Before the president of the United States announced on this morning’s broadcast of Fox & Friends that the man who’d assassinated Charlie Kirk was finally in custody—“I think, with a high degree of certainty, we have him”—he had already told the American people who was to blame.
Within hours of Kirk’s killing, when law enforcement had not released so much as a photograph of the suspected shooter, Donald Trump addressed the nation, accusing the “radical left.” His assertion fanned breathless speculation on social media that the shooter was some kind of operative, an agent of organized political violence, or maybe even a point man in an elaborate conspiracy involving antifa, Israeli intelligence, or operatives working for Kirk’s rivals in the MAGA sphere. Apparently inaccurate press reporting, attributed to federal law-enforcement officials, suggested that the shooter had carved messages espousing “transgender” ideology onto a bullet casing.
Not many of the people speculating the loudest online predicted that the killer was a young man from a deeply pro-Trump corner of Utah, raised by registered Republicans. But that’s the picture of 22-year-old Tyler Robinson that began to emerge today, when Utah Governor Spencer Cox announced that Robinson was in custody and would be charged.
“I was praying that, if this had to happen here, that it wouldn’t be one of us,” Cox said of his fellow Utahns. The governor, who has made it his political mission to lower the rhetorical temperature in his state and the country, seemed at times to be talking directly to the president and to those of Kirk’s supporters who have portrayed his assassination as the first shot in a war with the left.
“There is one person responsible for what happened here,” Cox said, his voice quavering slightly, “and that person is now in custody.”
Robinson’s arrest prompted Trump’s opponents to excoriate the president and others for rushing to judgment. Former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger, an ardent never-Trumper, asked his followers on X to send him any instances of politicians or other leaders “blaming the left, or declaring some war, or anything before we knew who the shooter was.” Political point-scoring is inevitable and, for some, deeply satisfying. But the truth is, much remains unknown and unclear about why Robinson, a young man with no history of criminal activity, allegedly sought out Kirk and killed him on Wednesday with a long-range-rifle shot to the neck.
Robinson “had become more political in recent years,” Cox said, citing a statement from a family member to law enforcement. At a recent family dinner, Robinson had mentioned that Kirk would be visiting Utah Valley University, and had discussed with another family member “why they didn’t like him and the viewpoints he had,” Cox said.
Even in reliably red Utah, support for Trump and his allies is hardly universal. The state’s Republican voters tend to prefer the gentler political stylings of their former senator Mitt Romney or the current governor, whose quixotic effort to find political common ground has often put him on a collision course with the president. Washington County, where Robinson and his family live, is a fast-growing area where unreserved support for Trump is expressed in MAGA flags that fly alongside the Stars and Stripes.
Authorities haven’t said what they think compelled Robinson to pick up a rifle and drive more than 250 miles to Kirk’s event. Robinson’s parents may eventually provide more answers. By outward appearances, they were close with their son. His mother’s Facebook page was filled with family photos from trips and holidays. She gushed about Tyler’s 4.0 high-school GPA. “His options are endless,” she wrote in one post.
Robinson confessed to his parents after he drove home from the university campus, two federal law-enforcement officials told us, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation. His parents then called their family pastor, who happens to be a court security officer with the U.S. Marshals Service. He called a deputy marshal, who came to the family home and, after realizing that Robinson was indeed the alleged shooter, contacted federal law enforcement, the officials said.
Federal investigators will surely scour Robinson’s communications and online presence looking for explanations. Investigators spoke with Robinson’s roommate, who showed them messages Robinson had allegedly sent about retrieving a rifle from a “drop point” and “leaving the rifle in a bush,” Cox said. Investigators later found a rifle in the woods near the crime scene wrapped in a towel, as Robinson had said it would be in his messages to his roommate. Robinson had sent the messages on the social platform Discord. FBI investigators will likely question his online network of friends; bonds forged on the internet can be stronger than those in real life.
Robinson also mentioned in his messages that he had engraved bullet casings, Cox said. One was scrawled with the words Hey fascist! Catch! Another was marked with a series of arrows—one pointing up, another to the right, and then three pointing down, an image that some have taken to refer to a gaming maneuver that summons a powerful weapon in the hugely popular Helldivers 2, an online shooter game.
On Discord this afternoon, fans and players of the game worried that Kirk’s murder, and Robinson’s invocation of Helldivers 2, could smear players and turn the right’s anger toward them. Many players condemned Kirk’s murder and encouraged their friends to stop talking about the news and get back to the game.
Cox seemed to want everyone to take that advice. Recalling Kirk’s own words, he urged Americans to put down their phones, get offline, and remember that the internet “is not real life.” Cox compared the public trauma of Kirk’s killing to that of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in 1963. The nation had been at a turning point then, he said: “This is our moment. Do we escalate, or do we find an off-ramp?”
During Trump’s interview with Fox & Friends, a co-host pointed to acts of political violence on the left and the right and asked, “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?” Trump replied that “radicals on the right” are concerned about crime and illegal immigration, painting them as zealous but restrained responders to civil disorder. “The radicals on the left are the problem,” he continued, “and they are vicious, and they’re horrible, and they’re politically savvy.”
Robinson’s political views will probably become clearer with time. But in the hours after he was first identified, in the absence of evidence that he was quite the exemplar of the radical left that Trump had predicted, the president seemed more interested in changing the subject.
On the White House lawn this afternoon, reporters asked the president how he was holding up after the death of his close friend. “I think very good,” he said. “And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks? They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House.”
He took no further questions.
McKay Coppins and Marc Novicoff contributed reporting.
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