a horrendous crime, and they shouldn’t have to tolerate it. And I can tell you, it’s not helping law enforcement to have the president instructing ICE agents, which is also law enforcement, to be chasing people down because of the color of their skin and have them out on the streets masked so nobody knows who they are, not showing I.D. and not any idea who these people are. I mean, what are folks in the community supposed to do when a guy with no identification and a mask comes to, like, chase them down? I mean, what would anybody do? So that’s not giving the American people tremendous confidence in police in general.
McKay Coppins: I actually had a colleague at The Atlantic who just wrote a piece about this question of ICE agents wearing masks. And his reporting suggested that they know it’s a bad look. They know that it reduces public trust, and they’re continuing to wear it for a variety of reasons. But one of them is that they fear for their own safety. All of these interactions are being recorded by people with phones. They’re worried that if an interaction that looks bad goes viral, that they could receive their own death threats. What do you say to ICE agents who say, “Look, I have to worry about my own safety as I’m carrying out the orders that I’ve been given.”
Mark Kelly: Don’t have bad interactions with people. Do the job in a respectful way and follow the law. By the way, you don’t have to follow unlawful orders. That’s true for the military. I think it’s true for federal law enforcement too. Nobody can tell you to break the law. You can’t be told to violate people’s constitutional rights. People have to stand up and say, no, I’m not going to do that.
McKay Coppins: Would you like to see more of that among ICE agents?
Mark Kelly: Yeah. Of course I would. I’d like to see them wearing an ID, not wearing masks and telling Stephen Miller, or Kristi Noem that we will follow the law and there are limits to what we will do. And we’re not violating people’s constitutional rights. I mean, there’s evidence that there were deported American citizens, and they’re breaking up communities. It benefits our country in no way. You know, tearing communities apart, taking parents away from their children. I mean, I’ve got two folks that I visited in an ICE facility in Florence, basically ICE jail. You know, one of them, her name’s Kelly Yu. She came to the United States from China 20 years ago. Today, her mother’s a U.S. citizen. Her daughter’s a U.S. citizen. Her sister’s a U.S. citizen. Her husband’s a U.S. citizen. She’s the only one who is not. She’s been here 20 years. She has two or three businesses. She has 70 employees. She has added to our economy, added to that community in such a positive way. She’s not only putting food on her family’s table. She’s putting food on other people’s table. She’s no threat to society at all. She’s been sitting in a jail in Florence, Arizona, for months. Now she has a deportation order. They’re going to kick her out of the country and send her back to China. For what? Doesn’t make us a better country. And here’s the sad thing about this. Got Republican colleagues that feel mostly the same as I do about this issue, many of them, they don’t think we should be deporting 10 or 20 million people. They know that that does not benefit us as a nation. Sure, we need strong border security. We should be kicking out criminals and gang members and drug dealers — 100% we should be kicking them out. But didn’t Donald Trump run on that? I guess it’s fair to say he also said the mass deportation thing. I don’t think anybody believed him.
McKay Coppins: Well, I think that one of the reasons, frankly, for the reported frustration that President Trump and some of his more hawkish advisers have been feeling, is that they envisioned millions and millions of deportations, right? But, the way he talked about it, to your point, was always, that he would target violent criminals, dangerous undocumented immigrants.
And the reality is —
Mark Kelly: There aren’t millions of them.
McKay Coppins: There just aren’t millions of them. And I think that anybody who has spent time in immigrant communities, I served a Latter-day Saint mission in Texas among Spanish speaking immigrants. Can tell you that while, of course, there are some bad apples, the vast majority are like people you just described.
Mark Kelly: Yeah.
McKay Coppins: This, though, again, and I’m going to press you on this a little bit, is an issue where one could argue that Democratic policy failures opened the door to the mass deportations and the ICE raids, because it just is the case that, the southern border, by most objective measurements, got fairly out of control during —
Mark Kelly: You don’t have to push me on this. I agree with you. And Joe Biden’s policy at the border was not working. It was a crisis. I said that from the first time I got elected and worked really hard with this and pushed back against the administration and the White House multiple times. You got to do more. Need more Border Patrol agents. By the way, we need to close some of these gaps in border wall. I mean, I’m probably the only Democrat that was able to get the White House to build some more border wall.
McKay Coppins: Can I ask you about that, though? Because when you said you were pushing the Biden administration, I know you were. I mean, it’s a matter of record that you disagreed with President Biden’s policy. What would you hear in response when you were talking to people in the Biden White House, when you were talking to the people advocating for or defending the Biden immigration, the border policy? I mean, what would they say to you when you said, we need to to take care of this? It’s getting out of hand.
