Charlie Kirk, an influential right-wing activist and close ally of Donald Trump, was shot and killed on Wednesday (10 September) during a public event at Utah Valley University. Mobile phone videos posted online showed Kirk, the co-founder of the conservative youth organisation Turning Point USA, holding a microphone and taking questions from the crowd beneath a white tent at what he called his “Prove Me Wrong Table” when a single gunshot sounded. Kirk slumped backwards in his seat. The students around him began screaming and running away.
Later that evening, Trump announced Kirk’s death on social media. “The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead,” Trump wrote. “No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us.”
Republican senator Markwayne Mullin said that Kirk’s wife, Erika, and their two young children, were both at the event, and urged people to pray for the family. Kirk was 31.
A manhunt is currently underway after two initial suspects were taken into custody for questioning and then released.
The first order response must be unequivocal condemnation across the political spectrum. The murder of any political figure, from the left or right, no matter their views, is a tragedy – not just for the victim’s immediate family but for the wider political system in the United States. The extraordinary eruption of political violence in the US in recent years – including two assassination attempts against Trump last year and the murder of a Minnesota state representative, Melissa Hortman, and her husband Mark in June – will not end with the shooting of Charlie Kirk. The only real certainty at this point is that more violence will follow.
The next question, then, is how the American right – and Trump in particular – responds to this tragedy. Kirk was a close ally to the Trump administration, largely thanks to his sway with young men built up over years with his campus tours and podcast. Yet it seems unlikely that the president will use this moment to try to bring the country together, recognising that the bitter political divisions that helped to fuel his return to power now represent a threat to the foundations of US democracy itself. It’s even less likely that Trump or his party will finally be moved to tackle the escalating terror of gun violence in America.
Trump has been telling his supporters for years that he is fighting against “radical left lunatics” and “extremists” on the other side of the political divide. (This narrative ignores the fact that one of the men who attempted to assassinate him last year was a registered Republican). He has called for past presidents, and some of his own former officials, to be tried for treason, or even put to death. The US National Guard is currently deployed on the streets of the capital following the attempted carjacking of a Trump administration staffer in August. Trump has already deployed active-duty marines to Los Angeles, and threatened to send federal troops into Chicago and other Democratic-led cities, on the basis of a largely imaginary crime wave – in reality violent crime is decreasing – and declared multiple manufactured emergencies.
Hours after Kirk was killed, Trump released a video of him speaking from the Oval Office. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said, staring into the camera. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.”
The right now has its martyr. The left must unite in condemning his killer. There are dangerous days ahead.
[See also: Donald Trump is creating a personal paramilitary force]
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