President Trump is ramping up his attacks on the left in the wake of last week’s killing of Charlie Kirk, providing fuel to the White House’s efforts to clamp down on left-leaning groups and institutions.
Trump has at nearly every turn since Kirk’s assassination argued the problem in the country stems from left-wing groups. The strategy has animated Republicans, who are mourning Kirk as a free speech champion and political martyr, but it ignores what his Democratic critics contend is Trump’s own history of normalizing political violence.
In a four-minute video posted hours after Kirk was shot, Trump said years of attacks from the left comparing figures like Kirk to Nazis was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
When co-host Ainsley Earhardt asked Trump how the country can come together, noting there are “radicals” on both the right and the left, Trump defended those on the right as concerned about crime, while condemning those on the left as “vicious” and “horrible.”
On Sunday, Trump again insisted the problem “is on the left.”
“When you look at the agitators, you look at the scum that speaks so badly of our country, the American flag burnings all over the place, that’s the left, that’s not the right,” Trump said.
Other Republicans have backed Trump’s rhetoric.
Just hours after Kirk was shot, Reps. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) both accused Democrats of creating an environment that makes conservatives targets of violence. And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) called for a national divorce Monday in a lengthy post, blaming the left for the death of Kirk and saying “millions on the left celebrated and made clear they want all of us dead.”
Yet political violence affects both parties, and both sides have fallen victim to attacks perpetrated by those with opposing ideologies.
With that in mind, many Democrats have pushed back on Trump’s assertion that political violence was somehow more rooted within the left than the right.
“No one party is immune from political violence,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) wrote in a post on the social platform X. “My family and I can attest to that.”
Shapiro who was home with his family in the governor’s mansion when a man set the house ablaze earlier this year on the first night of Passover, apparently targeting him over his position on Israel and Gaza.
“Using the rhetoric of rage and calling some of our fellow Americans ‘scum’ — no matter how profound our differences — only creates more division and makes it harder to heal,” he added.
“We are at an inflection point in America,” Shapiro wrote. “Violence transcends party lines — and the way to address it and have true peaceful debate is for leaders to speak and act with moral clarity. That needs to start with the President.”
Rep. Joe Morelle (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House committee that oversees member security, the House Administration Committee, said efforts “to assign blame to huge numbers of people” were irresponsible and would only further inflame tensions.
“It’s just so counterproductive to be laying blame at any ideological person or group. And frankly, it just furthers the escalation of the tensions that exist. I mean, we should be doing everything we can now to encourage people both on our side and the other side of the ideological divide to be calm and to be thoughtful in this moment, to be prayerful,” he said.
That Trump is going after Democrats is hardly a surprise.
Trump does not sell him self as a uniter, and much of his time in office has been spent playing to his political base.
Some Democrats think Trump’s attacks on them related to Kirk’s killing will thus fall flat, politically.
“The American people weren’t born yesterday. They’ve seen Trump whip up political violence & divide us,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) wrote in sharing a social media post from Trump last year showing a pickup truck emblazoned with an image to make it appear then-President Biden was tied up in the bed of the vehicle.
“He incited a mob to storm the Capitol and beat cops — then he pardoned violent criminals,” Crow continued, referencing Jan. 6, 2021.
“Now he’s trying to exploit a tragedy in order to silence his political opponents.”
Tensions are showing no signs of easing.
Deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller claimed Monday that there was a broad network of left-leaning organizations fomenting violence, though he did not provide specifics. He vowed to use the full strength of the federal government to “identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy this network.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who condemned both Kirk’s shooting and has urged the rejection of political violence in “EVERY form,” said Miller’s comments appeared to use the shooting as a basis for going after the Democratic Party.
“Wake up, America. Stephen Miller has already publicly labeled the Democratic Party as a terrorist organization,” Newsom wrote Monday on X.
“This isn’t about crime and safety. It’s about dismantling our democratic institutions. We cannot allow acts of political violence to be weaponized and used to threaten tens of millions of Americans.”
Vice President Vance, who hosted Kirk’s radio show Monday from the White House campus, bringing Miller on as a guest, said the administration would take action to address what he called “festering violence that you see on the far left.” And he insisted it was the left, not the right, that was more likely to accept political violence.
“While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far left,” Vance said.
Other Republicans have offered different signals.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) has urged the public not to point fingers at the other side as more becomes known about the killer’s motive.
“There is one person responsible for what happened here, and that person is now in custody and will be charged soon and will be held accountable,” he said at a press conference announcing the arrest of a suspect in the shooting, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson.
“The problem with political violence, is it metastasizes, because we can always point the finger at the other side,” he said, “and at some point we have to find an off-ramp, or it’s going to get much, much worse. But see, these are choices that we can make.”
