This article is part of HuffPost’s biweekly politics newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Two days on, little is known about the circumstances surrounding the murder of far-right activist Charlie Kirk at a Utah college on Wednesday. The FBI announced the arrest of a suspect, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, on Friday, but no motive has yet been announced.
But even before Robinson’s arrest, when nothing was known about the shooter, right-wing voices from President Donald Trump on down quickly called for retribution against their political enemies, whom they immediately blamed for the death of their ally.
Calls have ranged from declarations of “war” against Democrats and liberals to allusions to the 1933 burning of the Reichstag that led to the suspension of civil liberties in Germany and, eventually, the passage of the Enabling Act, giving Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party unreviewable power to crush their domestic opponents.
“Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war,” Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Trump, said Wednesday on his podcast named “War Room.” “We are at war in this country. We are.”
“They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not. What are we gonna do about it?” Fox News host Jesse Watters said Wednesday night. “Everybody’s accountable … the politicians, the media, and all these rats out there.”
“It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos,” Chris Rufo, the right-wing activist close to the Trump administration, wrote on X.
Similar sentiments were posted by online far-right conspiracists and influencers like InfoWars’ Alex Jones, Libs of TikTok influencer Chaya Raichik, Trump confidant Laura Loomer, The Federalist and Oathkeepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his part in the Jan. 6 insurrection and later had his sentence commuted by Trump. Rhodes called for Trump to “invoke the Insurrection Act.”
MEHMET ESER via Getty Images
“You should declare the left in this country is in obvious open rebellion against the law of the United States,” Rhodes said on Jones’ InfoWars show on Wednesday.
When questioned by a reporter on Thursday, Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) blamed “every one of you” in the press for Kirk’s death.
“You are responsible for this, because you are echoing the horrifically horrible political violent rhetoric produced by the Democrat Party,” Van Orden said.
“There is no longer any middle ground,” Rep. Bob Onder (R-Mo.) said on the floor of the House on Wednesday.
In a post viewed more than 2.6 million times, white supremacist activist Matt Forney called Kirk’s murder “the American Reichstag fire,” and called for “a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned.”
These calls for political repression are falling on fertile ground. As he has repeatedly done in his political life, Trump has refused to perform unity, as most presidents would do at such moments, and instead poured fuel on the fire in a speech from the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office on Wednesday night.
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. 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, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”
Trump’s exclusion of political violence committed by his allies was intentional. When asked about violence from right-wing radicals on Fox News on Friday, Trump replied, “I couldn’t care less.”
But beyond a promise of vengeance for Kirk, Trump’s words are also a promise to turbocharge the push for autocratic consolidation already underway. And there is a blueprint for him to do so.
After running a campaign promising “retribution” against the “lying” press and the “evil” Democrats he called “the enemy from within,” Trump has attempted to wave away due process protections in his mass deportation campaign, waged extortion campaigns against companies, universities and law firms, targeted Democratic politicians and party-connected entities for arrest and investigation and sent, or threatened to send, the military into Democratic-run cities as a form of punishment.
“[I have] the right to do whatever I want,” Trump said on Aug. 26. “I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country is in danger — and it is in danger in these cities — I can do it.”
Kirk’s murder now serves as a potential jumping-off point for a much broader crackdown. Political assassinations or attacks have long served as justification for authoritarian consolidation or brutal crackdowns on disfavored groups throughout history.
Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images
The most infamous example is that referenced by Forney: the Reichstag Fire. Soon after Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor in 1933, a Dutch leftist, although not a Communist, set the country’s national legislature, the Reichstag, on fire in a bid in response to the treatment of workers.
Hitler and his second-in-command Hermann Göring theorized, based on no evidence, that this was the beginning of a Communist revolution. They convinced the legislature of this conspiracy and secured the passage of a law to suspend civil liberties. The police and Nazi militias went about attacking, arresting and detaining thousands of Communist Party leaders and members into the just opened Dachau concentration camp while banning other parties from campaigning. Weeks later, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, commencing the Nazi Party dictatorship that lasted until Hitler’s death in 1945.
