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      Trump declines to call for unity after Charlie Kirk killing in stunning move

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      Donald Trump has declined to call for the US to come together as a way of fixing the country’s divisions in the wake of the assassination of his close associate, the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, preferring to cast “vicious and horrible” radicals on the left of US politics as the sole problem.In an interview on Fox & Friends on Friday morning, the US president was asked what he intended to do to heal the wounds of Kirk’s shooting in Utah. “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?” he was asked by the show’s co-host Ainsley Earhardt, who commented that there were radicals operating on the left and right of US politics.Less than 48 hours after Kirk was shot in broad daylight on the campus of Utah Valley University, Trump replied: “I tell you something that is going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.”He went on: “The radicals on the right are radical because they don’t want to see crime … The radicals on the left are the problem – and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy. They want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders. The worst thing that happened to this country.”Trump’s refusal to seek a common bipartisan way forward at a time of profound national anger, fear and mourning was a stunning move for a sitting US president, even by his standards.The US has a long history of presidents using their rhetorical powers to try to overcome political fissures. The pinnacle perhaps was Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address towards the end of the civil war, in which he sought to “bind up the nation’s wounds” and made a point of striving for unity “with malice toward none, with charity for all”.In more recent times, Joe Biden used his inaugural address in 2021, just days after the insurrection by Trump supporters at the US Capitol on January 6, to call for unity, without which, he said, “there is no peace, only bitterness and fury”.Trump’s appearance on Fox News made clear he has no intention of following that rhetorical tradition. Instead, the tenor of his response to the Kirk shooting has been hyper-partisan and grounded in retribution.In Friday’s comments, he threatened the philanthropist George Soros with a Rico investigation of the sort normally reserved for organised crime. He accused Soros of funding “professional agitators” who were engaging in “more than protest, this is real agitation, this is riots on the streets”.In an Oval Office address delivered hours after Kirk was pronounced dead, Trump made menacing remarks indicating he would seek revenge against “organizations that fund and support” political violence. He laid blame for the current plight entirely on what he called the “radical left”.The president has already used his second term in the White House to turn the heat up on those he regards as his political enemies. He has authorised an investigation into the main fundraising channel for the Democratic party, ActBlue, and threatened to rescind the tax-exempt status of progressive groups such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) and environmental groups. More

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      Missouri Republicans approve redistricting that gives GOP additional seat in Congress

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      Missouri Republicans approved a new congressional map on Friday that adds an additional GOP-friendly seat in Congress, a boost to Donald Trump as he tries to redraw districts across the US to stave off losses in next year’s midterms.Republicans currently hold six of Missouri’s eight congressional seats. The new map would eliminate a district currently represented by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver in Kansas City. Cleaver, who was Kansas City’s first Black mayor, has been in Congress for two decades. The new map splits up voters in the district and places them instead into more GOP-friendly ones.The plan now goes to Missouri’s governor, Mike Kehoe, a Republican, who is expected to sign it into law.Opponents of the measure pledged they would use a legal maneuver to force a statewide vote on the maps next year. Activists must gather more than 100,000 signatures in the next 90 days to put it up for a referendum.“This fight is not over. Missouri voters – not politicians – will have the final say,” Elsa Rainey, a spokesperson for the group People Not Politicians Missouri, said in a statement.Missouri is the first state to pass a new congressional plan after Texas adopted a map that gives Republicans between three and five new seats. California voters are set to vote on a ballot referendum later this year that would add five congressional districts in that state.“Missourians will not have fair and effective representation under this new, truly shameful gerrymander. It is not only legally indefensible, it is also morally wrong,” Eric Holder, the former US attorney general and chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in a statement.Each seat is important because Republicans only hold a three-seat majority in the US House and the president’s party typically loses seats in a midterm election. Typically, redistricting is done only once, after the decennial census at the start of the decade, but Trump has pushed an anti-democratic effort to redraw district lines mid-decade, allowing politicians to pick their voters instead of having them face competitive elections.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOhio, where Republicans also control the redistricting process, is also set to redraw its maps in the coming months. Indiana Republicans are also considering redrawing their state’s map as well. More

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      The US is on the brink of another era of political violence – and Donald Trump ‘couldn’t care less’ | Jonathan Freedland

