The real take-out of the Charlie Kirk tragedy? An emboldened President Trump
Donald Trump is doubling down on his electoral mandate to remake America. Those who stand in the way now face even greater hostility in the ongoing contest to define the nation’s future.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk has brought into focus an America in deep crisis. A towering beacon of democracy, the US is now blighted by the expanding spectre of political violence and a leadership class unsure of how to respond to the collapse of civil discourse and meaningful disagreement.
The American people are increasingly divided by politics and values in a society being pushed to the brink, with a dark shadow cast over the nation’s future. Its trajectory is uncertain and fiercely contested while confusion reigns over America’s role on the global stage and the reinterpretation of its historic mission for a more challenging age.
It is in this context that Donald Trump is mounting an effective conservative revolution that promises to change America and its government in profound and enduring ways – a project that has been infused with heightened urgency and transforming zeal since the murder of Kirk.
This is the real take-out of last week’s tragedy – an emboldened and impassioned President doubling down on his electoral mandate to remake America and achieve his unique vision for the country. Those who stand in the way now face even greater hostility in the ongoing contest to define the nation’s future.
Already the Trump administration has threatened a concerted campaign of retribution against left-wing political groups and non-government organisations seen to be funding a “vast domestic terror movement” while flagging a crackdown on dangerous hate speech.
Impassioned response
Speaking with Vice-President JD Vance, who guest-hosted Kirk’s podcast this week, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said the assassination had provoked “incredible anger” and that “focused anger, righteous anger directed for a just cause is one of the most important agents of change in human history”.
Miller said the last message he received from Kirk, the day before he was murdered, was a personal plea to develop an “organised strategy to go after the left-wing organisations that are promoting violence in this country”.
“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, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen,” Miller said.
Attorney-General Pam Bondi appeared to overreach in her own remarks, inviting a backlash from some of Trump’s strongest conservative cheerleaders by suggesting the Department of Justice could prosecute businesses that refused printing services to customers seeking posters to attend Kirk vigils.
During her media blitz, Bondi declared the DoJ would “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech. And that’s across the aisle” – comments seen as antithetical to the cause of free speech championed by so many on the right, including Kirk himself.
While the White House pushback against the radical left began before details had emerged about Kirk’s killer or his motivation, the arrest of 22-year-old Tyler Robinson after a more than 30-hour manhunt perfectly fit the administration’s narrative.
It was soon confirmed that Robinson was deeply anti-conservative in his political views. He had a romantic relationship with a transgender partner. He also was steeped in internet meme culture and familiar enough with anti-fascist slogans to inscribe them on his bullet casings.
These all point to a sinister and worrying problem about the normalisation of political violence on the left, especially online – a scourge that Trump is right to urgently address.
A survey conducted earlier this year by the Rutgers University Social Perception Lab and the Network Contagion Research Institute of 1264 US residents – balanced to reflect census data on race, gender, age, and education – found that “31 and 38 per cent of respondents stated it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk and President Trump, respectively”.
“These effects were driven by respondents that self-identified as left of centre, with 50 per cent and 56 per cent at least somewhat justifying murder for Elon Musk and President Trump, respectively.”
In addition, the survey found that nearly 40 per cent of respondents stated it was at least somewhat acceptable to “destroy a Tesla dealership in protest” and sounded the alarm on the “growing cyber-social presence of assassination culture”.
Yet the manner in which this problem is tackled matters. Already, the White House’s approach has generated fears that Trump will use the tragedy to silence and intimidate his foes in the prosecution of his agenda.
Trump’s instinctual reaction following the assassination was to immediately tap the sympathies of his own political constituency – it was the radical left that was fomenting violence in America and dehumanising its political opponents by comparing them to Nazis and mass murderers.
While it was Trump’s supporters who marched on the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, the US President said it was left-wing rhetoric that was “directly responsible for the terrorism we are seeing in our country”.
This was not an attempt to unify a wounded nation but a politicisation of the killing right out of Trump’s “take no prisoners” handbook. Yet a failure to ground the debate in the political centre and meaningfully address the problems of right-wing violence guarantees that bipartisanship is cruelled from the start while division is perpetuated.
California Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom, who interviewed Kirk on his podcast in January, has blasted the President for his handling of the killing.
“Rather than trying to unite our country, Donald Trump is trying harder than ever to divide us. I’d say it’s unbecoming, but we all know we’re beyond that. We cannot let him use political violence as an excuse to dismantle our democracy,” Newsom said.
On Wednesday local time Trump revealed he was designating the violent and repellent antifa (anti-fascist) movement as a “major terrorist organisation”.
He also applauded the ABC decision to pull comedian and talk show host Jimmy Kimmel off the air for his comments about the Kirk assassination, and demanded that NBC follow suit by firing late-night comedians Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers. All three comedians have been frequent critics of the President.
The potential for Trump to get the balance wrong by exacerbating differences and fanning political conflict rather than healing a broken nation is real. What happens next will hinge on Trump’s decisions and how he chooses to direct a conservative moment consumed by righteous anger.
Conservative revolution
Trump is not a conservative, at least not in the way the term is usually understood. His historic mission in his second incarnation as US President has been to remake government in America as a pathway to national salvation and future greatness – the promised “golden age”.
This project has included the reclaiming of institutions from progressive capture, dismantling the administrative state, establishing a new model of executive leadership, testing the limits of presidential authority, challenging the judiciary, redefining the role of the US in the world, and refining a new form of economic nationalism and state capitalism.
But there is more to the experiment. The US President has promoted himself as the answer to the excesses of the left and the long march of progressive ideology through US society – someone who will more robustly defend traditional values, take on the woke leadership at US universities, uphold Christian beliefs, defend religious freedoms and rebalance American culture.
