President Donald Trump is exploiting the assassination of Charlie Kirk to tighten his grip on power, political analyst David Rothkopf has warned on The Daily Beast Podcast.
Days after a gunman killed the high-profile conservative activist at a Utah university, investigators have yet to identify a clear motive. But Trump and his acolytes have already declared war on “the left,” turning tragedy into a political weapon.
“What you really see here is that there is a move from Trump and from [his deputy chief of staff Stephen] Miller and from [Vice President] JD Vance and from a lot of these people, not to solve the crime, not to be transparent, but actually to use the crime as a justification for their authoritarian power grab,” Rothkopf told host Joanna Coles and Daily Beast Executive Editor Hugh Dougherty.
Trump, who has long demonstrated a willingness to smash through democratic norms, announced Sunday that he was launching a major probe into left-leaning groups, invoking Kirk’s murder. “The problem is on the left. It’s not on the right,” he said.
On Monday, Miller revealed that the White House is working on an “organized strategy to go after left-wing organizations that are promoting violence,” during a taping of Kirk’s show, hosted by Vance. Miller called political violence on the left a “vast domestic terror movement.”
Rothkopf said the Trump camp has been all too willing to push this narrative “to serve themselves politically, to shift the blame off of them, but also to justify the president taking special steps ... to gather more power, more rights, more prerogatives to go and target their enemies.”
He also explained, “If it’s not quite the Reichstag moment, some people are calling it, it’s the same exact game where you look for an excuse to grab power, and that’s what’s going on right now,” referencing the 1933 arson attack on the German parliament building, which the Nazi party exploited to push through emergency legislation that suspended civil rights and paved the way for Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship.
When reached for comment, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Daily Beast, “President Trump is right – for years, radical leftists have slandered their political opponents as Nazis and Fascists, inspiring left-wing political violence against conservatives. It’s shameful that the Daily Beast is more concerned with the President speaking the truth about this than they are with the actual violence from the left.”
Rothkopf, who served in the Clinton administration and worked as editor of Foreign Policy Magazine, blasted Trump for portraying the left as the primary source of political violence, pointing to studies showing that such acts are more often carried out by right-wing extremists.
According to the conservative-slanted CATO Institute, 391 people have been murdered in right-wing terrorist attacks since 1975, compared to 65 people who have been murdered in left-wing terrorist attacks during the same time.
Political violence has played out from both sides of the aisle in recent years. In June, a gunman murdered Minnesota Democrat Melissa Hortman and shot Minnesota Democrat John Hoffman. A list found in the suspect’s abandoned car included names of Democrats and figures with ties to Planned Parenthood or the abortion rights movement.
Trump survived two attempts on his life last year, including a close call during a rally in Pennsylvania, when 20-year-old Thomas Crooks—a registered Republican at the time—opened fire on him.
Rothkopf noted that Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, has refused to play the blame game, while FBI Director Kash Patel and others in the Trump administration, “have been trying to attribute a motive, trying to say that this is political.”
The evening after Kirk’s assassination, Cox pleaded for unity, urging people to “find a way to stop hating our fellow Americans.” He has since issued a sharp rebuke of “conflict entrepreneurs” who profit off of division, specifically referring to Trump ally Steve Bannon, and lamented the role social media plays in polarization.
Dougherty suggested that Cox could start generating buzz as a future presidential contender.
“He is presenting a different version of being a modern Republican,” Dougherty said.
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