America Needs Unifying Leadership. Instead, Trump Plans Crackdown On Dissent.
The Trump Admin is exploiting Charlie Kirk's assassination as a pretext to blame and target liberal groups. America needs leaders who heal our divisions, not weaponize them to fuel their power grabs.
Thank you for reading! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.
In times of deep political strife and violent division, America has been best served when its leaders appeal to our better angels. It’s easy to feed our worst impulses and seek to further pit us against each other. The more challenging path, especially in an information ecosystem that algorithmically incentivizes vitriol, is to take the temperature down and encourage Americans to look at what unites us, not what pushes us apart.
The unifying leadership that America needs and deserves is not coming from President Trump and his administration. Instead, we’re getting exploitative blame-seeking that falsely pins all political violence on one side of the spectrum to provide a pretense to crack down on liberal dissent.
Within hours of Charlie Kirk’s murder last Wednesday, President Trump released a video shot in the Oval Office that blamed his killing on the “radical left” and promised to “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.”
Trump’s statement was released before the public or the administration had literally any information on the shooting suspect. Nevertheless, President Trump was already laying the groundwork to target liberal organizations.
In an appearance on Fox & Friends on Friday morning, President Trump was asked how to unite America. Host Ainsley Earhardt asked, “We have radicals on the right as well, we have radicals on the left… How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?”
Trump replied by saying, “I'll tell you something that's gonna get me in trouble, but I couldn't care less,” he then went on to attack the “radical left” at length.
As the next few days unfolded, it became increasingly clear that President Trump’s attacks on the left weren’t just knee-jerk reactions to Charlie Kirk’s murder. It was part of a calculated effort to exploit Kirk’s murder and provide a false justification to target liberal groups who had absolutely nothing to do with the killing.
Let’s dive in.
Trump Admin Exploits Charlie Kirk’s Death To Justify Crackdown On Liberal Groups
After Kirk’s suspected killer, Tyler Robinson, was taken into custody, a more complicated picture emerged. Robinson is reportedly from a conservative family, but Utah Governor Spencer Cox (R) said he held “leftist ideology.”
Robinson fits the mold of recent lone wolf shooters. Robinson’s politics appear to have shifted over time, but one thing is clear - Robinson was not part of some widespread, liberal-funded terrorist movement to target conservatives. In spite of the facts, that’s how the Trump Administration is increasingly discussing this.
On Monday, Vice President J.D. Vance guest-hosted Charlie Kirk’s podcast and used it as a vehicle to perpetuate the false narrative that liberal groups were behind Kirk’s murder and to proclaim that the administration would be targeting those groups.
Vice President Vance falsely said that “it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far-left." Data indicates otherwise. In fact, after Kirk’s killing, the DOJ reportedly scrubbed a study from its website that proclaimed, “Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists.”
Facts didn’t get in the way of the Trump Administration’s assertions. Vance said that the White House plans to go after the “NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence."
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who sat across from Vance, then walked through exactly what the White House plans. It’s a long quote, but it’s so dangerous it needs to be laid out here in full:
“We are going to channel all the anger we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks … The organized doxxing campaigns. The organized riots. The organized street violence. The organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification. Posting people’s addresses. Combining that with messaging designed to trigger and incite violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement. 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, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
To be clear, there is literally zero evidence that any left-wing or liberal organizations played any part in Charlie Kirk’s murder, but the Trump Administration is using Kirk’s death as a pretext to go after these organizations. Will the Trump Administration deem any organization they don’t like as part of a terrorist network? Will they consider organizations that lead protests as “organized riots”? How will they target them?
The New York Times has some more reporting on that. It’s not just all talk. There are real plans in motion:
Two senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal planning, said that cabinet secretaries and federal department heads were working to identify organizations that funded or supported violence against conservatives.
The goal, they said, was to categorize as domestic terrorism left-wing activity that they said led to violence, a continuation of existing efforts by federal agencies to try to punish liberal groups they have accused of funding or otherwise supporting violent protests. One tactic has been to target the tax-exempt status of nonprofits that are critical of Mr. Trump or conservatives.