These are the easy wins handed to Trump by the Democrats. The US President has made the most of his opportunities by recognising that there are only two genders, stepping back from the cult of diversity, equity and inclusion, closing the borders, cracking the whip on violent illegal aliens and fiercely promoting law and order.
And Trump has done it all with a showman’s flair before the world’s media cameras, exuding a rare authenticity and charisma – almost as if he is hosting his own reality TV show beamed directly into people’s living rooms from the Oval Office.
Peter Loge, director of the school of media and public affairs at George Washington University in Washington, tells Inquirer that Trump was about “politics as pro-wrestling. Spectacle is the point.”
All these factors explain how Trump has been able to appeal to so many Americans who nevertheless think of themselves as conservative. They view him as an antidote to a fractured society marked by a cacophony of conflicting values where the promise of globalisation and freer markets has failed to deliver for too many.
“Conservatism in the US is what Trump defines conservatism to be,” Loge says. “There isn’t this group of ideological and coherent people in the US … Most people most of the time view politics like plumbing. They just want it to work.”
Loge says Trump’s message is that “the system is failing. We need a new system.”
While there had always been parts of America that were fiercely anti-elite, anti-migration and isolationist, Trump had articulated this “in ways that are more popular now than ever before”.
Speaking at the 2025 National Conservatism Conference in Washington earlier this month, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer captured the rapid pace and scale of change in the Republican Party by openly mocking former president George W. Bush as an effective traitor to the conservative movement.
“Bush’s hubris in attempting to bring democracy to Iraq was matched only by his expectation of bringing market economics to China – both quixotic misadventures that were incredibly harmful to our country, economy and culture,” Greer said.
Bush’s expectation that China would liberalise and his continuation of Clinton-era trade policies was “very damaging to our country and the conservative cause”.
Speaking at the same event, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said today’s leaders could lay a foundation of renewal “so deep that our descendants will look back on us with gratitude, just as we look back on our own founders”.
He said the key to this would be “making the family the centrepiece of everything we do” and insisting that all policies be viewed through such a lens. This meant ensuring that US trade and economic policies were calibrated to serve the best interests of families rather than grounded in rigid ideologies, regardless of whether they were pro or anti-tariff.
The big question is whether Trump’s policies will succeed or fail in delivering for Americans who have felt left behind, with the mid-terms looming as the first major political litmus test of the Trump 2.0 era.
A poor showing will loosen his stranglehold over the party and the Republicans in congress, with all the signs suggesting that Trump faces a hard road ahead. The US President’s approval rating is stuck firmly in negative territory across all of the nation’s recent respected polls, from Reuters/Ipsos and the Economist/YouGov to the Silver Bulletin average.
“Most of his policies are incredibly unpopular,” Loge says. “Trump’s polling is underwater. His popularity is falling … His support on economic policies is falling even among Republicans.”
Barbara Weisel, the former US chief negotiator for the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trading pact (which was never ratified by Washington), has suggested that Trump’s tariffs will fail in their objective of reindustrialising America by instead increasing costs and deterring companies from relocating to the US.
Trump gets points from voters for trying to shake up the system, but the laws of politics dictate that he will be punished if those who elevated him to office feel they have been betrayed or left worse off.
Reclaiming democracy
Supporters of Trump’s conservative revolution view it as a long-overdue liberation and a vital reclaiming of democracy from unelected and left-leaning bureaucrats who comprise the deep state. This is an exercise held to be very much in keeping with the principles on which the country was founded.
Tom Fitton, the conservative president of right-wing legal advocacy group Judicial Watch who has served as a staunch ally and informal adviser to Trump, tells Inquirer there was only one man elected by the entire country.
“It’s the President of the United States,” he says. “The effort to restore democratic control of these federal agencies is historic. It’s the opposite of authoritarianism. It’s the opposite of strongmanism. He’s elected … We should be concerned if there isn’t political control of these agencies.
“Republicans were naive for decades as to the loss of that control. And the President, he’s not blind to it, which is a great development. Whenever you hear this language that an agency is independent, Republicans … should get their gander up about it.”
Furthermore, Trump’s pledge to target left-wing organisations in the wake of Kirk’s assassination is not only correct and prudent, it also is essential to ensure the health of the American experiment into the future. The survival of the country is on the line.
Fitton warns “there is a rising violent leftist cadre and mounting left-wing NGOs, activists and so on, that are pushing for the end of America as we know it, both constitutionally speaking and in terms of rights under law.
“We’re just going to see more violence and more attempts to undermine the American way – in a way that may end the republic.”
While America is going through a period “comparable to the assassinations of the 60s”, there are “opportunities for a robust defence of the rule of law and a more sophisticated and government-wide focus on … these woke, anarcho-antifa groups and their supporters that traffic in violence”.
“We have to understand that and how they are organised,” Fitton says. “The government has got to take the threat seriously. It’s the restoration of democracy.”
He warns the free speech debate had been debased to whether conservatives can make basic statements of public policy “without fear of being murdered”, while leftists want to “support murder and advocate violence against political opponents”.
On his own War Room podcast, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon described Kirk as a “casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are.” Following the initial response of the administration, Bannon said the “biggest thing is to broaden the assassination investigation from a single murder to the broader conspiracy”.
“If we are going to go to war, let’s go to war.”
Trump’s goal should be to address political violence in a considered and bipartisan manner that avoids such a war. But all the evidence suggests this is not in keeping with the spirit of the revolutionary conservatism that animates his politics, his fighting instinct and his administration’s policies.
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