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      The killing of Charlie Kirk has left the US and those who care about it on edge. The arrest of a suspect, Tyler Robinson, has hardly settled the nerves, not when the revelation of any supposed political allegiances could touch off a fresh round of recriminations. The fear is that the country is about to descend into a new era of political violence, becoming a place where differences are settled not with words and argument but by guns and blood. After all, it has plumbed those depths before.The US was born in violence, fought a civil war less than a century after its founding and in living memory seemed to be on the brink of another one – with a spate of assassinations in the 1960s that took the lives of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and John and Bobby Kennedy. That should provide some consolation, the knowledge that the country has been through this before and survived.And yet the comfort is scant, because these are different times. For one thing, guns are even more available now than they were then: there are more than 850m firearms in private hands in the world, and nearly half of those are owned by Americans. For every 100 Americans, there are 120 guns.For another, today’s information supply is dominated by social media, amplifying the most extreme voices and rewarding the angriest sentiments. Where once the CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite could break the news of a presidential assassination and provide sombre balm, now grief is inflamed into fury, with footage of Kirk’s horrific shooting entering global circulation mere moments after his death.But the crucial difference is at the top. An act of political violence used to be met by a standard, reassuringly predictable response: the president would condemn it, grieve for the dead and their families, plead that there be no rush to judgment, and call for calm and for unity, insisting that Americans not give the killers what they want, which was division, but rather come together as fellow citizens of a republic they all loved. I heard versions of that speech, delivered at different moments by Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama. On Wednesday night, Donald Trump chose an alternative path – one that proved that, as he later admitted to Fox News when asked about bringing the country together, he “couldn’t care less”.Instead, and at a time when no one was in custody and nothing at all was known of Kirk’s killer, Trump said the blame for his death lay with “the radical left”. It was its “rhetoric” that was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today”. The problem was not political violence in general, but “radical left political violence”.Put aside the inaccuracy of such a statement. Put aside the documented fact that not some, but all extremist-related killings in the US in 2024 were connected to rightwing extremism, just as they were in 2023 and in 2022. Put aside that, although Trump listed incidents in which figures associated with the right had been attacked, he pointedly did not mention and wilfully chose to ignore the murder of the Democratic Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in June; or the arson attack on the home of the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, in April; or an earlier plot to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan.Put it all aside, even though it exposes the transparent falsity of Trump’s declaration that US political violence comes from one side only. Consider instead the likely effect of his words. At best, they add fuel to an already incendiary situation. At worst, they encourage retaliation and revenge.Witness Trump’s allies and cheerleaders. “We’re gonna avenge Charlie’s death,” promised Fox News host Jesse Watters. Elon Musk declared that “The Left is the party of murder”. A legion of other rightwing influencers have already taken this talk to its logical conclusion, announcing, as one put it, that “THIS IS WAR”. Could the message being sent to a furious and well-armed support base be any clearer?And notice something else Trump said on Wednesday. He pledged to find those “organisations that fund and support” what he classifies as political violence. Given that one of his closest aides said before Kirk’s murder that the Democratic party should be viewed as a “domestic extremist organisation”, it’s not hard to imagine who he will be coming for. Surely any group that opposes him.How should they – Democrats, liberals, the left – be responding to this moment of peril? So far they have observed the old norms, with almost every Democratic figure of any standing, whether former president or serving politician, offering the decent, human response: horror at such a brutal act, sympathy for Kirk’s wife and now-fatherless young children, fear for where this leaves the country. Watch MSNBC, or listen to the Pod Save crowd, and you’ll see that that’s how most of the leading lights in the anti-Trump universe have, rightly, responded. Any deviation from that norm has been punished.It is one of the asymmetries of the US culture wars that this etiquette, rigorously enforced from left to right, is not observed in the other direction. So when an intruder broke into the home of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and nearly clubbed her husband, Paul, then 82, to death, the leading Republican in the country did not offer condemnation or words of consolation. No, Trump responded by making repeated jokes at Paul Pelosi’s expense.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDifferent rules apply. After an act of violence, Democrats must be gracious, empathetic and call for calm on all sides, while Republicans can mock the victims, blame only one side and demand more violence. And there’s a further asymmetry: a single post from a random, anonymous user online will be treated as a statement from “the left”, while the outpourings of the right’s most powerful voices, in politics or the media, and including the president himself, somehow get a free pass.As part of this etiquette, it’s become poor taste to point out Kirk’s actual views. It’s as if the belief that no one should be killed for their opinions requires you to withhold any judgment of those opinions. But Kirk did not hold back. He was happy to tell people that he would be nervous getting on a plane flown by a Black pilot, and to talk of “prowling Blacks”; to tell Taylor Swift to “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband … You’re not in charge”; to deny the truth of the 2020 election; to recommend that children should watch public executions; and to suggest “Jewish dollars” were to blame for the spread of “cultural Marxism”.Many liberal luminaries have swerved past this back catalogue, preferring to express their admiration for Kirk’s willingness to debate and his genuine gift for engaging the young. That has left the field clear for the right to redefine Kirk not as the extremist he was – and was proud to be – but as a paragon of civic participation, one who merits a posthumous presidential medal of freedom and a lowering of the flag. While the liberal left is observing the conventional pieties, the right is swiftly sanitising Kirk’s views and canonising him, hailing him as a martyr for the cause of what they insist is “simple common sense”. As a result, it will have moved the Overton window yet further in its direction.These are dynamics Kirk knew well and that he was adroit at using to his advantage. He understood that a culture war inherently favours those willing to disregard the rules. It is a lesson that liberals and the left are, rightly, reluctant to learn – but that reluctance comes at an increasingly high price.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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      Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy’

