To beat MAGA violence, Democrats must warn the public about it as much as possible
In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, GOP calls for retribution against Democrats for telling the truth about Trump's authoritarianism are both sinister and laughable
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
As Donald Trump and his allies attempt to transform the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk into a literal casus belli against their political opposition, based on blatant lies about Democratic incitement of left-wing violence, their efforts cannot overcome one basic fact: Starting with his first campaign for the presidency, and continuing through the present day, Donald Trump has done more to promote political violence than any other American of our era.
What seemed shocking a decade ago can feel almost quaint today: Trump’s encouragement of rally-goers to boo and threaten reporters, and to beat up protestors along with the promise to pay the legal bills of those who did so (he also said he’d personally like to punch a protestor in the face); his declaration that he would bring back waterboarding torture; his statement that there would be riots if he did not receive the presidential nomination.
And as his first term unfolded, the dark thread of violence remained for those with eyes to see it, as he urged police to abuse suspects in custody, pressed for border measures that would wound and maim desperate immigrants, and refused to condemn the far-right freaks whose descent on Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 resulted in the death of a counter-protestor. But these tendencies truly began to shine as his presidency foundered in the time of covid, economic slowdown, and the George Floyd protests. After tweeting “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!,” Trump gave shout-outs of support to those protesting anti-covid measures in that state, some of whom were armed; a subset of such opponents went on to plan a foiled kidnapping and possible murder of Governor Gretchen Whitmer. He responded to overwhelmingly peaceful civil rights protests by tweeting “When the shooting starts, the looting starts,” and indeed sought to order Defense Department officials to order troops to shoot protestors. At a debate with Joe Biden, when given the opportunity to denounce right-wing militias, he instead told the fascistic Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”
But the events of January 6, 2021 in particular should have forever wiped away any doubts that Donald Trump was a thug unfit for the presidency, and for whom political violence was a key tool to foil democracy. Unwilling to accept defeat in the 2020 presidential election, and deeply fearful of prosecution for the many crimes he had committed in office, he engaged in a months-long insurrection against the United States by attempting to subvert the election results through a variety of illegal maneuvers. When that effort failed, he turned to armed insurrection, inciting a mob of supporters that included paramilitaries, white Christian nationalists, and devoted followers to storm the Capitol building, in a last-ditch effort to halt the certification of the election results. For hours, Trump watched the violence he had incited unfold, as he sat in front of a television and refused to order a defense of the republic. Violence was his final card to play, and he played it to the hilt, until he finally grasped that it would not succeed.
In the subsequent four years, exiled from the presidency, Trump — and, increasingly, the far-right MAGA movement that provides the fount of his political strength — decided that the problem with his first presidency and his defeated insurrection was not that he had erred by embracing threat and violence, but that he had not done so nearly vigorously enough. And so he and his allies set out to transform public memory of the January 6 insurrection, from an act of treason and violent rebellion into a day of righteous cleansing in which no crimes were committed by his supporters. The violence was good, the violence was justified, and the violence was a down payment on more to come should anyone again dare stand against MAGA’s path to power. Rather than renouncing or apologizing for his offenses, Donald Trump doubled down on threat and violence, as did the vast bulk of Republican elected officials through their active endorsement or silent complicity. The few prominent Republicans who worked to hold him accountable for his crimes, such as Representative Cheney, were drummed out of the GOP.
To pave their way back to the White House, Trump and his allies combined white supremacism and incitements of violence into one neat package. They did so by promoting the Great Replacement theory, a far-right delusion that holds that millions of dark-skinned immigrants are being funneled into the U.S. by liberal baddies in order to literally replace good, white Americans with pliable, un-American foreigners. Vastly exaggerating the number of undocumented immigrants crossing our southern border, Trump and others spoke of a literal “invasion” of the United States. They framed the flow of poor Central and South Americans across our border as an actual army seeking to displace American citizens, seeking to transform ordinary, desperate people into actual enemies of the United States — enemies who merited the most extreme measures in response. This hideous lie also allowed them to incite anger at, and invite extreme measures against, the Democratic Party, as they claimed that Democrats only ever won elections through the ruthless use of undocumented, illegal voters. This tied into another overarching claim that required the an extreme response — that a deranged “far left” was trying to destroy America and replace it with an unrecognizable archipelago of gay bars, trans conversion centers, unspeakable displays of Black Power retribution against white Americans, and godless Wiccanism from Wenatchee to Wichita.
