Investigators have said little so far about the motive for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, although the Republican governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, has said, without providing specifics, that the shooter held a “leftist ideology” and acted alone.
On Monday, though, Trump administration officials united in an effort to pin the blame for the killing of the right-wing youth organizer on something much larger: a network of their political enemies.
Speaking on Kirk’s podcast, Vice President JD Vance vowed that the administration would “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence,” without offering any evidence that any such network exists or was involved in Kirk’s death.
Behind the scenes, two senior administration officials told my colleagues Katie Rogers and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, federal officials were working to identify organizations that funded or supported violence against conservatives. The goal, they reported, was to categorize such activity that led to violence as domestic terrorism.
It was the latest escalation of a blame game that began last week when Trump, speaking just hours after the shooting, said that rhetoric from the “radical left” had contributed to Kirk’s killing, before anything was known about the shooter. The assassination, my colleagues Tyler Pager and Nick Corasaniti wrote this weekend, has added fuel to Trump’s campaign against his political opponents in a presidency he has already used to pursue retribution against his enemies.
Democratic officials have widely condemned Kirk’s killing and political violence more broadly, which afflicts figures on both sides of the aisle. But some are beginning to warn that the crackdown could be a pretext for something even more expansive.
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