They will gather to mourn one of their own. On Sunday the late rightwing activist Charlie Kirk is set to be hailed by Donald Trump as a martyr of the Make America great again (Maga) movement.
But Kirk’s memorial service at a 63,000-seat football stadium in Arizona could, critics fear, be exploited by the US president to serve a darker purpose: turning collective grief into a campaign of vengeance against America’s enemy within.
Trump has spent the past 10 days escalating threats against what he calls the “radical left” after the fatal shooting of Kirk, 31, on a university campus in Utah.
The White House is considering classifying some groups as domestic terrorists and revoking tax-exempt status for certain non-profits, even though there is no evidence linking these groups to the killing.
Trump and his allies have also sought to undermine the legitimacy of the Democratic party, branding it an extremist organisation despite it having roundly condemned the attack on Kirk.
Although officials insist that their focus is preventing violence, critics see an extension of Trump’s campaign of retribution against his political foes and an erosion of free speech rights. They warn that, in an echo of authoritarian governments around the world, his administration is trying to harness outrage over Kirk’s killing to crush dissent.
“Political violence is very often used as a pretext to crack down on civil liberties and on opponents – this is page one of the autocrats’ playbook,” said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University and co-author of the book How Democracies Die.
“I’m a Latin Americanist by training and the language we’ve heard lately reminds me a lot of the outsized response of military dictators in South America in the 1970s and that was a response to much higher levels of political violence than we see in the United States.”
Levitsky added: “One is hard pressed to find an authoritarian government that did not take advantage of either a terrorist attack or a political assassination – an episode of political violence – to further crack down on civil liberties. This is mainstream authoritarian stuff.”
Emotions are bound to be raw at Sunday’s tribute to Kirk, a close ally of Trump and personal friend of his son Donald Trump Jr, and a key figure in mobilising support for the president on university campuses. Authorities said they believe the suspect, Tyler Robinson, 22, acted alone and they charged him with murder on Tuesday.
However, administration officials have repeatedly made sweeping statements about the need for broader investigations and punishments related to Kirk’s death. Stephen Miller, a top policy adviser, claimed without evidence that there was an “organised campaign that led to this assassination”.
Miller’s comments came during a conversation with JD Vance, who was guest-hosting Kirk’s talkshow from his ceremonial office in the White House on Monday.
Miller said he was feeling “focused, righteous anger,” and “we are going to channel all of the anger” by working to “uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks” by using “every resource we have.”
The vice-president blamed “crazies on the far left” for saying the White House would “go after constitutionally protected speech”. Instead, he said, “We’re going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence.”
Asked for examples, the White House pointed to demonstrations where police officers and federal agents have been injured, as well as the distribution of goggles and face masks during protests over immigration enforcement in Los Angeles.
The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, blamed “leftwing radicals” for the shooting and said “they will be held accountable”. She warned: “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech. And that’s across the aisle.”
Her comments sparked a backlash across the political spectrum, since even hate speech is generally considered to be protected under the first amendment to the constitution. Bondi tried to clean up her remarks, writing on social media that they would focus on “hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence”.
But Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “What you’re hearing from Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi is an unambiguous intention to use this tragedy as a pretext to crack down on dissent and criticism.
“This is almost a classic move from the authoritarian playbook: to use a crisis to declare an emergency, to identify enemies and then to use that as an excuse to use state power as a cudgel against political opponents.”
Already Trump has declared that he is designating the antifa movement a terrorist organisation while the Heritage Foundation thinktank and the Oversight Project, the authors of the influential Project 2025 blueprint, released a memo designating transgender people as “violent extremists”.
Conflating such so-called threats with the Democratic party would be a leap but it is one that Miller and company seem willing to make, in what Levitsky regards as another typical authoritarian manoeuvre. “There’s almost always a rhetorical slip of the hand in which you link extremists who may be real or imagined or exaggerated to your mainstream opposition,” he said.
“It’s far from clear that the guy who perpetrated this assassination belongs to any far-left movement; it seems pretty clear he did not. It’s very difficult to imagine that the far left, which in the United States is incredibly weak, poses a threat.”
He added: “This is being used – and this is what authoritarians have done in many places – as a pretext to go after the Democratic party, which uniformly to a person repudiated this assassination and is in no way linked to it, and to go after what might be called opposition civil society.”
Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, drew a comparison with the June killing of Democrat Melissa Hortman, a former speaker of the Minnesota state house, and her husband. “The Democrats didn’t run around blaming the Republican party or the conservative philosophy,” he said. “We didn’t engage in a series of guilt by association tactics.”
Raskin also reacted to recent comments in which Miller described Democrats as “a domestic, extremist organisation”. “What is his basis for that? That is out of an authoritarian how-to guide. Authoritarians like to describe anyone who does not accept their rule over society as a terrorist. That’s a Putin move; that’s a Pinochet move.”
Since taking office Trump has mobilised the federal government to pressure law firms, universities and other independent institutions. The White House has reportedly pointed to Indivisible, a progressive grassroots network, and the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, as further potential subjects of scrutiny.
More than a hundred non-profit leaders, representing organisations including the Ford Foundation, the Omidyar Network and the MacArthur Foundation, released a joint letter saying “we reject attempts to exploit political violence to mischaracterize our good work or restrict our fundamental freedoms”.
After years of railing against censorship and “cancel culture”, Trump and his allies are now policing their opponents’ speech. People deemed to have celebrated Kirk’s death have been portrayed as complicit in the surge of political violence, with dozens fired, suspended or disciplined by employers over “inappropriate” comments.
This week, late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended by the ABC network over comments he made about Kirk following pressure from the Trump administration. Trump suggested regulators should consider revoking licences for networks that “give me only bad publicity”.
Trump also brought a $15bn defamation lawsuit against the New York Times and four of its journalists in what the newspaper described as a meritless attempt to discourage independent reporting. On Friday a judge tossed out the action but allowed Trump to refile and amend it within 28 days.
Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, observed: “The irony is that Charlie Kirk justified much of his rhetoric as free speech and denied that there was such a thing as hate speech so that all the speech was justifiable. They’re willing to completely do a 180, completely turn that entire position on its head by adopting a position that they had claimed to reject.
“This is the party that before 2024 had insisted that they were the defenders of free speech. JD Vance went to Europe to lecture the Europeans on free speech. And now what are they doing? They are justifying and leading a state-sponsored cancel culture.”
Trump’s concerns about political violence are selective. He described people who rioted at the US Capitol on January 6 2021 as “hostages” and “patriots” and pardoned 1,500 of them on his first day back in the Oval Office. He also mocked House speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi after an attack on her husband.
When Trump condemned Kirk’s killing in a video message, he mentioned several examples of “radical left political violence” but ignored attacks on Democrats. Asked on Monday about the killing of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman over the summer, Trump said, “I’m not familiar” with the case.
A recent study of political violence by the Cato Institute, a libertarian thinktank, found that rightwing extremists have killed six times more people than their far left counterparts over the past half century.
Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, observed: “They expect the Democrats and people who don’t agree with Maga’s worldview to take the high road, that somehow the onus is on that side to be the better angel, but it’s not expected of them.
“Donald Trump can go out and call his political opponents scum and say that he doesn’t care about their wellbeing. But if these people point out the vile and controversial positions of someone like Charlie Kirk or those within their own administration, like Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi, then they’re domestic terrorists.”
Yet still Trump has unwavering support from Republicans in Congress. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and others proposed legislation that would enable the justice department to use racketeering laws, originally envisioned to combat organised crime, to prosecute violent protesters and the groups that support them.
Congressman Chip Roy of Texas wants the House to create a special committee to investigate the non-profit groups, saying: “We must follow the money to identify the perpetrators of the coordinated anti-American assaults being carried out against us.”
Rightwing commentators have also cheered on the clampdown. Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist with a long record of bigoted comments, said “let’s shut the left down” and acknowledged that she wants Trump “to be the ‘dictator’ the left thinks he is”.
Some analysts believe that Trump is fulfilling that ambition. Steve Schmidt, a political strategist, said there has never before been a crime committed in the US where the president and his allies have “used the occasion to demand a consolidation of political power for themselves and collective punishment against their opposition, who have been named as co-conspirators in a crime for which they had no involvement”.
Schmidt noted state demands that flags be lowered and tributes enforced: “What you’re witnessing is a propaganda campaign that is ruthless, brutal and cold, right down to the use of the highly choreographed videography and photographs from the open casket. It’s obscene.”
