Left: People hold candles during a vigil in Providence, R.I. Right: A tribute to shooting victims outside Sydney's Bondi Beach.Mother Jones illustration; Steven Senne/Press Association/AP, Mark Baker/AP

I’m in Sydney visiting family for Christmas. I’m writing this a short drive from where two gunmen opened fire at a Hanukkah celebration on Sunday, killing 15 people—one of the worst days of violence in modern Australian history.

I’ve lived in the US for nearly 15 years and have covered plenty of its disasters up close, including mass shootings. America was again awash in extreme violence this year. The Sydney massacre unfolded in the aftermath of the shooting at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island. My colleague (and Brown alum) Hannah Levintova reported from a reeling city that had “the energy sucked out of it by fear.” Hannah writes: “What I see now is a city trying to find moments of action and control when most feel helpless.”

In America, the trauma of disaster after disaster is compounded by something else: the president’s attack on truth itself.

Half a world away: same. But the contrast couldn’t be starker. To know both countries is to watch, in split screen, two similar societies diverge radically in how they respond to an atrocity.

Australia’s shock has produced something like consensus: an expectation that institutions and their leaders will search for the truth, messy as it may be, and reckon with it. In America, the trauma of disaster after disaster is compounded by something else: the president’s attack on truth itself.

Trump has torn up America’s post-tragedy script. He doesn’t merely fail to calm waters—he churns them. He scooped his own FBI by racing to release what he knew would be a headline-making morsel in the manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s assassin. Then he and his followers........

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