Pennsylvania Democrat Gov. Josh Shapiro and Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox headlined an event last night at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. “We – a Republican and a Democrat, a Mormon, a Jew – we need you now more than ever,” Cox said. “This country, if we’re going to make it another 250 years – if we’re going to make it another 2.5 years, we – we desperately need you tonight to lay down your swords and to treat each other with dignity and respect again.” We need to begin by saying that all leaders must condemn all political violence, not cherry pick which violence to condemn and which violence to accept, Shapiro said. When you’re a governor, when you’re a president of the United States, you are looked to for that moral clarity, and we have a president of the United States right now that fails that test on a daily basis… Leaders have a responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity and call it out wherever they see it, exactly the way Spencer Cox does. I just need to tell you when that very dark day happened in my state, the first call I got was from this guy, from Gov. Shapiro, and he gave me some advice that changed what I was going to say when I stepped in front of that camera for the first time, Cox said about the shooting of Charlie Kirk. He told me to speak with moral clarity and to speak from the heart. … I don’t care what color his politics are, in that moment we were two Americans who were deeply saddened and struggling, and I’m grateful that there’s somebody I can trust, even though we disagree on a lot of things.” “I never looked to myself to being any sort of expert on political violence or, frankly, needing to engage in a national conversation about political violence, until I saw Spencer Cox, in the wake of the killing of Charlie Kirk, handle that matter in the way that he did,” Shapiro said Tuesday. “I saw him lift up not just Utahns but create an opportunity for a dialog I think we sorely need in this country to try and lift everyone up and get us out of the darkness of political violence that has fallen upon us.” “I’m not trying to play down his divisive rhetoric at all,” Cox said about Trump. “I’m not going to do that. But I’m going to say this: If we think that a president of the United States or a governor is going to change where we are right now, we’re fooling ourselves. I truly believe that the people of our country are the ones who are going to have to change this.”
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