The Trump Administration Announces It Is Plotting a Broad Crackdown on Those Who Criticize the Right
Exploiting the shooting of Charlie Kirk by a gunman whose motives are still unclear and incoherent, the Trump administration is now announcing that they are preparing a broad crackdown to punish political dissent.
The New York Times provides a summary:
President Trump and his top advisers threatened on Monday to unleash the power of the federal government to punish what they alleged was a left-wing network that funds and incites violence, seizing on Charlie Kirk’s killing to make broad and unsubstantiated claims about their political opponents.
Investigators were still working to identify a motive in the death of Mr. Kirk, a prominent conservative activist who was shot last week in Utah. …
Two senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal planning, said that cabinet secretaries and federal department heads were working to identify organizations that funded or supported violence against conservatives. …
One tactic has been to target the tax-exempt status of nonprofits that are critical of Mr. Trump or conservatives. …
“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, eliminate and destroy this network and make America safe again for the American people,” said Stephen Miller, the president’s top policy adviser.
To be clear, there are no such organizations involved in this case. The idea of a vast left-wing conspiracy to fund political violence is an invention. The point is to simply target criticism of conservatives.
Elsewhere, Miller has been more explicit about what he has in mind: “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.” He is trying to push the rest of the administration to take the final plunge over the cliff into a totalitarian system.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.