That’s the context for President-elect Trump’s statement after a man murdered Russian Ambassador Andrey Karlov at an art gallery last Monday in Turkey’s capital, Ankara. Just before committing the act, the killer had shouted in Arabic: “God is great! [NOTE: “Allahu Akbar”] Those who pledged allegiance to Muhammad for jihad. God is great!” and then, in Turkish: “Don’t forget Aleppo! Don’t forget Syria!” Trump immediately released a statement characterizing the assassin as a “radical Islamic terrorist.”

How did Trump know this right away? The murderer was certainly angry at Russia’s backing of Syrian President Assad in the civil war that has reduced much of that country to rubble. Is that fact alone enough to put this particular killer in the same ideological category as ISIS? That may turn out to be the case, but Trump doesn’t wait for the full story before tweeting, and certainly doesn’t seem to consider such questions important in the first place. His purpose in saying “radical Islamic terrorist” was simple: to show he’ll say the thing Obama won’t. In other words, it’s politics.

For Trump and his fellow Republicans, this is just another version of the War on Christmas, where only a few brave souls have the courage to stand up for those who dare mention the true reason for the season.

Let’s go back a few months. After the June murder of 49 people on Latino night at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Trump went after the president, who had earlier in the day spoken about the terrorist attack: “In his remarks today, President Obama disgracefully refused to even say the words 'Radical Islam.' For that reason alone, he should step down.”

Once upon a time, there was a relatively high bar for calling on the president of the United States to resign the office to which the people had elected him. It’s a safe a guess that no serious presidential candidate had ever done so in the midst of a campaign before this year. Yet the one who did got elected president.

Trump turned the murder of more than four dozen people into a political wedge issue. Party over country. Politics over security. That’s what Republicans do. Could you imagine Barack Obama doing that? Could you imagine Trump not?

Ask yourself what kind of thinking lies behind the decision to do so. Is it just naked ambition? Is it a sense of entitlement that runs so deep that doing anything necessary to gain power becomes justified? It’s not solely about one individual, however, given how widespread is the phenomenon of Republicans putting party over country, party over security, or party over democracy (see: Carolina, North and Garland, Merrick).

Ask yourself what kind of thinking leads a party’s top congressional figures to decide—after Barack Obama won in a landslide not seen in a generation and during the worst economic crash since the Great Depression—to “show united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies.” What was their motivation? To sabotage the recovery and defeat him four years later. Republicans always put party first. These events are all connected.

The time has long passed for Democrats to fully acknowledge what their opponents across the aisle are not only capable of doing, but have been doing for many years. The only way to stop this behavior is to make Republicans pay for it at the ballot box.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books).