The horrific murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk inspired politicians on all sides to call for calm. “The time for unity, the time for peace, it is now,” Republican Senator Katie Britt of Alabama said. Fellow Republican Senators James Lankford, Thom Tillis, and John Curtis offered similar bromides, and Utah Governor Spencer Cox urged every American to “always forgive your enemies”—a lesson he said he learned from Kirk himself. This is the sort of rhetoric that American politicians typically resort to in the aftermath of political violence. But when it came from Republicans, they were promptly attacked from the right.
“If You’re Not Focused on Fighting Left-Wing Violence, Step Aside,” a Federalist headline demanded. “If I hear an elected Republican say the phrase ‘political violence’ or ‘both sides’ I’m going to scream,” wrote Shashank Tripathi, a co-host of the Ruthless podcast.
Such criticism is in line with the president’s. Donald Trump, who granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people associated with the January 6, 2021, riots, has made it plain that he is not opposed to political violence. The only threat worth combatting, he insists, is left-wing violence. In his Oval Office speech after Kirk’s assassination, Trump did not call for unity. Instead, he exploited plausible concerns about left-wing extremism by accusing the “radical left” of stoking the kind of rage that leads a young man to commit murder.
But blaming the left exclusively for violence is not just a rhetorical flourish from a pugilistic president. Instead, it is a pretext, a justification for what appears to be coming next. Trump and his supporters are promising to exploit the tragedy of Kirk’s assassination to undertake a sweeping government crackdown on the left. His targets include civil society, opposing politicians, the news media, and even late-night comics such as Jimmy Kimmel, a special fixation for the television-addled president, whom ABC just yanked off the air for comments he made about Kirk’s suspected killer on his show.
[Isaac Stanley-Becker: What Charlie Kirk told me about his legacy]
Trump, who rose to power promising salvation for anyone who had been unfairly cancelled by overly sensitive leftists, was never actually against cancellation. His concerns were about who was getting cancelled. The Kirk shooting is his chance to redefine the attributes of a healthy democracy, including peaceful protest, candid criticism, unfettered journalism, and political satire, as illegitimate, subversive, or violent.
The idea of using government power to harass and break up the American left has been floating around right-wing circles for years. The national conservatives, a growing faction of Republicans who favor illiberal use of state power to crush their enemies, have been longing to turn the government into a weapon of vengeance. But these ambitions had been on the fringe of the party. Now they are in the White House.
In his first term, Trump’s authoritarian impulses were curbed by the conservative institutionalists in his administration. This time, he has no such constraints. Although the Republican elite still includes traditional conservatives who view the Democrats as a legitimate political opposition entitled to operate legally, the natcon wing is ascendant. Kirk’s murder has provided the party’s extremists with a galvanizing event that could tamp down internal opposition to suppressing the left, at least temporarily.
This intention was made plain when Trump vowed, the night of the shooting, to “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, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.” (Such concern for the welfare of police officers must seem refreshing to the many who were injured defending the Capitol on January 6.)
The administration claims that its proposed crackdown is about public safety, about disrupting a domestic terrorist network for the sake of public order and the preservation of the republic. “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people,” Stephen Miller vowed in an appearance on Kirk’s livestream show on Monday. “It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
Miller has presented this crusade as in keeping with Kirk’s own wishes. “The last message Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his Creator in heaven was he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical-left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence,” he explained ominously. But Miller’s desire to delegitimize the political opposition preceded the assassination. Weeks before Kirk was killed, Miller said on Fox News, “The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”
Likewise, while Trump and his supporters have defended Kimmel’s suspension as a response to his comments about the Kirk shooting, Trump seemed to predict this turn of events on Truth Social in July: “The word is, and it’s a strong word at that, Jimmy Kimmel is NEXT to go in the untalented Late Night Sweepstakes and, shortly thereafter, Fallon will be gone.”
To escape the ire of Trump and the far right, elected Republicans needn’t directly endorse right-wing violence; they just can’t criticize it. (Regarding January 6, for instance, support and silence are the two acceptable Republican postures.) The administration has also made it clear that conservative lawmakers must refrain from holding all Americans to the same standard of conduct.
[Graeme Wood: Why people fell for an outlandish Charlie Kirk theory]
Trump, as he often does, put the matter bluntly. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime,” he said in an appearance on Fox & Friends last week. “They’re saying, ‘We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street. The radicals on the left are the problem. And they’re vicious, and they’re horrible.”
By this logic, if people on the right sometimes engage in violence, it is only because the left has provoked them. The solution, according to Trump and his supporters, is not to clamp down on political violence, but to clamp down on its root cause: the left.
Laura Loomer, one of Trump’s most influential advisers, summed up the administration’s ambitions. “I do want President Trump to be the ‘dictator’ the Left thinks he is,” she wrote on X, “and I want the right to be as devoted to locking up and silencing our violent political enemies as they pretend we are.”
On Kirk’s show on Monday, J. D. Vance, perhaps the natcons’ favorite elected official, echoed the far right’s complaints about the rhetoric of unity offered up by the likes of Lankford and Cox. “People on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence,” he declared. “This is not a both-sides problem.”
The emotional pinnacle of Vance’s sermon came when he decried a column in The Nation criticizing Kirk’s ideological legacy. Vance called the article a smear and an apologia for Kirk’s assassination: “There is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers, who argue that Charlie Kirk, a loving husband and father, deserved a shot to the neck because he spoke words with which they disagree.”
The Nation column did not call for Kirk’s murder. To the contrary, its author, Elizabeth Spiers, wrote, “I won’t celebrate his death, but I’m not obligated to celebrate his life, either.” But that hardly seemed to matter to Vance, who went on to claim that The Nation receives funding from two well-known progressive foundations: “Did you know that the George Soros Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the groups who funded that disgusting article justifying Charlie’s death, do you know they benefit from generous tax treatment? They are literally subsidized by you and me, the American taxpayer.” (The OSF most recently funded the Type Media Center, formerly the Nation Institute, in 2020, and the Ford Foundation funded an internship program at the magazine in 2019, but neither appears to be a backer now.)
There was something sinister in Vance’s charge that these foundations enjoy a special subsidy. Donations to nonprofit organizations are generally not taxed—an exclusion that applies to all nonprofit organizations. Vance seems to be using the pretext of terrorism to float the possibility that the federal government will selectively target nonprofits on the left.
National unity will come only “when we work to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country,” Vance proclaimed. “And our government, and you heard me talking to Stephen Miller about this, will be working very hard to do exactly that in the months to come.”
[David Sims: An escalation in every way]
Miller made an even more sweeping threat. “It could be a RICO charge, a conspiracy charge, conspiracy against the United States, insurrection. But we are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that are fomenting riots, that are doxxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, that are committing acts of wanton violence,” he shouted on Fox News on Friday. “The power of law enforcement, under President Trump’s leadership, will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”
Note that Miller reserved the final punishment, imprisonment, for those targets who have broken the law. Other targets, apparently, will lose their “money” and “power” regardless. Miller is someone who speaks deliberately and with some precision, a trait that makes his regular bouts of autocratic fury all the more unnerving. The administration and the movement that he represents are describing a far-reaching campaign against the political left, coupled with an effort to suppress dissent on their own side. If Miller is saying he will punish targets who have broken no law, he likely means to do just that. Unity, or even calm, is the last thing this administration seeks.