Similarly, the assassination of a German embassy official by a Jewish teenager in Paris in 1938 served as the pretext for the antisemitic riots against Jewish Germans known as Kristallnacht.
And yes, it has happened in the United States. In 1919, mail bombs sent by anarchists to government officials led to a vicious crackdown from the Department of Justice, known as the Palmer Raids, which rounded up thousands of immigrants it believed were anarchists or communists for detention and deportation. But this crackdown eventually fell apart amid internal division in President Woodrow Wilson’s administration and a legal response from the ACLU, which was created in response to the raids.
The Palmer Raids may now serve as a model for the crackdown that Trump’s allies wish him to enact from here.
“The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” Rufo posted to X.
And instead of being shut down, it has the potential to snowball. Unlike Wilson, Trump is an aspiring autocrat who revels in political violence and seeks to rule by fiat. Violence colors his rhetoric, with constant references to blood, savagery, enemies and war. Just days ago he threatened Chicago with a military intervention by saying on social media that the city would “find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” after he issued an executive order purporting to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War.
A National Guard deployment to Chicago would have come from a declaration of emergency granting Trump broad powers, but Trump has used such declarations plenty. Spurious emergency declarations declared on the basis of non-emergency events, as a means to centralize authority and bypass Congress and the courts, have become a hallmark of his second term: He deployed troops to Washington, D.C., after a Trump administration employee was a victim of street crime in the city, which was used as a pretext to federalize the D.C. Police Department. Similarly, protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles were used to justify the deployment of troops there over the summer, despite the objections of city and state officials who said they had the situation under control.
Universal History Archive via Getty Images
This impulse was seen back on Jan. 6, 2021, during the violent insurrection that Trump fomented, which he called “a day of love.” The insurrection marked the pinnacle — so far — of his support for political violence and willingness to foment crisis to create an emergency situation. Despite the numerous assaults on police officers, threats to kill lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence and the deaths of five police officers in its aftermath, Trump praised the insurrectionists and, upon returning to power, pardoned them all.
On announcing his 2024 campaign, Trump pledged to his supporters, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” That retribution would be carried against his Democratic opponents, whom he called “the enemy from within” and threatened with specific force. The enemy within, Trump said, “should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard — or, if really necessary, by the military.”
He has reveled in political violence targeting his opponents with praise for assailants and mockery of victims. He joked about the attack on Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022. When a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota was killed and another wounded in an attack perpetrated by a right-wing assailant, Trump called it a “terrible thing,” but added that Democratic Gov. Tim Walz is a “terrible governor” so he wouldn’t call to offer condolences.
This mockery of Democrats, joined with conspiracy theorizing, who face political violence has become a hallmark of the right in the Trump era.
After the Minnesota attacks, right-wingers rushed to social media to claim that the attack was committed by a leftist.
“Nightmare on Waltz [sic] Street,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said, mocking the governor, alongside a picture of the attacker on X. (Lee later took down the post after being shamed by his colleagues from Minnesota.)
“The far left is murderously violent,” billionaire Elon Musk wrote on X at the time. Lee responded, “Fact check: TRUE.”
Kirk himself got in on the act at the time, attacking Walz with claims that the gunman was an anti-Trump protester, “Total shocker that smearing a duly-elected president who won an overwhelming electoral mandate as a fascist or a king leads to violent political radicalization.”
This mode of politics has created a simmering atmosphere of fear and political violence across the country. It has torn at the nation’s fabric, threatening to plunge it into the abyss of tyranny or civil strife. Trump’s aspirations of total power hinge on this atmosphere — as he is otherwise very unpopular and holds only the slimmest legislative majorities in Congress.
Kirk’s murder may give him the pretext to try to enact the wildest fantasies of his most extreme supporters. That may prove difficult without popular support or a legal structure to pull it off — but it doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.