‘The first page of the authoritarian playbook’: How Trump and his allies are exploiting Kirk’s killing | The shooting of Charlie Kirk
Donald Trump and MAGA allies took advantage of the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk to expand attacks on liberal groups, donors, Democrats and others by branding several critics as the “enemy within” and the “radical left” in a move that legal scholars and historians have described as authoritarian and anti-democratic.
Kirk’s killing by a lone gunman prompted Trump and his top allies to quickly launch conspiracy charges against a group of his political rivals and launch an investigation into billionaire liberal donor George Soros. They also threatened legal action against the television network ABC after their late-night star Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension ended due to rude comments about Kirk.
While Kirk’s killing was a major personal blow to Trump and his allies, a month after the shocking event, it appears to have provided cover for a sprawling retaliation campaign by the president and a MAGA scientist that is endangering civil liberties against a range of critics in the media, universities, nonprofits and other parts of American civil society, researchers say.
At a memorial service for the slain conservative leader just after Kirk’s widow poignantly said she would “forgive” his killer, Trump angrily declared: “I hate my opponents and I do not wish them the best,” words that scholars viewed as unpresidential with the potential to fuel more violence.
Likewise, even before the suspect in Kirk’s murder was arrested, Trump assumed that “radical left” language contributed to his death. He also pledged to go after the people responsible for the violence as well as “the organizations that fund and support them… We have crazy people on the extreme left, and we just have to defeat them.”
Moreover, Trump’s escalating attack on enemies was evident in his talk with hundreds of senior military officials last month when he strongly warned of the need to confront the “enemy within” and suggested that the military could be useful in his crackdown on crime in heavily Democratic cities that could serve as a military “training ground” as well.
On a related front, on October 8, as hundreds of National Guard troops prepared to enter Chicago over the objections of the city’s mayor and the governor of Illinois, both Democrats who have criticized Trump’s militaristic crackdown on immigration, Trump called for their imprisonment even though none of them had been charged with crimes.
Historians and legal experts warn that Trump and the MAGA world used Kirk’s killing to justify far-reaching attacks on numerous critics.
Steven Levitsky, a Harvard government professor who co-authored the book “How Democracies Die,” said Trump and his allies are using “the front page of the authoritarian playbook” in their accelerating attacks on their political opponents.
“You use political violence as an excuse to go after your political enemies. Some of them have been chomping at the bit to do it. They go after major opponents and other critics. They define unacceptable behavior as broadly as possible.”
Levitsky stressed that Trump’s attacks on Soros and some other major funders of Democrats and liberal groups are part of a broader attack on civil society. “The goal is to change the playing field by going after anyone in civil society who can challenge them,” he said. “One way to weaken them is to go after funders using a false pretext by associating them with violence or illegal behavior.”
Notably, Trump, in interviews days after Kirk’s murder, charged in conspiratorial and evidence-free language that the 95-year-old Soros “should be put in prison” and was a “bad person.” “man”. “We’re going to look into Soros” for possible violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), he told Fox & Friends.
The Justice Department has opened investigations into Soros’s Open Society Foundations, which over decades has spent several million dollars on civil rights, human rights and democracy programs, according to the New York Times.
Soros’ foundations have responded strongly, saying that the accusations are “politically motivated attacks on civil society” aimed at silencing opposition speech and stressing that all of their activities are “peaceful and lawful.”
Legal experts say Trump’s over-the-top campaign to prosecute Soros on RICO charges runs counter to the rule of law and is part of Trump’s broader campaign to use the Justice Department as a weapon against old enemies like former FBI Director James Comey who angered Trump to investigate Russian moves to help Trump win the 2016 election.
Last month, Trump’s chosen junior prosecutor filed an indictment charging Comey with lying to Congress and obstruction of Congress, after Trump fired the veteran prosecutor who did not pursue charges due to weak evidence. Comey pleaded not guilty on October 8.
Trump himself selected Virginia’s attorney general, over the objections of impeached veteran prosecutors. On October 9, he filed charges of bank fraud and making false statements against New York Attorney General Letitia James, whom Trump has long criticized for winning a civil case against him and others for improperly inflating his real estate assets. James described the charges against her as “baseless” and part of Trump’s “weaponization” of the American judicial system.
“Trump calling RICO to investigate Soros is trivially wrong,” said former federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig. “It is another example of him using the law as a weapon to target his enemies.”
The threat of further attacks on nonprofits was underscored when the Democracy Defenders Fund announced on October 1 that more than 3,700 groups had signed a letter sharply criticizing the administration for launching a campaign to “intimidate and silence charities through executive action.”