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      Charlie Kirk, the far-right commentator and ally of Donald Trump, was killed on Wednesday doing what he was known for throughout his career – making incendiary and often racist and sexist comments to large audiences.If it was current and controversial in US politics, chances are that Kirk was talking about it. On his podcasts, and on the podcasts of friends and adversaries, and especially on college campuses, where he would go to debate students, Kirk spent much of his adult life defending and articulating a worldview aligned with Trump and the Maga movement. Accountable to no one but his audience, he did not shy away in his rhetoric from bigotry, intolerance, exclusion and stereotyping.Here’s Kirk, in his own words. Many of his comments were documented by Media Matters for America, a progressive non-profit that tracks conservative media.On race
      If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024

      If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 8 December 2022

      Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023

      If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because affirmative action?
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024
      On debate
      We record all of it so that we put [it] on the internet so people can see these ideas collide. When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.
      – Kirk discussing his work in an undated clip that circulated on X after his killing.

      Prove me wrong.
      – Kirk’s challenge to students to publicly debate him during the tour of colleges he was on when he was assassinated.
      On gender, feminism and reproductive rights
      Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.
      – Discussing news of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement on The Charlie Kirk Show, 26 August 2025

      The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.
      – Responding to a question about whether he would support his 10-year-old daughter aborting a pregnancy conceived because of rape on the debate show Surrounded, published on 8 September 2024

      We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 April 2024
      On gun violence
      I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.
      – Event organized by TPUSA Faith, the religious arm of Kirk’s conservative group Turning Point USA, on 5 April 2023
      On immigration
      America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 22 August 2025

      The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 20 March 2024

      The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 March 2024
      On Islam
      America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank: large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 30 April 2025

      We’ve been warning about the rise of Islam on the show, to great amount of backlash. We don’t care, that’s what we do here. And we said that Islam is not compatible with western civilization.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 24 June 2025
      On religion
      There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 6 July 2022 More

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      The Guardian view on the killing of Charlie Kirk: a perilous moment that may lead to more | Editorial

