Donald Trump has been making anti-democratic moves since returning to the White House eight months ago, from attacking universities to law firms. Now, the president is using the horrible murder of right-wing political commentator Charlie Kirk as a pretext to ramp up his authoritarian efforts, openly boasting of the coming crackdown.
The danger was always real. It is now getting worse. Trump wants to hobble opponents, the press, even his allies, as he seeks to consolidate power. It is textbook authoritarianism, the rule of the strongmen and dictators he admires so much.
A ludicrous $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times seeks to cow the free press from criticizing him, even though that right is guaranteed in the Constitution. Ironically, Wednesday, Sept. 17, is Constitution Day. It is also the congressional recognized Citizenship Day, celebrating immigrants who become naturalized. And also ironically, Tuesday was National Voter Registration Day, celebrating Americans signing up to vote.
Trump has attacked all three concepts.
But Trump doesn’t care about irony. He only cares about Trump.
Vice President JD Vance and White House aide Stephen Miller are among those administration figures promising a wide-ranging crackdown, targeting foundations, nongovernmental groups and other institutions they claim are inciting violence but also happen to be the very groups that could act as a check on Trump’s autocratic designs.
If Trump, Vance and Miller really believed the problem in America is that people are unable to freely speak their minds, the last thing they’d be doing to mark Kirk’s death is launch a crackdown on their political enemies.
But speech isn’t on their minds. Power is.
Neither is this actually about Kirk’s accused assassin, who it seems might have acted completely alone and even his general ideology remains in question. And where was the outrage when Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman was gunned down?
You don’t have to be a Democrat to see what’s going on here. It’s time for those who thought Trump would lower egg prices or that America was drifting too far to the left to stop pretending this is OK and accept what is happening to our nation.
MAGA and its ideological luminaries have been planning to harness the awesome powers of the federal government to break the back of ideologically oppositional civil society since well before Trump even got reelected; this was explicitly part of the Project 2025 framework that various right wing groups developed as a roadmap for his presidency.
It’s something that Vance himself has been talking about openly since well before he was vice president.
Trump is executing the game plan.
Already, the administration has taken aim at the press, universities, think tanks, law firms, and even individual political figures and government officials like New York Attorney General Tish James and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. The statements of the last two days herald a phase of even heavier-handed efforts.
It seems almost beyond the point to point out that the kind of crackdown they are describing is patently illegal, trampling the First Amendment and probably violating multitudes of other laws and constitutional principles.
We hope that the institutions targeted hold the line and fight back. We’ve certainly seen that folding has not been a successful deterrent. Still, fighting the might of the federal government is an expensive and complicated task in the best of times, which is part of Trump’s strategy.
Even if it came to light that the shooter did have some sort of link to established liberal groups, we do not in this country subscribe to the principle of holding people and institutions liable for what a single person chooses to draw from otherwise protected speech.
That principle is so ingrained in our legal fabric that we have explicit and extraordinarily few exceptions centering on the concept of clear and present danger of lawbreaking and harm. It’s what actually does make America great.
Using Kirk’s heinous murder as a launching pad for retaliation against perceived enemies is no tribute to Kirk.
But that won’t bother Trump. Power is all that matters and Trump is about to try and grab more of it.
