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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
America awaits the fateful consequences of a horrific assassination
Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
Updated:
12:00 AM EDT, Mon September 15, 2025
Source: CNN
The horror of Charlie Kirk’s assassination added a dangerous and
unpredictable catalyst to America’s toxic political reality.
But it has not yet crystalized into hard policy responses by the Trump
administration, leaving the country in limbo — on the brink of
something potentially significant that is yet to be defined.
The graphic nature of , which could be with a cellphone, and the
conservative activist’s youth, political power and may enshrine it as
a searing collective moment in modern US history.
Its potential to galvanize profound reactions is more potent because it
took place in a nation racked by its most venomous divides in decades,
where every political win or loss can seem existential, and under an
administration that often shows a desire to wield almost .
This is also an age when activists and partisan media figures on the
left and the right have personal and financial incentives to stoke
division and social media tools to magnify their extremism. This is a
significant impediment for those who genuinely want to cool tempers.
And no wonder lawmakers and opinion formers are to the public following
Kirk’s killing in a hunkering-down that could further constrain
American democracy.
Trump has not chosen the traditional presidential route of invoking
calm at perilous political moments. He’s ominously blaming his
opponents collectively for a spate of worsening political violence that
has spilled blood on both sides. “The problem is on the left. It’s
not on the right,” he said Sunday.
But America does not look like a country that wants a civil war.
Citizens walked their dogs, watched their kids’ soccer games, and
gathered with their families over the weekend without waging political
hate or turning on their neighbors. Some even bought one of the early
Halloween pumpkins showing up in grocery stores.
Blanket media coverage of Kirk’s death and the resulting political
tumult may be encapsulating the political stakes — but much of the
country is going about its business and not giving the impression that
it’s on a downward path to disaster.
It’s a mark of the toxicity of the moment that , the Republican
governor of Utah, has seemed like a revelation with pleas for Americans
to voice differences but not to hate one another over them.
“What I’m saying is, we actually should disagree. I think Charlie
represented that better than anyone. Charlie said some very
inflammatory things. And in some corners of the web, that’s all
people have heard,” Cox told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the
Union” on Sunday.
“But he also said some other things about forgiveness. He said some
amazing things about, when things get dark, putting down our phones,
reading Scripture, going to church, talking to our neighbors.” Cox
added: “What I appreciate most about Charlie Kirk, (he) said, ‘If
we don’t keep talking, that’s when the violence starts.’”
Fears of more violence
One fear is that the assassination of Kirk, who took Trump’s MAGA
movement to a younger generation of voters, will provoke more violence
or reprisals against other political leaders, or will stifle open
public debate.
One early consequence has been a campaign by some prominent Trump
supporters to who allegedly celebrated or justified his killing on
social media, and an attempt to get them fired from their jobs in
academia, transportation, education or other sectors. Sean Parnell, the
chief Pentagon spokesman, that mocking or celebrating the assassination
was unacceptable in the ranks. “Zero tolerance means zero
tolerance,” he wrote.
And Trump’s top White House policy adviser, Stephen Miller, wrote a
in which he claimed there’d been a “vast, organized ecosystem of
indoctrination” by the left targeting citizens.
Everyone is watching how Trump and his administration respond to see
whether the president will build on his blame for the so-called radical
left by moving against specific organizations or political figures.
This is an administration that never worried about crossing
constitutional barriers with its questionable that have unlocked vast
powers. And Trump has turned the into an engine for his own .
Anger among conservatives over Kirk’s killing could be channeled into
more intensity for Trump’s existing policy goals, like his crackdown
on crime in , his push for to try to stave off GOP losses in the
midterm elections, and a federal funding that could at the end of the
month.
Trump’s second term has shown that he’s always looking to use
events as a justification to . Some of his aides and Cabinet members
sound like they believe a turning point has been reached.
“It feels like a grief has settled on not just the country, but the
entire world. Something has changed,” Homeland Security Secretary
Kristi Noem said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria
Bartiromo.”
Noem called for unity. But she added, “Some of the rhetoric we’re
seeing out of the left and out of political animals is ugly and it’s
bitter and it’s seeking to seize this opportunity to turn it into
evil.”
Democrat Pete Buttigieg warned, meanwhile, that there should be no
attempt to use Kirk’s death for a power grab. “In order to deprive
political violence of its power, we have to reject anyone who would try
to exploit political violence,” the former transportation secretary
said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“The response to this cannot be for the government to crack down on
individuals or groups not because of violence but because they
challenge the government politically,” Buttigieg said.