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      “Democracy is the way that we have diverse societies that don’t kill each other, largely,” Lilliana Mason, a leading scholar of partisanship, observed recently. She added: “As soon as we stop believing in it, it disappears.” Dr Mason’s own research suggests that there is sharply rising tolerance of political violence. On Wednesday, it claimed one more victim.The shocking killing of the co-founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk, a hugely influential activist who rallied young people to Donald Trump’s cause and far-right ideology more broadly, has been widely and rightly condemned across the political spectrum. Leading Democrats and progressive activists made clear that such violence must not be tolerated.Before a perpetrator had even been identified, the president, like several other Republicans, blamed “radical left political violence”, claiming that liberal rhetoric against conservatives was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country”. Mr Trump himself faced two attempts on his life last year. He cited other victims, but not the many Democrats who have been targeted, including Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota state representative shot dead at her home alongside her husband, Mark, in June. Meanwhile, some far-right commentators spoke of vengeance.Political violence is hardly a new phenomenon in a country that has seen a civil war, four presidential assassinations, and lynchings. But it is rising again. Ordinary Americans are being radicalised. In such an environment, one thing unites the political poles; any prominent figure is vulnerable, though women and people of colour are particularly targeted. Threats to members of Congress rocketed last year.“Demonising those with whom you disagree” is indeed dangerous, but Mr Trump himself has normalised vicious attacks on opponents. The tolerance of violent action – as with Mr Trump’s blanket pardons for the January 6 rioters – sends a message too. The roots of violent acts are complex, but an environment conducive to political attacks may channel the propensities of potential perpetrators. Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, has warned that US politics may be on the brink “of an extremely violent era … The more public support there is for political violence, the more common it is.” The US addiction to guns drastically increases the impact.Acts of political violence exact an appalling human toll in lives lost and families shattered; Mr Kirk’s death leaves two small children fatherless. But they also – by design – deter other people from political or other civic activity at all levels. The most extreme voices may persist and prevail. Blaming political adversaries before a perpetrator has even been identified risks fuelling anger and attacks, to everyone’s cost. Research by Dr Mason, of Johns Hopkins University, and Nathan Kalmoe, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that a fifth of respondents said political violence could sometimes be justified, but three-fifths thought it could sometimes be justified if the other side committed violence first.Yet other research notes that people appear less willing to condone violence if misperceptions of the other side’s extremism or propensity for force are corrected. In this perilous moment, the response to such hateful crimes should be to coalesce to stress non-violence and civic tolerance. To instead promote division will only increase the threat to politicians and activists of all stripes, and strike another blow to democracy itself.

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      From ‘hellhole’ UK to anti-Muslim rhetoric in Japan, Charlie Kirk took his message abroad