And so, in the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump openly ran to be a strongman president who would subdue America’s internal enemies by force. Violence would be the cornerstone of Donald Trump’s quest for dictatorial power over the American government and people, and for MAGA’s quest to role back a century or more of racial, gender, and economic progress. Advisors like Stephen Miller dreamed of plans to deploy ICE to round up millions of undocumented immigrants, to occupy liberal sanctuary cities that refused to cooperate, and to unleash the military on any resulting protests. Tellingly, Trump promised, as one of his very first acts if elected, to free the insurrectionists who had stormed the Capitol, despite their lawful convictions and the threat that such violent-minded, unrepentant Trump loyalists would pose to American society. Also tellingly, Donald Trump refused to say that he would accept the election results were he to lose, suggesting that a defeat could only be due to an election stolen by treasonous Democrats, and raising the specter of armed rebellion that would dwarf the events of January 6. Trump even spoke about being a dictator “for a day.”
With his calamitous re-election and subsequent inauguration, even close observers might be forgiven for temporarily losing the theme of violent intent. As Elon Musk rampaged through the federal bureaucracy, the assault on the nation was wild, yet relatively peaceable, with illegal mass firings and spending cuts inflicting damage that could feel abstract and theoretical — even as these maneuvers threatened millions of lives and livelihoods. The violence remained, for a short while, symbolic and latent.
But as the first few months passed, a far more ominous phase of his presidency began. ICE agents started aggressive sweeps of undocumented workers, employing violent tactics against unarmed targets; soon, the vast majority masked their faces, in order to obscure their identity, and thus potential accountability for their excesses. All of this was the logical, predictable outcome of a GOP that had for years spoken of an actual invasion of our country: if American were truly occupied by invaders, weren’t such measures justified? Of course, the lawlessness and ruthlessness of this anti-immigrant purge guaranteed that Americans, too, would be caught up in the dragnet, and in fact many Americans began to be illegally arrested and even imprisoned on the basis of racial profiling and illegal demands for documentation.
Even more unsettlingly, Donald Trump used anti-immigration enforcement protests in the Los Angeles area as an excuse to flood in federal agents, federalize National Guard troops against the wishes of California Governor Gavin Newsom, and deploy U.S. Marines to city streets. Not only was this an unprecedented escalation of threatened force against American citizens based on false pretenses, the president was clearly looking for an excuse to provoke violent confrontations with protestors so as to crack down further. Claiming to be putting down a rebellion, the president aimed to create a scenario where he could potentially murder some of his own citizens in order to transform American politics in his favor.
Soon afterward, the president ordered a federal takeover of the Washington, D.C. police department, and troop deployments to that city. This time, the president claimed — falsely — that out-of-control crime required a militarized response, despite statistics showing dramatic declines in D.C. crime rates in recent years. Again, his moves openly sought escalation by occupying an American city, violating the rights of its citizens, and cultivating a response that he could meet with force. The administration advertised that the moves on D.C. would soon be replicated in other Democratic-governed cities, lending weight to the overwhelming evidence that the point was not to fight crime but to dominate, provoke, and punish Americans who opposed the Trump presidency.
As a preview of coming mayhem, Donald Trump just one week ago posted a social media message loaded with violent imagery and intent. Riffing off the film Apocalypse Now, the president portrayed himself as a bloodthirsty army commander from that movie, while also showing Army helicopters flying past a burning Chicago – the city that the administration had indicated would be its next target. A sinister line of text was included: “Chicago [sic] about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR." The message was clear, if ungrammatical and cloaked in a patina of plausible deniability due to its sheer craziness: Chicago residents were un-American enemies, engaged in behavior that merited a lethal crackdown. In a single image, it captured Trump’s basic strategy: use false claims on internal rebellion and violence by anti-American forces as justification for militarized crackdowns on political opponents.
