Trump vows vengeance against the Left

What happened

President Donald Trump this week threatened to unleash the federal government against the “radical left,” as he and his allies suggested without evidence that a leftist network bore responsibility for the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah last week. “My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence,” Trump said, “including the organizations that fund it and support it.” Administration officials told The New York Times that department heads and Cabinet secretaries have begun identifying left-leaning groups that may have funded or supported violence so it can label them domestic terrorism organizations. Guest-hosting a memorial episode of Kirk’s podcast, Vice President JD Vance—a personal friend of the slain activist—said, “We are going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence,” and later criticized the Ford Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top policy adviser, vowed to “disrupt, dismantle, and destroy” what he called a “vast domestic terror movement,” adding, “we will do it in Charlie’s name.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Justice Department would pursue anyone engaging in “hate speech” but backtracked after critics pointed out such speech is protected by the First Amendment. State Department officials, meanwhile, threatened consular action against any noncitizen “praising, rationalizing, or making light” of the murder. Such weaponization of the government against critics is “straight out of the totalitarian playbook,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “It could be a really dark time for this country if mainstream progressive organizations are just labeled as terrorists or as inciters of violence simply because they are working to undermine the president’s political agenda.”

What the columnists said

The Trump administration is portraying Kirk as “a free speech advocate who abhorred political violence,” said Aaron Regunberg in The New Republic, instead of what he was: a provocateur who doxxed left-wing professors and sent buses of rioters to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. “Anyone who resists this false characterization now risks being targeted, not just by MAGA trolls online but by literally the most powerful people in the world.” Dozens of Americans—including teachers, military service members, and reporters—have already lost their jobs merely for criticizing Kirk’s views.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

To justify this broad crackdown, the Right is pretending there is some widespread “strain of liberal support” for Kirk’s killing, said Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. Yet while there may have been “random private citizens”—and bots—exulting in his death, Democratic lawmakers and pundits “were united in condemnation of the attack.” Contrast that with the behavior of Republicans when Democratic lawmaker Melissa Hortman was killed by a Trump supporter in June. Utah Sen. Mike Lee tweeted jokes, while President Trump refused to offer a condolence call.

To find real “moral and political” leadership, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, look to Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox. Rather than seeking to tar political opponents, Cox made clear there was just “one person responsible” for the murder—the shooter. He called on young Americans to build a better culture “by embracing our differences and having those hard conversations.”

Trump, though, rewards performative bullying, said Noah Rothman in National Review. That’s why Bondi, formerly a warrior for free speech, felt “obliged to prove her illiberal bona fides” by ranting about punishing hate speech. FCC head Brendan Carr did something similar in July, when he announced he would target networks for their content—saying ABC’s left-leaning The View was “now in the crosshairs of this administration.” Yet the thesis that the Left perpetrates most political violence in the U.S. is “demonstrably false,” said Thomas B. Edsall in The New York Times. Far-right actors, such as white supremacists, are responsible for more than 60% of such murders, leftists just 10%.

The most “dangerous thing” about all this, said Jonah Goldberg in The Dispatch, is the claim that “they” on the Left are “already at war with ‘us.’” Right-wing voices, including Steve Bannon and many on Fox, have made this declaration, saying that because “they” have taken up violence, so we too must go forth to battle them. These are the kind of incendiary statements “that laid the rhetorical groundwork for the Rwandan genocide” in 1994. In fact there is no they, there is only a we. “We, all of us, are responsible for this corruption of our shared spaces.” It cannot be Right pitted against Left. It has to be all of us recognizing our own culpability.