The horror of Charlie Kirk’s assassination added a dangerous and unpredictable catalyst to America’s toxic political reality.

But it has not yet crystalized into hard policy responses by the Trump administration, leaving the country in limbo — on the brink of something potentially significant that is yet to be defined.

The graphic nature of Kirk’s killing, which could be witnessed by anyone with a cellphone, and the conservative activist’s youth, political power and proximity to President Donald Trump may enshrine it as a searing collective moment in modern US history.

Its potential to galvanize profound reactions is more potent because it took place in a nation racked by its most venomous divides in decades, where every political win or loss can seem existential, and under an administration that often shows a desire to wield almost unlimited power.

This is also an age when activists and partisan media figures on the left and the right have personal and financial incentives to stoke division and social media tools to magnify their extremism. This is a significant impediment for those political leaders who genuinely want to cool tempers. And no wonder lawmakers and opinion formers are reconsidering their exposure to the public following Kirk’s killing in a hunkering-down that could further constrain American democracy.

Trump has not chosen the traditional presidential route of invoking calm at perilous political moments. He’s ominously blaming his opponents collectively for a spate of worsening political violence that has spilled blood on both sides. “The problem is on the left. It’s not on the right,” he said Sunday.

But America does not look like a country that wants a civil war. Citizens walked their dogs, watched their kids’ soccer games, and gathered with their families over the weekend without waging political hate or turning on their neighbors. Some even bought one of the early Halloween pumpkins showing up in grocery stores.

Blanket media coverage of Kirk’s death and the resulting political tumult may be encapsulating the political stakes — but much of the country is going about its business and not giving the impression that it’s on a downward path to disaster.

It’s a mark of the toxicity of the moment that Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah, has seemed like a revelation with pleas for Americans to voice differences but not to hate one another over them.

“What I’m saying is, we actually should disagree. I think Charlie represented that better than anyone. Charlie said some very inflammatory things. And in some corners of the web, that’s all people have heard,” Cox told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” on Sunday.

“But he also said some other things about forgiveness. He said some amazing things about, when things get dark, putting down our phones, reading Scripture, going to church, talking to our neighbors.” Cox added: “What I appreciate most about Charlie Kirk, (he) said, ‘If we don’t keep talking, that’s when the violence starts.’”

One fear is that the assassination of Kirk, who took Trump’s MAGA movement to a younger generation of voters, will provoke more violence or reprisals against other political leaders, or will stifle open public debate.

One early consequence has been a campaign by some prominent Trump supporters to expose people who allegedly celebrated or justified his killing on social media, and an attempt to get them fired from their jobs in academia, transportation, education or other sectors. Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, warned on X that mocking or celebrating the assassination was unacceptable in the ranks. “Zero tolerance means zero tolerance,” he wrote.

And Trump’s top White House policy adviser, Stephen Miller, wrote a chilling message on X in which he claimed there’d been a “vast, organized ecosystem of indoctrination” by the left targeting citizens.

Everyone is watching how Trump and his administration respond to see whether the president will build on his blame for the so-called radical left by moving against specific organizations or political figures. This is an administration that never worried about crossing constitutional barriers with its questionable national emergencies that have unlocked vast powers. And Trump has turned the Justice Department into an engine for his own political grievances.

Anger among conservatives over Kirk’s killing could be channeled into more intensity for Trump’s existing policy goals, like his crackdown on crime in Democratic cities, his push for mid-cycle redistricting to try to stave off GOP losses in the midterm elections, and a federal funding confrontation with Democrats that could shut down the government at the end of the month.

Trump’s second term has shown that he’s always looking to use events as a justification to seize more power. Some of his aides and Cabinet members sound like they believe a turning point has been reached.

“It feels like a grief has settled on not just the country, but the entire world. Something has changed,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.”

Noem called for unity. But she added, “Some of the rhetoric we’re seeing out of the left and out of political animals is ugly and it’s bitter and it’s seeking to seize this opportunity to turn it into evil.”

Democrat Pete Buttigieg warned, meanwhile, that there should be no attempt to use Kirk’s death for a power grab. “In order to deprive political violence of its power, we have to reject anyone who would try to exploit political violence,” the former transportation secretary said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“The response to this cannot be for the government to crack down on individuals or groups not because of violence but because they challenge the government politically,” Buttigieg said.