How exactly they will go after these organizations and their funding is unclear, but President Trump has given hints. Also from that New York Times story:
The president also promised investigations into who was funding and organizing the left, suggesting the violence was somehow coordinated. In recent days, Mr. Trump has renewed calls for prosecutors to file racketeering charges against George Soros, one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors. Mr. Trump and his allies have long claimed without evidence that Mr. Soros foments violent protests. (A spokesman for Mr. Soros’s organization, Open Society Foundations, denied the allegations and called the threats “outrageous.”)
The Associated Press also reported on the planning:
Without establishing any link to last week’s shooting, the Republican president and members of his administration have discussed classifying some groups as domestic terrorists, ordering racketeering investigations and revoking tax-exempt status for progressive nonprofits. The White House pointed to Indivisible, a progressive activist network, and the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, as potential subjects of scrutiny.
Let’s be clear. This is an overt, authoritarian effort to target dissent. The Trump Administration appeared to already be planning these moves and is merely using Kirk’s murder as a trigger.
The Trump Administration is not interested in unity. They don’t want to turn the temperature down. They want to ramp it up and go after their critics.
The Leadership We Need
At every turn, Donald Trump and his imitators have seized on the flaws in the American psyche, pulled them to the forefront, and exploited them. Whenever Donald Trump has been presented with an opportunity to unite the country or divide us over the past 10 years, he has selected the most divisive choice almost every single time, all for personal gain.
Peter Baker, Chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, published a particularly poignant article making this point on Sunday. Its headline sprawled across the publication’s digital front page as the top story: “In an Era of Deep Polarization, Unity Is Not Trump’s Mission.” The subtitle read, “President Trump does not subscribe to the traditional notion of being president for all Americans.”
The article’s lede summarized Donald Trump’s vitriolic approach to politics:
“Mr. Trump has long made clear that coming together is not the mission of his presidency. In an era of deep polarization in American society, he rarely talks about healing. While other presidents have typically tried to lower the temperature in moments of national crisis, Mr. Trump turns up the flames. He does not subscribe to the traditional notion of being president for all the people. He acts as president of red America and the people who agree with him, while those who do not are portrayed as enemies and traitors deserving payback.”
America deserves better than this. You deserve better than this.
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 71% of Americans believe American society is broken.
When America is broken, it can’t be fixed by targeting our fractures and deepening them. These schisms need to be mended with a new style of unifying leadership.
One person who I think models unifying leadership well is Texas Democrat James Talarico, who just launched his Senate candidacy last week. He’s been on my radar for a long time. Back in my days running Rantt Media, we interviewed him for his first State House race in 2028.
He’s grown a large following on TikTok for his unifying messaging, meeting this political moment with stories of hope, unity, and an interesting use of religion to make the argument for progressive causes. Here’s what he said in his announcement video that I think models the kind of leadership this moment requires:
“The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power… They want to keep us from realizing there’s far more that unites us than divides us. Because once we do, we’ll come together — across party, across race, across gender, across religion — to fix what’s broken in our country and take back power for ourselves and our communities.”
Utah Governor Spencer Cox also deserves some credit for how he’s called for unity in the wake of Kirk’s killing. Former President Obama praised Cox in remarks this week.
I’m not arguing that Democrats shouldn’t fight for what they believe in. Talarico himself was among the Texas Republicans who fled the state to break quorum and draw attention to the GOP’s gerrymandering push. Authoritarian actions should be met with forceful, non-violent pushback.
What I’m arguing is that we need leaders who speak truth to power, but speak unity to the people. Hold the liars in power accountable, but speak to the better angels of everyday Americans.
This volatile political strife is not sustainable. We need to start thinking about how we navigate out of this moment. If liberals want to provide an alternative to Trumpism, all of us in the pro-democracy coalition need to model the politics we want to see in America.
Americans are tired of this divisiveness and want to harmonize with one another. They might not know it yet, but they just need to have that future picture painted for them.