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      Charlie Kirk directed most of his rhetoric at the US political scene, but he also strayed into foreign affairs, drawing both favourable and critical comparisons between life in the US and in other countries on his shows and doing the occasional speaking tour.In May, Kirk visited the UK, debating against students at Oxford and Cambridge universities and appearing on the conservative GB News channel. Days before he was fatally shot in Utah he took his message to relatively new audiences on a tour to South Korea and Japan.Last weekend he addressed like-minded politicians and activists at a symposium in Tokyo organised by Sanseito, a rightwing populist party that shook up the political establishment in upper house elections this summer.In Tokyo, Kirk described Sanseito, which ran in July’s elections on a “Japanese first” platform, as “all about kicking foreigners out of Japan”, where the foreign population has risen to about 3.8 million out of a total of 124 million.Foreign residents and supporters of mass migration were, he claimed, “very quietly and secretly funnelling themselves into Japanese life. They want to erase, replace and eradicate Japan by bringing in Indonesians, by bringing in Arabs, by bringing in Muslims”.He spoke at length about his trip in a podcast released the day before his death, returning to a familiar theme – criticising women who choose not to have children – that echoed the views of his host in Japan, the Sanseito leader, Sohei Kamiya.In Seoul, he addressed more than 2,000 supporters at the Build Up Korea 2025 event, which drew predominantly young Christians and students from evangelical schools, representing a self-styled Korean Maga movement that has rallied in support of the impeached former president Yoon Suk Yeol.The event invited a host of far-right American personalities, who openly promoted conspiracy theories including claims that China orchestrated “stolen elections” in both America and South Korea, and that Lee Jae Myung’s recent presidential victory was fraudulent.Kirk criticised special prosecutor investigations into Yoon and his martial law, describing “several disturbing things happening right now in South Korea” where “pastors are being arrested” and “homes are being raided”, adding: “If South Korea keeps on acting like this, it is the American way to step up and fight for what is right.”Kirk said he had “learned a lot” from his time in South Korea and Japan, recalling how safe he had felt on the clean and orderly streets of Seoul, where there were “no bums, no one asking you for money”.In his three-day visit to the UK in May, he clashed with students at the Cambridge Union debating society, arguing that “lockdowns were unnecessary”, “life begins at conception”, and the US Civil Rights Act was a “mistake”.Kirk made the same points in Oxford, also alleging immigrants were “importing insidious values into the west” and that police violence against Black people was a result of a “disproportionate crime problem” in the Black community.He told the rightwing GB News that the UK was a “husk” of its former self and needed to “get its mojo back”. The perception among US conservatives, he said, was that “this is increasingly a conquered country … We love this country from afar, and we’re really sad about what’s happening to it, and what has happened to it”.On his first show after returning to the US, Kirk described the UK as a “totalitarian third world hellhole”, adding: “It’s tragic. I don’t say that with glib, I don’t say that with delight. It is sad. It’s chilling and it’s depressing.”He claimed he had seen a cafe in which “every single table was taken by a Mohammedan and a fully burqa-wearing woman – not a single native Brit” and that people were being arrested for online posts that displayed no apparent harmful intent.“They invented free speech,” he said. “Now there’s so much wrong with that country and it is not worthy of making fun of. I mean, you can have some laughs and some comedy, but it is depressing. It is dark.”View image in fullscreenWhile he was fond of referencing Europe in his shows, Kirk’s only other recent public visit there appears to have been a trip to Greenland in January in the company of Donald Trump Jr.He said afterwards that Greenlanders should be allowed to “use personal autonomy and agency to disconnect from their Danish masters”, then have “the opportunity to be part of the US, no different than either Puerto Rico or Guam” (two self-governing “unincorporated territories” of the US) in order to be “wealthier, richer … and protected”.Kirk was also sharply critical of many countries in his videos and podcasts. “France has basically become a joke, for a lot of reasons,” he said last year, amid widespread French protests over pension changes. “What’s happening in France should serve as a warning to America.”After JD Vance attacked Europe for alleged free speech shortcomings this year, Kirk hit out at Germany. “Germans are a bunch of troublemakers,” he said. “German prosecutors say someone can be locked up if they insult someone online. Free speech is not a German value. Totalitarianism is a German value.”He was a vocal supporter of Trump’s China-focused policies, backing the president’s attacks on Harvard University in April, and the punishing trade war with Beijing.In April, he claimed Harvard had “raked in” more than $100m from China. “We need to ask serious questions in this country about whether we can trust our elite universities to put America first when so much money is flowing to them from America’s number one rival.”The same month, he told Fox News the US had become “a glorified vassal state” subservient to the Chinese Communist party, by relying on China for rare earth minerals. He said the CCP wanted to create “lots of little colonies all around the world through the belt and road initiative”.He also waded into the complicated waters of cross-strait relations. In April, Kirk told his podcast he had “a soft spot for the people of Taiwan”, but also showed a limited understanding of its history and the complexities of the dispute.“I would say, sadly if we took Taiwan, it would probably start a nuclear war. Our leaders have largely mishandled China. We probably should have taken it in 1950 right after world war two,” he said.There has never been any discussion of the US “taking” Taiwan. The US is Taiwan’s most important backer, providing billions of dollars in weapons and some military training, and has not ruled out coming to its defence in the event of a Chinese attack or invasion.In a video in May, Kirk used the escalating hostilities between India and Pakistan to push his argument against US military intervention abroad. Describing Pakistan as a “very, very sneaky actor”, Kirk was emphatic that “very simply, this is not our war … This is a great test of whether every great conflict is America’s problem”.Kirk was equally dogmatic on the issue of Indians being granted more visas as part of a US-India trade deal, accusing Indians of taking American jobs.“America does not need more visas for people from India,” he said. “Perhaps no form of legal immigration has so displaced American workers as those from India. Enough already. We’re full. Let’s finally put our own people first.” More

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      ‘What have we become?’: shock across US political parties after Charlie Kirk shooting

