young man

As one way to keep tabs on President Trump’s state of mind, I’m on his email fundraising lists. Lately his 79-year-old mind has seemed to be on his mortality.

“I want to try and get to heaven” has been the subject line on roughly a half-dozen Trump emails since mid-August. Oddly, one arrived earlier this month on the same day that the commander in chief separately posted on social media a meme of himself as “Apocalypse Now” character Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, satisfyingly surveying the hellish conflagration that his helicopters had wreaked, not on Vietnam but on Chicago. “Chipocalypse” was Trump’s warning to the next U.S. city that he might militarize.

Mixed messages, to be sure.

The president hasn’t limited his celestial contemplations to online outlets. “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” he told the hosts of “Fox & Friends” in August, by way of explaining his (failed) effort to bring peace to Ukraine. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well.”

Well, Mr. President, here’s some advice: I don’t think you’ll get to heaven by wishing that many of your fellow citizens go to hell.

The disconnect between Trump’s dreams of eternal reward and his earthly avenging — against Democrat-run cities, political rivals, late-show hosts and other celebrity critics, universities, law firms, cultural institutions, TV networks and newspapers, liberal groups and donors, government employees, insufficiently loyal allies and even harmless protesters at a Washington restaurant — was rarely so evident as it was at the Christian revival that was Sunday’s memorial for the slain MAGA activist Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz.

Mere minutes after Erika Kirk, Kirk’s widow and successor as head of the conservative group Turning Point USA, had tearfully forgiven her husband’s accused killer, the president explicitly contradicted her with a message of hate toward his own enemies, and his continued determination to exact revenge.

Erika Kirk spoke of “Charlie’s mission” of engaging his critics and working “to save young men just like the one who took his life.” She recalled the crucified Christ absolving his executioners on Calvary, then emotionally added: “That young man. I forgive him.”

“I forgive him because it was what Christ did and what Charlie would do,” she said to applause. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer, we know from the Gospel, is love and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”

Then it was Trump’s turn.

Just one minute in, he called the 22-year-old suspect “a radicalized cold-blooded monster.” And throughout, despite investigators’ belief that the man acted alone, Trump reiterated for the umpteenth time since Kirk’s death that “radical left lunatics” — his phrase for Democrats — actually were responsible and that the Justice Department would round up those complicit for retribution.

Trump acknowledged that Charlie Kirk probably wouldn’t agree with his approach: “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them.” Then Teleprompter Trump went off script, reverting to real Trump and ad-libbing: “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.” He spat the word “hate” with venom. And he got applause, just as Erika Kirk had for a very different message.

Jesus counseled “turn the other cheek” to rebuke those who harm us. Trump boasts that he always punches back. “If someone screws you, screw them back 10 times harder,” he once said. Love your enemies, as Christ commanded in his Sermon on the Mount? Nah. You heard Trump in Arizona: “I hate my opponent.”

Trump might have some explaining to do when he seeks admittance at the pearly gates.

The Bible’s words aside, a president is supposed to be the comforter in chief after a tragedy and a uniter when divisions rend the American fabric. Think of President Clinton, whose oratory bridged partisan fissures after antigovernment domestic terrorists bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, and of President George W. Bush, who visited a mosque in Washington after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, in a healing gesture intended to blunt rising anti-Muslim reactions. (Later, of course, Bush would cleave the nation by invading Iraq based on a lie about its complicity.)

Trump, by contrast, is the inciter in chief. Just hours after Kirk’s death on Sept. 10, and before a suspect was in custody, he addressed the nation, blaming “radical left political violence.” He has repeated that indictment nearly every day since, though the FBI has reported for years — including during his first term — that domestic right-wing violence is the greater threat. “We have to beat the hell out of them,” Trump told reporters. When even one of his friends on “Fox & Friends” noted radicals are on the right as well, Trump replied: “I couldn’t care less. … The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible.”

All of this vituperation and vengeance suggests a big “what if”: What if Trump were more like Charlie Kirk? To ask is not to gloss over Kirk’s controversial utterances against Black Americans, gay and transgender Americans and others, but he did respectfully deal with those who disagreed with him — as he was doing when he was shot.

What if Trump, since 2016, had sincerely tried to broaden his political reach, as presidential nominees and presidents of each party historically did, to embrace his opponents and to compromise with them? What if he governed for all Americans and not just his MAGA voters? He might well have enacted bipartisan laws of the sort that Trump 1.0 promised on immigration, gun safety, infrastructure and more. In general we’d all be better off, less polarized.

And with a more magnanimous approach like that, Trump just might have a better chance at getting into heaven.

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Like many young men these days, Kamaldeep Dhanoa, a lanky 17-year-old, knew he wanted to do something with his life, be a part of something, but didn’t quite know what that meant.

Coming up with a career was important. But even more, it was finding the right friends — discovering what he wanted to be a part of.

