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  2. How Trump Is Dangerously Exploiting Kirk’s Assassination

How Trump Is Dangerously Exploiting Kirk’s Assassination

President Donald Trump speaking in the Oval Office on Wednesday. White House video

There are an estimated 500 million civilian-owned guns in the United States. There are 340.1 million people in America. It only takes 0.00000029 percent of the population—one person—with one of those half-billion guns to change our world.

We cannot prevent every extremist or deranged person bent on killing from doing so. We certainly can institute gun safety measures and firearms restrictions and provide more and better social services to those in need. We can also try to adjust the tenor of our politics to counter or restrain the accelerants of violence. That latter point is a top-down matter of leadership. And as Donald Trump quickly demonstrated in the aftermath of the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk, the MAGA warrior, there’s no chance of that occurring on his watch. In fact, unsurprisingly, he and his lieutenants quickly seized on this tragedy to intensify their politics of hate and division and reinforce the conditions in which political violence is likely.

On Wednesday night, mere hours after Kirk’s murder in front of an audience of students at Utah Valley University, Trump posted a video on his social media platform. Speaking from the Oval Office, he hailed Kirk as a “patriot” who “devoted his life to the cause of open debate” and “fought for liberty, democracy, and justice.” He referred to Kirk, a prominent proponent of Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election and a social media influencer who routinely uttered racist and bigoted remarks, as a “martyr for truth and freedom.” Then he addressed the issue that plagues the nation: “This is a dark moment for America. It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.”

Many Americans on the different sides of the divide could agree with this. This is what a president should say at such a terrible time. But then Trump weaponized this sentiment: “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today and it must stop right now.” He listed incidents of political violence: the assassination attempts on him, assaults on ICE agents, the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and the 2017 shooting of Republican House Majority Leader Steve Scalise. “Radical left political violence,” he said, “has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”

You see what Trump did there, right? He assumed the shooter—who had yet to be apprehended—was aligned with the left, and he ignored the acts of violence committed against Democrats or by gunmen with extreme right views. These episodes include the murders of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, and the shooting of state Sen. John Hoffman; the recent shooting at the Atlanta headquarters of the US Centers for Disease Control that resulted in the death of a police officer; the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi; and the mass shootings in El Paso and Buffalo and at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, each perpetrated by a killer apparently motivated by racist and far-right conspiracy theories. And, of course, January 6.

This was unconscionable conduct on Trump’s part—though nothing surprising. After all, he did not attend the funeral for the Hortmans. He did not bother conveying his condolences to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. “Why waste time?” he said. (Yes, he really said that.) Nor did Trump publicly address the shooting at the CDC by a gunman with grievances pertaining to the Covid vaccine. And Trump pardoned hundreds of violent J6 domestic terrorists, who are now seeking financial reparations from his administration.

With this speech, Trump was crassly using Kirk’s murder to score political points and smite his enemies. He was not acting as the leader of the nation. He was behaving as the leader of a tribe. This was not a time to turn down the heat. It was a time to inflame.

His only culprit was the “radical left”—a phrase he has used in the past to refer to Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and virtually all Democrats and liberals. He has long demonized his political foes as “communists” and “radicals” bent on destroying the United States. This is the foundation of the political cultural war Trump has been waging for almost a decade. The Kirk assassination was more ammo for him—even before anything was known about the at-large assassin or his motivation. (As I was writing this on Friday, it seemed possible the alleged shooter, who was now in custody, was tied to or inspired by the Groypers, a group of alt-right white nationalists led by Nick Fuentes, a Hitler fanboy. There was yet no definitive information about his motive.)

Only two weeks earlier, White House aide Stephen Miller, Trump’s newest Roy Cohn, laid out for Sean Hannity on Fox their intent to delegitimize the Democratic Party as part of Trump’s march toward authoritarianism and their preparation for the 2026 midterm elections: “The Democrat [sic] Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”

Trump and Miller’s goal—boosted by Steve Bannon and others—is to completely denigrate the Democrats and brand them as anti-American evildoers. And what do you do with enemies of the state? You eradicate them.

The Kirk assassination appeared to be their chance to advance this agenda. On Wednesday, Miller posted a long statement on X that displayed his Manichean view of the world:

There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless. It is an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth. Its adherents organize constantly to tear down and destroy every mark of grace and beauty while lifting up everything monstrous and foul. It is an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence — violence against those uphold order, who uphold faith, who uphold family, who uphold all that is noble and virtuous in this world. It is an ideology whose one unifying thread is the insatiable thirst for destruction.

We see the workings of this ideology in every posting online cheering the evil assassination that cruelly robbed this nation of one of its greatest men. Postings from those in positions of institutional authority—educators, healthcare workers, therapists, government employees—reveling in the vile and the sinister with the most chilling glee. The fate of millions depends upon the defeat of this wicked ideology. The fate of our children, our society, our civilization hinges on it.

I do not like jumping into Nazi Germany analogies. But it’s hard to read this and not think about how Hitler and his henchmen used similar language to vilify Jews and the other marginalized groups they targeted: the enemy within undermining society. Ask Miller to identify who adheres to this ideology that is an existential threat to America’s families, and he will point to Democrats and progressives. Perhaps to readers of this newsletter.

Like Trump, Miller’s concern over political violence is one-sided and transactional. It’s a cudgel to wield against political opponents that stand in the way of their quest for power.

In the aftermath of episodes of political violence, there’s often an argument over whether more of such violence comes from the right or the left. That’s a pointless debate. The question is which side is encouraging and fueling the politics of hate, division, and extremism. Many pundits feel most comfortable referring to this as a both-sides problem. That’s wrong.

On the right, the folks who engage in extreme politics and demonization and who spread baseless lies and conspiracy theories are...the president, his advisers and appointees, members of the House and Senate, the heads of major advocacy groups, and prominent media figures. On the left it’s...largely social media posters, if anyone, not Democratic Party leaders. Trump has promulgated numerous conspiracy theories that feed right-wing paranoia, such as the destructive nonsense of QAnon. His FBI Director Kash Patel has whipped up fantasies about a supposed diabolical Deep State and supported purveyors of January 6 conspiracy theories. Nancy Pelosi? Chuck Schumer? They’re middle-of-the-road liberals who rushed to issue kindhearted statements about Kirk.

There’s no contest here. Only one side is led by a man who incited an attack on the Capitol, in which hundreds of his supporters beat up cops and called for the death of the vice president. Some of these pardoned insurrectionists in the past few days have issued calls to their networks to seek revenge for Kirk’s assassination. Other right-wingers have also demanded vengeance. And Trump and his crowd will now try to stifle any criticism that compares Trump’s actions to fascism and accuse those who make such critiques of inciting domestic terrorism.