In the hours immediately after the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in front of a large crowd of students at a Utah university on Wednesday, there was no word on who had actually done it and no explanation for why it had happened. But, in Washington, those who profess certainty no longer need much in the way of facts: partisans come equipped with preëxisting truths, and events are slotted into narratives that existed long before the events occurred. Even before Kirk’s death had been confirmed, Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina, spoke to reporters outside the Capitol. “Democrats own what happened today,” she told them. When Ryan Nobles, the chief Capitol Hill correspondent for NBC News, asked her if, by that logic, Republicans would own the shooting this summer of two Minnesota Democratic lawmakers, she replied, “Are you kidding me? . . . Some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through his neck and you want to talk about Republicans right now? No. . . . Democrats own this a hundred per cent.”
In a different time, it might have been easier to dismiss Mace as just playing to the cameras, and to take heart instead from the many statements rejecting political violence and expressing shock, horror, and solidarity that were already rolling in from Democrats and Republicans alike. Vice-President J.D. Vance offered a heartfelt eulogy on X, calling the thirty-one-year-old political provocateur, who had been his close friend, an exemplar of “a foundational virtue of our Republic: the willingness to speak openly and debate ideas.” But the visceral rage channelled by Mace was not an outlier. On the House floor, when Speaker Mike Johnson called for a moment of silent prayer for Kirk, members from both parties rose from their seats and the brief hush suggested that at least some of the old habits of ritual bipartisanship in a crisis might still be intact. Then a shouting match erupted, with Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, loudly demanding more than a silent prayer and various Democrats objecting that there had been no prayer offered for students in a mass shooting that same day in Colorado. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, shouted back at the Democrats, “You all caused this.”
A few hours later, Donald Trump reacted to Kirk’s death, in a four-minute Oval Office video that he posted on his social-media feed. There would be no Joe Biden-esque lectures about “the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics,” or about how, while “we may disagree, we are not enemies.” (Which was what Biden actually said when Trump was grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet in the summer of 2024.) Instead, Trump explicitly laid blame for what he called a “heinous assassination” on his and Kirk’s political opponents. He neither cited any evidence nor seemed to think that any was necessary. He made no mention of any of the political attacks in recent years that have claimed Democratic victims, including, earlier this summer, the shooting of two Minnesota state legislators, one of whom died.
“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 are seeing in the country today, and it must stop right now,” Trump said, before offering a list of other victims of “radical-left political violence,” including himself. He promised swift action to take down the perpetrators of such violence as well as “organizations” that fund and promote it. Trump’s remarkable threat somehow did not get much attention. It should have. Not only was the President not even trying to unite the country but he seemed to be blaming the large chunk of the nation that reviles his racially divisive policies and those promoted by Kirk as surely as if they had pulled the trigger.
Some of Trump’s most influential allies and advisers were clarifying what this could mean by explicitly calling for a crackdown on the American left—hardly consistent with the spirit of free expression that Kirk used as his rallying cry for recruiting a new generation of young conservatives. “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization,” Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist who has successfully pushed Trump to fire a number of senior national-security officials, wrote on X. “We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.” Christopher Rufo, another influential Trumpist, who led the move against diversity initiatives that eventually became a core tenet of the second Trump Administration, invoked the political convulsions of the nineteen-sixties. “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” he wrote. “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”
And in case there was any mistaking the official view of such pronouncements, Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller on Thursday joined in from the West Wing, promising in a lengthy post on X to wage war on the “wicked ideology” that had killed Kirk and the proponents of it who, he claimed, were online cheering Kirk’s death. “The fate of our children, our society, our civilization hinges on it,” Miller added. Dialing it down, they were not.
It was purely a sad coincidence that Kirk’s killing happened to fall just a day before September 11th, when Trump would be marking the twenty-fourth anniversary of the attacks on the United States. The destruction of the Twin Towers in New York by Osama bin Laden and his band of Islamic extremists brought forth the George W. Bush Administration’s “global war on terror”—another war against an ism that first motivated Miller and many other young conservatives to become politically active in the early two-thousands. Back in his student days, Miller launched a project to warn against the threat of “Islamofascism,” and portrayed the United States as having been forced into a worldwide conflict with radical Islamic jihadist ideology.
How striking it is, then, to read Miller’s manifesto about what he considers to be today’s chief threat, which, like much of Trump and his MAGA movement’s current rhetoric, is focussed not against external adversaries such as Russia and China but on the scary prospect of a violent enemy within, “an ideology that has been steadily growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved,” as Miller called it.
Although it’s fair to point out that much of what Miller wrote about today’s leftists in response to Kirk’s death is similar to what he might have said about Islamic terrorists a couple of decades ago, it’s not Miller’s lack of creativity that stands out, so much as the speed and explicitness with which he—and Trump—chose to exploit the shooting of one of their most important allies in service of a sweeping attack on the American political left.
While others were praying for a sane conversation around how to end the rapidly escalating problem of violence across the political spectrum, the President and his close adviser defined the crisis differently: it was about the American right under siege—and what Trump was going to do about it. The point here was clear for those who chose to listen: the President doesn’t care one bit about all those sanctimonious calls for healing. It is not a dialogue about the crisis of political violence in America that he wants right now but an aggressive new policy of political vengeance. ♦
