Imagine that President Donald Trump actively wanted to encourage radical right-wing groups and “lone wolf” individuals to wage open violent warfare on anyone they deem a leftist anywhere in America. If Trump wanted to send that precise message, he could hardly do much better than the words he actually did deliver on Fox and Friends on Friday Morning.
“We have radicals on the right, as well—we have radicals on the left,” Fox’s Ainsley Earhardt said as Trump listened during a discussion about the recently assassinated Charlie Kirk. Earhardt continued: “How do we fix this country?”
“I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less,” Trump replied. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They’re saying, ‘We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.’”
Trump concluded: “The radicals on the left are the problem.”
This exchange is being vastly overshadowed by the arrest of Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old unaffiliated voter in Utah, for allegedly assassinating Kirk. But whatever more we learn about Robinson, this Trump moment mustn’t skate by unnoticed. Though Trump has encouraged right-wing political violence for years—including inciting a violent insurrection and pardoning hundreds of supporters for it—he has also been known to rhetorically denounce political violence from both sides at key moments, or has gone through the motions of doing so.
But now Trump has broken with even that ritual, one enacted by presidents in both parties for decades. “I couldn’t care less” about radicals on the right, Trump explicitly said, declaring straight out that right-wing extremism is justified as a response to the alleged extremism of the left.
That is likely to be received as a clear message by radical right-wing forces across the country. Kirk’s assassination has triggered many on the right to call for full-scale violent civil conflict. “Charlie tried to have conversations with you on the left, and you killed him for it,” seethed influencer Matt Walsh, calling on the right to “fight back” in response. Libs of TikTok screamed: “THIS IS WAR.”
Notably, those calls to arms came well before we knew anything about Kirk’s alleged assassin. These declarations openly, unabashedly declare that the right has now been given the excuse it needs to wage open season on the left. On Fox, Trump has basically given this the green light.
“That statement is basically a permission slip,” said Jared Holt, who tracks extremist activity for the online research group Open Measures. Holt means this in two senses: Trump’s statement offers permission to broader mainstream audiences to write off the importance of radical right-wing violence, and is also aimed at right-wing extremist activity itself.
“It’s very likely that radical right groups that talk about Trump’s statement are going to view it as an indirect endorsement,” Holt added.
Kirk’s murder has ignited the perennial online war over which “side” is more guilty of political violence. Here’s a very partial list of prominent horrors: Aimed at the right we’ve seen the gristly shooting of Representative Steve Scalise, the two assassination attempts on Trump, and now the killing of Kirk. In the other direction, we’ve had numerous mass shootings motivated by “great replacement theory,” the vicious assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, the assassination of a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, and of course the January 6 insurrection.
Kirk’s alleged assassin was apparently in the grip of a bundle of incoherent views rooted in extensive online meme brainrot. Perhaps he will turn out to be “more” left than right; perhaps not. But either way, to engage in these comparisons at times like these is to fight on the wrong field.
When certain far-right voices vow retribution in response to Kirk’s murder, they’re seizing on it as a bad-faith pretext to wage open warfare on liberals and leftists who are not guilty of any political violence at all. As Brian Beutler notes, only the right’s major institutional players do this.
Put another way: No amount of reasoning about who actually has waged political violence and who has not—or about who has actually been victimized and who has not—can make headway against that push. The entire point of it is to fake-justify the targeting of innocents.
Look at what the president said just after the assassination of Kirk:
For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country and 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 and law enforcement officials.
As Jonathan Chait notes, here Trump treats political violence as if it only exists on one side of the spectrum. I’d add something else: I’m unaware of any other recent president explicitly vowing to unleash the power of the American state on a vast, inchoate ideological group in quite this way.
Trump’s wording in this prewritten speech is deliberate: He says his administration will target everyone it can find who contributed to the assassination of Kirk. The clear message is that anyone who can be blamed for Kirk’s death even speciously and pretextually is now subject to retribution by the full force of the government and Trump’s security services. Note that this includes liberal-left “organizations” as well.
It shouldn’t escape notice that Stephen Miller recently called the entire Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization,” or that Miller is a close ally of FBI Director Kash Patel. One imagines that Miller is whispering in Trump’s ear that Kirk’s assassination frees him to defy the courts with abandon and is conspiring with Patel to draw up plans for going after “domestic extremist” Democrats in what could look like a revival of the FBI domestic political spying of the 1960s.
If you think that sounds far-fetched, note that leading MAGA figures very much expect something like this, as these examples collected by Zack Beauchamp document:
The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years. It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.
— Christopher F. Rufo
(@realchrisrufo) September 10, 2025
This. A thousand times this. Left-wing violence is out of control, and it’s not random. Either we destroy the NGO/donor patronage network that enables and foments it, or it will destroy us. https://t.co/eOG1MbenL4
— Blake Masters (@bgmasters) September 10, 2025
We need whistleblowers right now more than ever: If the FBI gets enlisted in this threatened campaign of state retribution—which seems likely, given that Patel vowed exactly this before Trump won—we need to know what sort of planning for this is taking place on the inside. And now that Trump has declared right-wing extremist targeting of the left fully justified, we also need to know if the FBI is further turning a blind eye to far-right paramilitary mobilizations.
Obviously, presidents are supposed to try to calm tensions at such times, which is why they usually call for restraint on both sides. True, invoking a “norm” like this one seems preciously naïve when the authoritarian president is openly waging war against blue America on many fronts. But let’s not forget that there’s a reason presidents have typically denounced political violence on both sides: What presidents say on this topic matters.
“When any national political leader blames the other party for political violence, this only raises the temperature on both sides,” University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, who researches the issue, tells me.
Pape says Trump’s statement on Fox represents something new. “There’s never been a president in our lifetimes who has excused political violence on his own side,” Pape notes, adding that Trump should instead “restrain extremist responses to the assassination of Kirk.”
Unfortunately, that’s not what Trump is doing at all. At a time when some of his most prominent supporters are calling for open season on liberals and the left, he’s functionally saying: Go for it. The MAGA-captured American state has your back. We’re behind you all the way.
The post Trump Just Went on Fox and Issued an Unnerving Threat Against Liberals appeared first on New Republic.