He did both when he joined Improve Your Tomorrow, a mentorship organization for teenage boys and young men — that vulnerable, chronically online demographic from which Charlie Kirk drew many of his most ardent supporters, and where so much of our societal angst is focused in the wake of his death.

Now a senior at Florin High School in a suburb outside Sacramento, Dhanoa has a plan to become a paramedic, and more importantly, has those friendships that help him feel not just connected, but included and valued.

His something.

“I just know I have brothers around me,” he told me Tuesday. “We’re always with each other. It gives you, like, a sense of security. So if you’re feeling down, you could always, always rely on them.”

Dhanoa was hanging out in his school’s gym with Gov. Gavin Newsom, who dropped by to announce the California Men’s Service Challenge, an effort to recruit 10,000 Golden State males to serve as mentors to boys such as Dhanoa, so more boys can find their something.

It’s a worthy effort and before you jump to thinking it’s a reaction to Kirk, I’ll point out that 10 years ago, California’s first partner, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, made a documentary about the crisis of connection and identity facing young men, “The Mask You Live In.”

Recently, her husband caught up.

To be fair, a lot of us have been slow on the uptake when it comes to understanding why so many young men seem drawn to the obvious loneliness and disconnection of chronically online lives.

Kamaldeep Dhanoa, 17, and Michael Lynch helped Gov. Gavin Newsom announce his new statewide initiative to engage more men in volunteer and mentorship work.

(Anita Chabria/Los Angeles Times)

“Touch grass” has become a generation’s cultural shorthand to describe both the isolation and cure for people who seem so deep into a virtual world that the real one has lost meaning. It’s a dismissive way of looking at a problem that doesn’t begin and end with boys.

But, if we didn’t see it earlier, Kirk’s killing has made it clear that there are too many boys that need to be pulled back from the brink of a very bad something. One that is less about left or right and more about exactly who and what those boys stumble upon inside those ethereal spaces that most parents can’t even find, much less understand.

“We’ve got to get these kids back,” Newsom said. “They’re very susceptible young men. They’re very vulnerable online.”

Even more concerning, when the nihilism of the darkest corners of the internet catches up to their psyches, “young people weaponize those grievances,” Newsom said — whether that anger turns inward or outward.

Suicide among young men has increased. In 2023, the male suicide rate was about 23 deaths per 100,000 men, nearly four times higher than for women, a number that has been climbing for years (albeit with some slight dips). Sadly, women attempt suicide more often, but men have a higher rate of completion, often because they use more deadly means such as guns.

But lonely boys are also more prone to commit violence on others, maybe especially when they mix their anger with politics. Once recent study by social epidemiologist Julia Schleimer at the University of Washington School of Public Health found that individuals who reported having few social connections were, “more likely than others to support political violence or be personally willing to engage in it in one form or another.”

For reference, about 15% of men have no close friendships, according to a recent poll by the Survey Center on American Life. Newsom puts that figure even higher for young men, with “one in four men under 30 years old reporting that they have no close friends, a five-fold increase since 1990.”

Kirk stepped into that gap, providing meaning and belonging not just through his podcasts, where he was best known, but through the grassroots Turning Point USA organization that gave thousands of young people (of both sexes) both an ideology and, equally as important, real-world connections and events.

“Obviously Charlie Kirk was a master at not only the work he did online, but offline, and his capacity to organize and engage,” Newsom said.

Whether you agreed with Kirk’s views or not (and I did not agree on many points, including matters of race, sexual orientation, immigration or the meaning of patriotism), he created that something that is missing for so many young people. He created a vision of an America that needed to be saved, and could be saved, through a dedication to a certain kind of family and a certain kind of faith. As Newsom described it of his own effort, young people don’t just want a cause. They want to feel invested, they want to feel an “obligation to give back.”

If Newsom’s recent foray into Trump-esque social media proves anything, it’s that he’s willing to learn, even emulate, success — wherever he finds it. Newsom is trying to offer the belonging that Kirk supplied, seeped not in the exclusion and rigidity that Kirk embodied, but in California values.

“It’s about building an inclusive community of all different kinds of voices,” Michael Lynch told me of the California Challenge. He’s the co-founder and chief executive of Improve Your Tomorrow, the organization Dhanoa belongs to.

Lynch said kids get all kinds of benefits from mentors, but when he asks what those are, the sentence usually starts, “Now that I have friends…. “

The outcome of the effort to bring boys out of the virtual world is all about who those friends are, who pulls them out.

Our boys don’t just need to touch grass, they need to be around men who don’t seek to impose values, but teach them how to craft their own, how to believe in themselves before they believe in something someone is selling.

“What the world needs is your authenticity,” Newsom told a teenage journalist who covered the event for the school newspaper. “And so I just hope we take a deep breath and discover the most important, powerful thing in the world, and that’s who you are.”

If Newsom’s effort inspires just one good man to step up and help a kid figure that out — who they are, and how to believe in themselves first and forever — it will be something.