Of American’s two major political parties, only one has systematically excused, incited, and deployed political violence – and that party is the Republican Party. Of America’s two major political parties, only one has been led by a man with an unparalleled, unambiguous record of not only encouraging political violence, but in actually inciting and directing it, up to and including armed insurrection against America’s seat of government, and state violence against immigrants, and even against citizens — and that party is the Republican Party. Of America’s two major political parties, only one is closely tied to a far-right media apparatus and opinion makers who openly speak of political opponents as enemies, who dehumanize non-white, non-straight, and non-Christian citizens and immigrants, and who incite and even support violence as a political tool — and that party is the Republican Party.
In contrast, there is a glaring lack of links between mainstream Democratic politicians and progressive thinkers and activists, on the one hand, and violence by actors on the left side of the spectrum. In fact, you will look in vain for any Democratic elected official of stature, or indeed of any stature, who has in any way encouraged or excused violence by party rank-and-file. You will also find passing few rank-and-file party members who actively embrace violence in any way analogous to the millions upon millions of MAGA voters who supported Donald Trump’s armed insurrection — in part, of course, because Democratic politicians have not engaged in such violent behavior in the first place.
The above history is essential context for understanding both last week’s tragic assassination of right-wing celebrity Charlie Kirk, and President Trump’s instant efforts to leverage Kirk’s death into an excuse for repression and violence against a “far left” he claims is responsible for Kirk’s death — claims initially made on the basis of zero evidence, before a perpetrator had even been caught. In other words, the killing was immediately dragooned into a long-standing right-wing embrace of retributive violence against its purported enemies as the means to seizing and securing power.
And as Jonathan Chait writes at The Atlantic, Trump’s first speech in response to the shooting was arguably even more dangerous for the country than the shooting itself. In it, Trump called not for unity against political violence, but for a war on American’s supposed internal enemies on the left; in doing so, he reminded Americans of a handful of high-profile shootings perpetrated by alleged left-wing terrorists, while neither mentioning nor condemning the far more numerous acts of right-wing violence in recent years. As Chait summarizes, “The most important move Trump made in his remarks was to define political violence as an exclusively left-wing tactic. He listed a series of events carefully selected to implicate his enemies and exonerate his allies.”
The implications of Trump’s denial of dangerous right-wing violence, and presentation of violence as both exclusively a threat from the left and driven by Democratic criticisms of his right-wing authoritarianism, are almost impossible to overstate. His refusal to condemn right-wing violence amounts to a tacit endorsement of it, particularly alongside his false accusations that it’s actually the Democrats and the left who advocate violence. And it only took a day for Trump’s endorsement of right-wing violence to become more explicit, as he told reporters that right-wing actors do what they do because they “don’t want to see crime,” while those on the left are “the problem.” The notion that right-wing terrorists are actually warriors for law and order is a sickening, even psychotic, inversion of reality.
Trump’s willingness to openly incite violent retribution against “the radical left” for Kirk’s killing should be revelatory, both for ordinary citizens and for Democrats who have been consistently flat-footed in responding adequately to Trump’s open authoritarianism. Far more than at any point in his administration, Trump is undeniably attempting to paint his opponents as a party of violence, as justification for inflicting retributive violence and punishment upon them.
Unfortunately, not nearly enough Democrats have responded to this watershed moment as if they understand the danger of Trump’s maneuver, or that it requires a far more oppositional politics than they’ve practiced to date. This is all the more unforgivable as most Democrats have for years now declined to identify MAGA threats and violence as an unacceptable practice and undeniable threat to American democracy, or to make this rising danger central to their case against Trump and MAGA. Even in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, as the majority of congressional Republicans voted against certifying the election results and thus threw their tacit support behind Trump’s insurrection, Democrats chose not to fully condemn their colleagues for throwing in with a bloody-minded would-be dictator.
