Trump Uses Charlie Kirk's Assassination to Threaten a Crackdown on His Political Opponents
Even before we know who killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk and why, Donald Trump is using his death as an excuse to make Trump’s own critics “directly responsible” for political violence.
NPR provides a summary of Trump’s address on this from the Oval Office:
“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,” Trump said.
Trump said his administration would find “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.”
Trump drew a throughline from the assassination attempt at his campaign rally last year to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the 2017 shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise at a congressional baseball practice.
Trump did not include any examples of political violence against Democrats, such as the June attack in Minnesota that killed a state lawmaker and left another wounded or the 2022 hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Trump’s statement is not a condemnation of hateful rhetoric and political violence in general. It is a condemnation of political violence only against his allies. And the threat that he issued is not against the perpetrators of violence but against those who engage in anti-conservative rhetoric.
Watch the video of Trump’s address and notice again this promise: “My administration will 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.” He included in this the vilification of ICE agents.
We will see what this actually translates to in practice, but Trump’s own rhetoric is preparing the ground for a general crackdown on critics of the administration.
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.
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