Having neither a subject in custody nor any confirmation of the motive of a shooter didn’t stop President Donald Trump on Wednesday evening from seizing on the killing of Christian nationalist youth leader Charlie Kirk as an excuse for declaring war on the political left.
Kirk, a far-right media personality and founder of the MAGA campus group Turning Point USA, was gunned down Sept. 10 at Utah Valley University while debating mass shootings at a student event.
Speaking from the White House, Trump declared Kirk “a martyr” and said that the “radical left” was responsible for his death. “For years,” Trump claimed, “those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis.” He said that “violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree” and said the “left” was “directly responsible for the terrorism” seen in Utah.
Trump neglected to mention recent episodes of right-wing political violence, such as the assassination of Minnesota State. Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband in June by an alleged Trump supporter, a conspiracy theorist’s attack on Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s husband during an attempt to take the former speaker hostage in 2022, MAGA influencer Matt Walsh’s call for the execution of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson a few days ago, or his own 2016 suggestion that “Second Amendment people” might have to deal with Hillary Clinton, to name only a few.
Nor did he speak up about the epidemic of gun violence that has long plagued the nation, demonstrated so blatantly by the fact that literally within minutes of Kirk’s murder, yet another school shooting took the lives of two students in Colorado—the type of incident that Kirk himself said was “worth it” to preserve gun rights.
Instead, the president said it was not fascist violence and ideology but rather the criticism of the latter that led to the terror and division on display in the U.S.
He did not bring up any of the reprehensible and racist views that Kirk has promoted to the youth of America—ideas like:
Black women don’t have the “brain processing power” to be political leaders. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination, was a “huge mistake.” Islam is a “sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.” Gay and transgender people are “groomers” who target youth for sexual abuse and should be “stoned to death.” Women should follow a “biblical model” for relationships and submit to their husbands. Black Americans who achieve high positions, like airline pilots, can’t possibly be qualified for their roles and only achieve them due to DEI. The people of Washington, D.C.—most of whom are people of color—are “cockroaches.” Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza is justified because “Palestine does not exist” and Palestinians brought their suffering on themselves (even as he simultaneously made antisemitic assertions that “Jewish people” control colleges, non-profits, and the media in the U.S.).
The list could literally go on and on.
Rather than a propagandist of division, white supremacy, and hate, Kirk was reimagined by the president as a “patriot” who “fought for liberty, democracy, justice…joyfully engaging with everyone interested in good-faith debate.”
Immediately joining Trump in his rewriting of reality were all the names big and small of the MAGA movement. They cast a wide net, pinning blame for Kirk’s murder on anyone who might oppose the Trump agenda, from the mainstream liberals of the Democratic Party to the progressive movement writ large.
Elon Musk, who spent the first months of the second Trump administration terrorizing federal workers, wrote on his X platform that “The Left is the party of murder.” Podcaster Joey Mannarino said the “Democrats murdered Charlie Kirk” and that there can be no more “moderate right” or compromise going forward. Republican Sen. Nancy Mace, R-N.C., told reporters that “Democrats own what happened today…. Some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through his neck.”
Disinformation diva Laura Loomer responded by calling former President Barack Obama a “sanctimonious piece of shit” after he said he was praying for Kirk’s family. She labeled the left “a national security threat” and urged Trump to “shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.”
Trump signaled he may do just that, confirming his intention of using the Kirk killing as justification to go on the offensive against anyone who challenges him. He pledged to set loose law enforcement to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity…including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
The country thus enters a moment of escalated danger, with democracy and constitutional liberties in the firing line. The Communist Party USA warned Thursday morning that, with the Kirk killing, “the cycle of political violence that’s plagued the U.S. grew worse.”
The party condemned political violence as a tactic and said that “the working-class and democratic movements know full well from our own long experience that acts of violence and terror only serve the interests of the forces of hate, racism, intolerance, and reaction.”
The CPUSA, itself the victim of right-wing political repression at multiple points in the past, sounded the alarm that Trump and MAGA could launch “a crackdown and even war” on the organizations and activists affiliated with struggles for economic justice, racial equality, immigrant rights, and other causes.
This newspaper, People’s World, has also repeatedly found itself the target of government repression as part of a broader ruling class campaign to crush the working-class and left movement.
From the 1920s to the ’80s, the FBI constantly spied on and harassed the journalists of our predecessors, the Daily Worker and the Daily World—whether they were on the picket line in the office or at their homes. Lawsuits attempted to silence us, and tax officials sought to bankrupt us.
During the McCarthy era, we were branded a “foreign agent” because we dared speak out against the Cold War, and the Post Office tried crippling our ability to reach our readers via the mail. Our editors were among those indicted in the Smith Act trials and locked away in federal prison for years, falsely accused of conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence.
Far-right and fascist governments throughout history have regularly latched onto episodes of political violence and terrorism—real or contrived—as a pretext for repression, to silence dissent, and to destroy constitutional rights.
With the Kirk murder, the Trump administration and the MAGA movement are signaling they may be trying to follow that same playbook. The time is now to both condemn individual acts of terror and violence and also rally to defend democratic freedoms.
Mass collective struggle and broad unity are the time-tested tools for combatting fascism and winning change.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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