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      Charlie Kirk’s death by an assassin’s bullet on a university campus in Utah on Wednesday has left the United States, a country already grappling with mounting political anger and polarization, in a state of profound shock bordering on despair.Kirk, a rising star of Donald Trump’s make America great again (Maga) movement, was struck in the neck by a single shot as he addressed a large student crowd at Utah Valley University. The event had been billed as the grand opening of his 15-stop “America Comeback Tour”, but instead will be marked as the place where he uttered his last words.The 31-year-old leader of the rightwing student group Turning Point USA was about 20 minutes into a Q&A, ironically engaging with a question on mass shootings in America, when the shot rang out. Within seconds, hundreds of students had scattered screaming from the campus lawn.Within minutes of that, gruesome videos began to proliferate through social media, apparently undeterred by any algorithm. They showed Kirk being hit, slumping to his left side and profusely bleeding.Long before Kirk was pronounced dead at 4.40pm – poignantly in a post from his champion, the US president, on Truth Social – the wave of profound shock was breaking over both sides of the US’s political divide.“This is horrific. I am stunned,” said the Republican senator from Texas Ted Cruz, who described Kirk on Twitter/X as a “good friend” since the young activist’s teenage years.Kirk was unashamedly far to the right of the US political spectrum and had expressed openly bigoted views and engaged in homophobic and Islamophobic rhetoric. He recently tweeted: “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”He mixed evangelical Christian beliefs with rightwing politics into a combustible brew. During an appearance with Trump in Georgia last fall, he claimed that Democrats “stand for everything God hates”, adding: “This is a Christian state. I’d like to see it stay that way.”But mourning for Kirk crossed the political aisle.Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe who has been unrestrained at times in his criticism of Kirk’s political posturing, called the shooting “tragic and sickening”. He added: “Violence targeting political public figures is violence against American democracy itself and the freedom of every American to express their views.”Tommy Vietor, a former staffer in Barack Obama’s White House, issued an even darker warning. Political violence, he said, was a “cancer that will feed off itself and spread … it will rip this country apart”.The political violence that Vietor identified is etched into the US’s psyche. The country has had to absorb the assassinations of four sitting presidents including Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy, as well as the tragic trilogy of 1960s shootings of Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.Those grim historic landmarks were brought slamming back into public consciousness by the assassination attempt on Trump at a presidential campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024. Trump survived that incident by a hair’s breadth, which he has since claimed to be an act of God’s will. A second would-be assassin later waited for Trump on a Florida golf course before being discovered in the nick of time by his security detail.At the same time America has been rocked by the killing on the streets of Manhattan of a top healthcare executive, and in June an attack in Minnesota saw a gunman brutally shoot a local lawmaker dead in her own home.Kirk’s death – though the precise motive behind his killing remains so far unknown – leaves the US standing on the edge of a new abyss, over which a black cloud now looms over the safety of its public figures and the sanctity of its public debate.“What the actual hell have we become?” asked the Catholic writer Emily Zanotti, speaking for many. In a comment under her X feed, another poster said: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”Dylan Housman, editor-in-chief of the rightwing news outlet the Daily Caller, also expressed foreboding. “We can’t live in a country where things like this happen,” he said.For months now the temperature of the US’s political discourse has been rising. As JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, put it following the Kirk shooting: “Political violence unfortunately has been ratcheting up in this country.”In June a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota, Melissa Hortman, and her husband Mark, were killed in a shooting. Federal and state judges have reported a plethora of threats, including deliveries of unsolicited pizzas to their homes in grotesque reference to the 2020 killing of Daniel Anderl, the son of a New Jersey district judge Esther Salas.Kirk’s killing takes this booming scourge of discourse-by-bullet to another level. The location of the shooting in itself indicates that there might be trouble ahead, as the TV political journalist Chuck Todd noted. “On a college campus, no less, a place where we should be celebrating speech, not trying to silence it.”The identity of the victim, too, raises the stakes dramatically. Kirk was the golden boy of the Maga movement, a Trump favorite.The president called Kirk “legendary” in his post announcing the death. The Turning Point leader was boosted to nationwide prominence when he was taken on as personal aide to Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, during the 2016 presidential campaign.Kirk’s ascent within the Maga firmament was as fiery as the trademark pyrotechnical displays that opened his Turning Point “people’s conventions”. The speakers he attracted on stage were like a roll-call of Maga royalty – JD Vance, former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, entrepreneur and presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and many more.By Wednesday night consternation had already begun to be aired about how the Trump administration, and the wider Maga movement, would respond to the loss of one of their dearly beloved own. “There are people who are fomenting [political violence] in this country,” Pritzker said. “The president’s rhetoric often foments it.”Later this month, Kirk had a stop on his Comeback Tour scheduled at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. On 25 September he was scheduled to debate the progressive influencer, Hasan Piker.After Kirk’s shooting, Piker spoke out about his fears on his live stream. “This is a terrifying incident,” he said. “The reverberation of people seeking out vengeance in the aftermath of this violent, abhorrent incident is going to be genuinely worrisome.” More