What did Donald Trump do today?

He made sure to politicize a political assassination.

Yesterday, two Minnesota state legislators and their spouses were shot by a man posing as a police officer. Former Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were killed. State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette were seriously wounded.

The only suspect, Vance Luther Boelter, is still at large as of this post.

Minnesota's governor Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice-president, called the shootings "a political assassination." Boelter's car and house contained lists of Democratic politicians and leaders in pro-choice organizations. There were also indications he'd planned to attack the anti-Trump rallies that were to be held at various locations in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. (Many of those were officially canceled, but thousands of people swarmed the Minnesota state capitol grounds anyway.)

Assassinations of high-ranking state officials would normally prompt an extraordinary federal response to augment state investigations. Asked today whether Trump had spoken with Walz to help coordinate those efforts, Trump said this:

Well, it's a terrible thing. I think he's a terrible governor. I think he's a grossly incompetent person. But I may, I may call him, I may call other people too. 

This is actually restrained by Trump's standards in similar situations. He pointedly ignored a politically-motivated arson attack on the residence of Pennsylvania's Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, for a week. He's enjoyed publicly floating the idea of a pardon for six men convicted of an attempted kidnapping plot against Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan's Democratic governor. And when a man planning to kill former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi broke into her house and seriously injured her husband Paul, Trump made crude jokes about it for years afterwards. 

Why does this matter?

• Trump's personal opinions aren't supposed to matter when it comes to doing the basics of his job. 

• Ignoring or tolerating crimes against political enemies is what dictators do.