Charlie Kirk’s killing, and Trump’s response, are a danger to liberalism
The president is seizing a national tragedy to threaten a crackdown on his opposition.
At 8:44 p.m. on Wednesday night, investigators were searching for a suspect in the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk. But President Donald Trump was ready to assign blame.
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he told the camera while sitting in the Oval Office. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today. And it must stop right now.”
What followed were some of the darkest remarks I can remember uttered from the White House, a hint of crackdowns against political enemies to come in the name of curbing domestic “terror.” The president vowed that the administration would “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
“From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a health care executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” he said.
I want to be plain here: Kirk’s shooting was an unjustifiable crime against both a human being and free political disagreement. We cannot have sincere debate if people are at risk of getting shot over it. The shooting was a dangerous strike against liberal values, and so too was Trump’s response. In reaction to a national tragedy, a sitting president implied he would use the power of the state to break the infrastructure of a rival party. That he would even float such a thing is cause for deep alarm.
Earlier today, my colleague wrote a column imploring you to tune out all of the “abstractions” and arguments over Kirk’s legacy. But there’s nothing abstract about Trump’s words. He’s talking about action. The president was only slightly more ambiguous about his intentions than the right-wing influencers who, hours earlier, had called for open institutional warfare on liberals and progressives in response to Kirk’s shooting.
“The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” Chris Rufo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote in apparent reference to Hoover’s arguably unconstitutional and widely condemned surveillance of groups like the NAACP and American heroes like W.E.B. Du Bois in the pre-Civil Rights Era. “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos,” Rufo continued.
Right-wing Twitter personality Mike Cernovich called for “Massive RICO investigations” into billionaires like George Soros, Bill Gates, and Reid Hoffman, whom he blamed for funding “far left wing extremism.” He was seconded by the likes of former Senate candidate Blake Masters, who called for the destruction of the left’s “NGO/donor patronage network.” These sorts of ideas may well now be coursing through the ranks of the administration.
That Trump sounds eager to criminalize those who call him a fascist is a bit on the nose. After all, Hitler’s response to the 1933 Reichstag Fire is the canonical example of using political violence as a pretext for cracking down on one’s opposition. Historians still debate exactly who was responsible for the arson attack on Germany’s parliament. But the future Fuhrer quickly blamed communist radicals, and convinced President Paul von Hindenberg to grant an emergency decree leading to the suspension of civil liberties like freedom of assembly, speech, and the press. What followed were mass arrests of political rivals, allowing Hitler to dominate the next election and consolidate dictatorial power.
I don’t think we’re about to watch history exactly repeat, but we might see something that rhymes.
Let me paint out the nightmare scenario: The administration will step up its attempts to use every legal and political tool at its disposal to crush progressive and Democratic party organizations. It will use lawsuits or prosecutions to do direct damage to nonprofit organizations, activists, and any movement that smacks of opposition. Even if it loses in court, it will drain the finances, time, and willpower of the entities and people that stand between it and power.
Fundamentally, I’m talking about a frightening unknown. But here’s what I can say for sure.
First, contrary to the president’s claims, we still do not know what motivated this killer. It’s possible that it really was an unhinged leftist. On Thursday morning, The Wall Street Journal reported that authorities found “ammunition engraved with expressions of transgender and antifascist ideology inside the rifle that authorities believe was used in the fatal shooting.” It’s also possible that those messages are an intentional red herring. It’s possible that like many past political assassins, the perpetrator had a paranoid and inconsistent mishmash of views. Perhaps they had aspirations of starting a civil war, much as Dylann Roof believed that shooting up a black church would lead to a race war. Whatever early clues have emerged, we don’t know the full story yet.
Second, whatever deranged beliefs led to this crime cannot possibly justify an attack on broader civil institutions on the left. If it turns out this killer was funded, trained, or indoctrinated by a specific group, the law should deal with them. But America is a tinder box ready to go up right now in part because we have seen a string of awful political attacks committed against the left and the right. In his remarks, the president neglected to mention that just months ago, two Democratic state legislators were killed by a conservative gunman. The Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was led by Trump supporters. The young man who nearly killed Trump left a sparse trail, but we know he was a registered Republican who classmates described as a conservative.
What’s terrifying at this moment is not that members of one party or another are engaged in this behavior, but rather that political violence, irrespective of ideology, could become normalized in the United States, the way school shootings have.
Americans do not want this. As Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan pointed out last night, the most meticulous research shows that only a tiny minority — at most around 7% — of adults support hardcore political violence, and after the attempt on Trump’s life in Pennsylvania, support for it actually dropped.
Last night, it was possible to find ghouls making light of Kirk’s death if you searched around enough on Bluesky or Twitter. But the vast majority of responses among prominent Democrats and leftists consisted of people vehemently rejecting violence, expressing sadness for Kirk’s family, and voicing fear for where the country could be headed. Kirk’s rival influencers on the left went live in near tears, and worried that they too could become targets. And who could blame them? Nobody sane thinks a cycle of political violence will end well.
Which brings me to the thing I know, which is that even if he does not try to parlay this killing into a wide-ranging political crackdown, Trump’s reaction is a blow against liberal values of tolerance and civil political disagreement. No president can singlehandedly heal the divisions in America. But they can soothe and certainly avoid escalating the tensions. They can model forgiveness and tolerance. We saw that from politicians like Republican Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who mourned that “our country is broken” while acknowledging the attacks against figures in both parties.
“We just need every single person in this country to think about where we are and where we want to be,” he said. “To ask ourselves, is this, is this it? Is this what 250 years has wrought on us? I pray that that’s not the case. I pray that those who hated what Charlie Kirk stood for will put down their social media, and their pens, and pray for his family. And that all of us, all of us will try to find a way to stop hating our fellow Americans.”
Trump has chosen the opposite path, to escalate where most Americans are all but begging leaders to de-escalate. I hope those in power somehow find their better angels. If not, we’re headed deeper into the darkness.
Excellent discussion of historical and present situations.
I’m glad to hear the Utah governor seems to be acting responsibly!