As fallout mounted from Kirk’s death, authorities in Utah probed the motives of the alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson. Cox told CNN that investigators were examining whether the suspect’s romantic relationship with a partner transitioning from male to female was a factor. Robinson is expected to appear in court on Tuesday.

Trump will travel to the United Kingdom this week for a state visit, but he’s expected next weekend to attend a memorial service for Kirk in Arizona — an event that could galvanize more political reaction to the MAGA hero’s death.

Kirk’s murder is the latest troubling outburst in a period of political violence, which has included the assassinations of a Minnesota Democratic state lawmaker and her husband; an alleged arson attack on the home of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro; and two attempts to kill Trump last year.

But in public remarks following Kirk’s death, the president highlighted only attacks on Republicans. He and his supporters view Kirk’s assassination as distinct. This may not reflect the facts, but it could shape Trump’s response.

“I see this as an attack on a political movement. I see this being different,” GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said on NBC. “Charlie Kirk is one of the top three people in the country that allowed President Trump to win in 2024 by his efforts. And I think President Trump sees this as an attack on his political movement, what he created. A year ago, people tried to blow his head off.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson has been an important voice in calling for calm. The Louisiana Republican said on Fox News on Sunday, “The key is to remember that you can disagree with someone vehemently on policy and not hate them as a person.”

“You know, people have got to stop framing simple policy disagreements in terms of existential threats to our democracy and all these phrases you hear all the time,” Johnson said. “You can’t call the other side fascists and enemies of the state and not understand that there are some deranged people in our society who will take that as cues to act and do crazy and dangerous things.”

Johnson’s comments might have been intended to heal. But they pointed to a major issue driving division. Many Democrats believe the House speaker and other GOP leaders construe any condemnation of Trump and his antics — which have often challenged the law — as unacceptable extremism.

And the president has a long record of his own political extremism. Some of the most vicious political speech in recent years has come from Trump and his social media accounts. A week ago, the president circulated a meme that suggested he was about to wage war on Chicago. Trump has often called Democrats “evil” or guilty of treason.

At the same time, Johnson may have a point that Democrats have often reacted to Trump’s outlandish actions by flinging disproportionate labels. Many have described him as a “fascist.” There’s a lucrative left-wing media industry that endlessly portrays the United States as a totalitarian state already.

And while Trump has autocratic tendencies and Johnson’s GOP-controlled House has abdicated much of its power to the executive, claims that Americans are living in a dictatorship are ahistorical. They ignore functioning checks and balances like the courts and fail to honor people suffering under real tyrannies abroad.

That said, Trump did refuse to accept the result of a democratic election that he lost in 2020. He incited a crowd to trash the will of voters before the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and pardoned hundreds when he took office again four years later. Saying that Trump has been an existential threat to democracy in the past is less an act of incitement than a statement of fact.

The president, who claims he has the power to do anything he wants, has purged independent experts from the government; is seeking to destroy the independence of the central bank and the Justice Department; and has opened investigations into some of his political opponents.

Once again, after a national tragedy, there’s a focus on the corrosive influence of social media.

There are indications that Kirk’s alleged killer may have frequented a dark online world. Social media firms, meanwhile, harvest polarization and monetize it, spreading hate and herding ultra-partisans together. Its owners sometimes use their own tools for political ends.

“The left is the party of murder,” X boss Elon Musk said in an online video to a far-right immigration protest Saturday, in which he also agitated for “revolutionary” change in Britain — days before the arrival of Trump. The two are personally estranged but still share a similar populist ideology.

Cox accused social media firms of “hijacking our free will with these dopamine hits, same chemical reaction as fentanyl, getting us addicted to these platforms. And outrage releases a dopamine hit, for sure. And they are taking no responsibility for this.”

The reactions of some social media users to Kirk’s death — whether by celebrating or by calling for vengeance — showed how many people have been radicalized by the dark political times and have found fellow travelers online.

“Every one of us has to look in the mirror and decide: Are we going to try to make it better or are we going to make it worse?” Cox told CNN.