Latest developments in Utah investigation
As fallout mounted from Kirk’s death, authorities in Utah probed the
motives of , Tyler Robinson. Cox told CNN that investigators were
examining whether the suspect’s romantic relationship with a partner
transitioning from male to female was a factor. Robinson is expected to
appear in court on Tuesday.
Trump will travel to the United Kingdom this week for a , but he’s
expected next weekend to attend a memorial service for Kirk in Arizona
— an event that could galvanize more political reaction to the MAGA
hero’s death.
Kirk’s murder is the latest troubling outburst in a period of , which
has included of a Minnesota Democratic state lawmaker and her husband;
an on the home of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro; and two attempts to
kill Trump last year.
But in public remarks following Kirk’s death, the president
highlighted only attacks on Republicans. He and his supporters view
Kirk’s assassination as distinct. This may not reflect the facts, but
it could shape Trump’s response.
“I see this as an attack on a political movement. I see this being
different,” GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said on NBC.
“Charlie Kirk is one of the top three people in the country that
allowed President Trump to win in 2024 by his efforts. And I think
President Trump sees this as an attack on his political movement, what
he created. A year ago, people tried to blow his head off.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson has been an important voice in calling for
calm. The Louisiana Republican said on Fox News on Sunday, “The key
is to remember that you can disagree with someone vehemently on policy
and not hate them as a person.”
“You know, people have got to stop framing simple policy
disagreements in terms of existential threats to our democracy and all
these phrases you hear all the time,” Johnson said. “You can’t
call the other side fascists and enemies of the state and not
understand that there are some deranged people in our society who will
take that as cues to act and do crazy and dangerous things.”
Johnson’s comments might have been intended to heal. But they pointed
to a major issue driving division. Many Democrats believe the House
speaker and other GOP leaders construe any condemnation of Trump and
his antics — which have often challenged the law — as unacceptable
extremism.
And the president has a long record of his own political extremism.
Some of the most vicious political speech in recent years has come from
Trump and his social media accounts. A week ago, the president
circulated a meme that suggested he was about to . Trump has often
called Democrats “evil” or guilty of treason.
At the same time, Johnson may have a point that Democrats have often
reacted to Trump’s outlandish actions by flinging disproportionate
labels. Many have described him as a “fascist.” There’s a
lucrative left-wing media industry that endlessly portrays the United
States as a totalitarian state already.
And while Trump has autocratic tendencies and Johnson’s
GOP-controlled House has abdicated much of its power to the executive,
claims that Americans are living in a dictatorship are ahistorical.
They ignore functioning checks and balances like the courts and fail to
honor people suffering under real tyrannies abroad.
That said, Trump did refuse to accept the result of a democratic
election that he lost in 2020. He incited a crowd to trash the will of
voters before the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and
pardoned hundreds when he took office again four years later. Saying
that Trump has been an existential threat to democracy in the past is
less an act of incitement than a statement of fact.
The president, who claims he has the power to do anything he wants, has
purged independent experts from the government; is seeking to destroy
the independence of the central bank and the Justice Department; and
has opened investigations into some of his political opponents.
A new turn against social media
Once again, after a national tragedy, there’s a focus on the
corrosive influence of social media.
There are indications that Kirk’s alleged killer may have frequented
a dark online world. Social media firms, meanwhile, harvest
polarization and monetize it, spreading hate and herding
ultra-partisans together. Its owners sometimes use their own tools for
political ends.
“The left is the party of murder,” X boss Elon Musk said in an
online video to a far-right Saturday, in which he also agitated for
“revolutionary” change in Britain — days before the arrival of
Trump. The two are personally but still share a similar populist
ideology.
Cox accused social media firms of “hijacking our free will with these
dopamine hits, same chemical reaction as fentanyl, getting us addicted
to these platforms. And outrage releases a dopamine hit, for sure. And
they are taking no responsibility for this.”
The reactions of some social media users to Kirk’s death — whether
by celebrating or by calling for vengeance — showed how many people
have been radicalized by the dark political times and have found fellow
travelers online.
“Every one of us has to look in the mirror and decide: Are we going
to try to make it better or are we going to make it worse?” Cox told
CNN.
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