TOM EATON | As they say, never let a good crisis go to waste: what’s next for Trump?

I’ll leave the obituaries of the American provocateur Charlie Kirk to those who admired him and those who saw him for what he was. The truly important part is what happens next.

Of course, we’re not supposed to focus on that. We’re supposed to get sucked in. You’ve probably seen it yourself on social media. Charlie Kirk was a brilliant young thinker who is now a martyr. Charlie Kirk was filth, who made money hawking hypocrisy and contempt to the most gullible people. And cue the arguments. Let the smoke billow. Let the both-sides-ism run wild.

A few facts, however, are undeniable. One is that a man who said, “I think it’s worth to have a cost of unfortunately some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the 2nd Amendment,” has now been killed by a person with a gun.

Another is that man who said: “If I see a Black pilot, I'm going to be like, 'Boy, I hope he's qualified’,” will be awarded the same Congressional Medal of Freedom given to, among others, Martin Luther King Jnr, John F Kennedy, Stephen Hawking and Desmond Tutu.

That’s really all there is to say about Kirk, and to linger too closely on his legacy puts one at risk of not seeing what an enormous moment this is for Donald Trump and his oligarch backers.

Russia’s dramatic intensification of missile attacks on Ukraine, and the incursion of Russian drones into Nato airspace in Poland, and what this means for Trump’s floundering efforts to broker a peace deal, have dropped completely off the radar.

Trump went on national television to mourn Kirk and ordered flags hung at half-mast – it goes without saying that neither honour was offered after Minnesota Democrat lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a right-wing extremist in June, But for all his sad and sombre remarks, the fact remains that Trump has been given an extraordinary political windfall by Kirk’s killer.

The immediate benefit is, of course, a dramatic easing of the mounting pressure he has been under as, in a single instant, the entire media machine in the US has forgotten the questions it was asking Trump and has instead rushed to Utah.

Today, nobody is talking about Trump’s friendship with paedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, or this week’s revelation that Trump lied about never having written a suggestive birthday message to Epstein.

Nobody is asking about the US’s involvement in Israel’s bombing of Qatar, or whether Trump ordered extrajudicial killings when the US military destroyed a speedboat allegedly running drugs and allegedly killed survivors in the water.

Russia’s dramatic intensification of missile attacks on Ukraine, and the incursion of Russian drones into Nato airspace in Poland, and what this means for Trump’s floundering efforts to broker a peace deal, have dropped completely off the radar.

Best of all for Trump, however, is that he has been handed his Reichstag Fire: a shocking, extremely public attack that he can use to ramp up his administration’s message that the US is under siege by homicidal leftist maniacs and, possibly, insist that now more than ever it needs to be saved by a leader who, though he does it with great reluctance, might have to suspend certain laws and rights to secure the homeland.

They say in politics you should never let a good crisis go to waste. The next few months will tell us just how well Trump understands that lesson.

For opinion and analysis consideration, email opinions@timeslive.co.za