In addition to Trump’s retaliatory moves, Trump’s extremist deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, described the Democratic Party as a “domestic extremist organization” and blamed “terrorist networks” for Kirk’s killing. He pledged that the administration would pursue a “vast domestic terrorist network.”
To achieve this goal, Trump signed an executive memorandum two weeks after Kirk’s death called “Combating Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.”
Citing Kirk’s killing, the memo laid the groundwork for a coordinated effort by the attorney general, the Treasury secretary, and the IRS commissioner, among others. The memorandum called for “a national strategy to investigate, prosecute and disrupt entities and individuals involved in acts of political violence and intimidation with the aim of suppressing legitimate political activity or obstructing the rule of law.”
As part of this effort, Trump designated the left-wing movement Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization,” even though no such designation exists under U.S. law.
Specifically, Trump directed his administration to “use all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations—particularly those involving acts of terrorism—conducted by Antifa.”
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Likewise, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a prominent Trump ally, has instructed his office to launch comprehensive investigations into “far-left organizations that engage in or provide support for political violence.”
Despite the Trump administration’s focus on linking the “radical left” with political violence, a 2024 study found on the Department of Justice’s website stated that “far-right attacks continue to outnumber all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”
A recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that left-wing violence in the first half of 2025 has reached its highest level in 30 years, but noted that right-wing violence overall since 2016 has been much higher: The study indicated 41 attacks by left-wing extremists compared to 152 attacks by far-right extremists in these years.
Legal scholars warn that the Trump administration’s actions against a range of liberal political targets and critics since Kirk’s death reflect increasingly authoritarian tendencies.
“The hallmarks of authoritarian regimes include that they seek to undermine independent media and NGOs, dissolve legal boundaries between state and civil society, discredit critics and marginalized groups, personalize politics, and make dissent more costly,” David Posen, a law professor at Columbia University, told The Guardian. “All of these authoritarian tendencies have been on display in the Trump administration’s response to the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk.”
Historians also fear Trump will use Kirk’s death to conjure up conspiracies for political gain and revenge.
“Since the killing of Charlie Kirk, President Trump has amplified and expanded his propensity to bring conspiracy charges,” said Russell Muirhead, who heads Dartmouth’s government department.
The target is “domestic terrorist organizations,” which appear to include peaceful pro-democracy and anti-communist entities, such as the Open Society Foundations founded by George Soros. The effect is to characterize the entire “left” as a conspiracy bent on destroying the country – including the Democratic Party.
Muirhead added: “The danger here is clear: conspiracy charges turn peaceful political opponents into enemies. Once this is achieved, they no longer need respect or tolerance. They can be integrated into shadowy ‘domestic terrorist networks’ and imprisoned – or worse.”
Muirhead’s concerns were underscored in Trump’s September 30 speech in which he warned of the “enemy within” before an audience of hundreds of senior military leaders, declaring emphatically that “America is being invaded from within,” and claiming that “Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape.”
Trump described these cities as “very unsafe places and we’re going to fix them one by one,” a mission that would form a “major part” of what some military leaders would do. Trump also bluntly suggested that the military “should use some of these dangerous cities as training sites.”
Trump’s extreme proposals for a military buildup appear to ignore the nearly 150-year-old Posse Comitatus law that restricts the use of federal troops in law enforcement matters on U.S. soil with some loopholes and exceptions.
Legal experts have also raised loud alarms about Trump’s extreme military plans.
“For a president with dictatorial ambitions to declare that people in Democratic-led cities are ‘domestic enemies’ who must be controlled using the military runs counter to the very principles on which this country was founded,” said Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission who now teaches law at American University.
“One can only wonder whether he will continue to expand the Democratic cities in which he will use the military and whether this military presence will continue until the 2026 midterm elections, in an effort to try to undermine free and fair elections.”
“President Trump’s recent comment on military leadership about the enemy ‘from within’ is another familiar authoritarian trope — and a particularly chilling one,” Posen agrees.
More broadly, legal scholars say Trump’s far-reaching attacks on the radical left endanger the “laws and traditions” on which democracy is based.
“Trump is using obscene rhetoric to try to legitimize his unconstitutional transgressions,” said Peter Shin, a constitutional law professor at New York University. “Whether it’s groundlessly withholding money from private institutions that fail to kneel or a fantasy about using cities with Democratic mayors to train the military, Trump is taking a callous approach to the laws and traditions that have long supported a strong American democracy.”