SALT LAKE CITY — Once upon a time, there was nothing all that unique about a politician like Utah’s 50-year-old governor, Spencer Cox.

In the hours and days after Charlie Kirk was killed at Utah Valley University, the Republican governor offered a message of unity and shared anger and even hope.

It called to mind George W. Bush in the rubble of Ground Zero, megaphone in hand, or Bill Clinton, post-Oklahoma City bombing—which makes Cox an anomaly in 2025.

Cox’s very presence—decent, sorrowful, sympathetic—posed a question that has been lurking just behind the political theater for the past decade and the horrifying violence of the last few weeks: Were Americans finally ready to stop the madness? Or, as Cox himself put it hours after Kirk’s assassination: Would this mark “the end of a dark chapter in our history or the beginning of a darker chapter”?

A week after Kirk was shot, I met Cox in his office at the state Capitol to ask him which direction he thought Americans, and America, would choose.