Then, as the GOP increasingly embraced a deranged narrative of foreign invaders and Democratic complicity during the Biden era, the party still refused to prioritize the GOP’s dangerous conflation of immigration with a Democratic plan to overthrow America. And when Donald Trump again refused to say in 2024 that he would accept the election results, even after we all knew what violence his refusal would likely engender, Democrats downplayed Trump and the right’s propensity for violence, including the obvious dangers Americans would face should such a dangerous man and movement once again occupy the Oval Office.
The current wave of Democratic submissiveness in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, and in the face of Trump’s renewed threats against a “far left” so loosely and broadly defined as to encompass all who don’t support the president, is the predictable end point for a party that has collectively refused to confront the centrality of violence to the MAGA movement. Trump and his allies’ general goal now is as reckless as it is obvious: to cow the Democrats and others into ceasing any criticism of President Trump’s authoritarian danger and violent tactics by claiming that such critiques are themselves incitements of violence against Trump and Republicans. They also seek to cultivate an atmosphere of violence against Democrats in order to support this suppression, as a way of permanently re-ordering American politics along axes of fear and dominance rather than competition and democracy. Chait puts this starkly and clearly: “The president of the United States is treating the political opposition as accessories to murder and threatening to use the full power of the government to attack it.”
Democrats need to act decisively to disrupt and re-frame the authoritarian narrative that Trump is currently pushing, which essentially elides right-wing violence while in reality using threats of such violence to silence and discredit the opposition. Of primary importance is calling out Trump’s insane calls for retribution against Democrats and progressives, including his endorsement of right-wing violence to fight “crime.” To no extent can Democrats accept constraints on speaking in clear, unvarnished terms about the authoritarian nature of Trumpism and the fascistic tactics of the larger MAGA movement.
They need to understand, once and for all, that Trump and the GOP are practicing a form of authoritarian politics that rejects long-standing norms like not threatening adversaries with violence, and that the GOP is no longer playing by the old rules in which the parties alternate power depending on voter preference; rather, the Republican Party appears set on doing what it can to rig the political system so as to insulate itself from the will of the voters in perpetuity, with threats and violence as the ultimate arbiter. Should the Democrats continue to hedge and cower, they will become complicit in MAGA’s anti-democratic goals; to accede to false accusations of stirring up violence, and to elisions of how very central violence is to the Trumpist project, would gut the Democratic Party’s legitimacy as a party worthy of entrusting with power.
As a start, they could focus on Trump’s deranged calls for retribution against non-Trump voters; as novelist Joseph O’Neil writes, “It is politically essential that top Dems go on the offensive and insist on an apology from Trump and a promise of a full investigation into far-right political violence.” They can also decline to whitewash the activities of white supremacist and misogynist Charlie Kirk. Already, too many Democratic politicians and progressive opinion makers have offered words of praise for his participation in politics, while ignoring that his ideology sought to reduce the participation and power of those Americans he considered unworthy; Brian Beutler rightly notes that these Democrats do so “to insure against collective punishment,” and participate in his martyrization as a “free speech” hero “out of fear and confusion.”
Instead, they should accept the invitation that Republicans believe is a trap for Democrats, and actually talk about Kirk’s life — with an emphasis on his rancidly racist, misogynistic, and anti-democratic beliefs. They might highlight his mind-boggling comments about the intelligence of black women and embrace of the violence-inciting Great Replacement theory. Or they might remind of Americans about his calls for President Joe Biden to be tried and executed. Democrats must recognize that attempts to lionize Kirk and sanitize his extremist, anti-democratic beliefs are not meant to abstractly honor his life, but to mainstream noxious ideas antithetical to a free and egalitarian modern society. As historian Thomas Zimmer reminds us, “We should trust ourselves and those we address to hold two thoughts at the same time: That we must forcefully condemn political violence but also acknowledge that it festers and thrives in a deeply unhealthy political culture that Kirk himself helped create.”