Mark Kelly: Well, you would hear a lot of yeah, we’re working on it. We’re doing more. You know, thanks for calling. Yeah, we’ll look into that. But I would say as you know, weak, that the southern border policy that the previous president had, I would say that what this president is doing internally in our country is just awful, and uncalled for, and not helpful.
McKay Coppins: I want to ask you about one more recent development in the news that I think you’ll have a unique perspective on. It was just reported that the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, has arrived, in waters near Latin America. Thousands of U.S. troops are now closer to Venezuela. Most likely escalating the conflict between Venezuela and the U.S. Trump administration obviously has targeted multiple boats that he says are drug boats, ordered military strikes on them. As a Navy veteran yourself, what do you think of this policy that’s, you know, connects to this idea that Trump being the strongman, telling American voters that he’s going to crack down on these issues, that have wide support, but in ways that are more provocative and controversial than past presidents. What do you make of what he’s doing? Is it right? And what should change from your perspective, if anything?
Mark Kelly: Well, I mean, just go back to January and was war with Venezuela on anybody’s bingo card for this administration? Not mine. I mean, I did not see this coming. I mean, actually, kinetic strikes into Venezuela, which is what he’s talking about now. Hey, nobody likes, nobody wants drug dealers. Nobody wants drugs coming into our country, whether it’s fentanyl or cocaine or whatever it is. But is this the way to do it? And this, to me, is a law enforcement action. And I really worry about these young military pilots. MQ-9 drone operators that it might be determined sometime later that what they were doing was not lawful. See what happened with the United Kingdom said? That they are no longer going to share all their intelligence with us. The Five Eyes countries, right? U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand. We share everything across all of our intelligence agencies with theirs. This is a policy change from the U.K. at the highest level. And this is specifically because of the strikes against the Venezuelan boats. When you have one of our closest allies taking that kind of action against us because of what we’re doing and, their words, not mine, that this might be against international law. We have a problem. He at times, you know, gets extra aggressive. And it’s to our detriment. And sticking the Ford battlegroup out there? Now I’m going to be really concerned when you see the Marine Expeditionary Force show up. That’s when we really got to start to be concerned. By the way, fentanyl, most of it comes through on the Pacific. Now they’ve done some strikes.
McKay Coppins: It doesn’t come from Venezuela.
Mark Kelly: But it actually comes through the border. You know, the land border. That’s where the focus should be. If you want to bring down the amount of fentanyl into the United States.
McKay Coppins: Legal ports of entry is actually where we’re seeing a lot of the fentanyl smuggled into the U.S.
Mark Kelly: I have seen it. I represent a border state. I spent a lot of time down there. We put in legislation, the ability for them to get more technology at the southern border to combat that fentanyl smuggling and other tools to prevent fentanyl from coming into the United States. President could do a lot more on that front.
McKay Coppins: I want to bring this conversation back to where we started as we wrap up here. You talked at the beginning about the need for us to turn down the temperature as a country. To pull back from the brink, de-escalate. But at the same time, you’re not pulling your punches, right? When you talk about President Trump, you’re very critical of his policies. You’re very critical of him. I’m wondering if you can talk about how you reconcile the desire to de-escalate the tension in our political culture with what you seem to believe is a need to also be very clear-eyed and direct about the points of disagreement. Are there kind of principles that you follow in talking about these issues, where you feel like you can be constructive and still support a healthy democratic culture without biting your tongue and hiding your opinions? Because I bet a lot of people listening to our conversation will have that same thought that like, yeah, it sounds nice for us to all get along, but we disagree really profoundly about really important things. And I don’t want to just shut up about it.
Mark Kelly: Yeah. Well, here’s the thing, though. You probably also notice that I never called the president a name, right? I never said he was my enemy. I want to work with the president on anything that helps this country, you know, do better. We are so fortunate to live in the greatest country that this planet has ever seen. We’re generous. We’re innovative. We’re welcoming. We don’t always get it right. And I think this president largely gets most of it wrong. Not everything, but a lot of it. But I don’t consider him my enemy at all. I consider him, you know, he’s a member of the opposition party. I think he makes bad decisions, but he called, you know, he called us all dogs the other day. And I would never say anything like that about him.
McKay Coppins: Well, Sen. Kelly, thank you for making the time. Thank you for coming on Deseret Voices and I hope we can talk again soon.
Mark Kelly: Look forward to it.