Charlie Kirk, the influential right-wing activist, was shot and killed Wednesday on a college campus in Utah. The shooter is still at large, and as of this writing, little is publicly known about the shooter’s identity or the potential ideological motive behind the attack. But instead of waiting for facts of the case to emerge, many conservatives quickly to jumped to conclusions in the immediate aftermath.
Shortly after Kirk was shot, Elon Musk posted on his platform X, “The Left is the party of murder.” Fox News host Jesse Watters said, “They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not. They are at war with us.” And conservative activist Christopher Rufo made a call to crack down on left-wing groups. “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” Rufo posted on X. “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”
Most alarmingly, President Donald Trump, in an Oval Office address later that evening, echoed those sentiments. “Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” Trump said. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
Trump also hinted at the kind of crackdown that his administration might impose in the wake of Kirk’s killing, saying they would find “those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”
There are two major problems with the right’s rush to blame the incident, and political violence more broadly, on the left. First, even if the shooter turns out to be a left-wing extremist — certainly within the realm of possibility — the urge to immediately blame the left before facts emerge is reckless. As we learned from the assassination attempt on Trump last year on the campaign trail, shooters might not always have clear ideological motives. Second, and more importantly, the attempt to frame political violence as a problem that solely plagues the left is not just irresponsible; it’s factually inaccurate.
What Trump conveniently left out of his speech, for example, is violent right-wing extremism — the very sort of violence that he incited after he lost the 2020 election, culminating in an assault on the US Capitol. But that omission isn’t a one-off. For years, Trump and his allies have tried to paint Democrats and the left as not only extreme but violent. He has called Democrats the “party of crime,” blamed Democrats’ rhetoric for his assassination attempt last year, and warned that if Democrats gain power, they would “violently” assault his agenda. Trump, like many other influential figures on the right, chose to capitalize on Kirk’s killing — even before the facts of the case are known — to shape the story to his own political advantage by solely focusing on left-wing political violence, and to create a dangerous environment of fear that is entirely detached from reality.
Who is to blame for the rise in political violence?
The uncomfortable truth that Trump tried to paper over in his statement is that in recent American history, the most frequent perpetrators of domestic terrorism have been far-right extremists.
According to a 2020 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, since the 1990s, “far-right terrorism has significantly outpaced terrorism from other types of perpetrators, including from far-left networks.” Since that report, there has been a notable rise in political violence perpetrated by the far left, but far-right extremists still account for most terrorist attacks and plots in the United States.
This should come as no surprise. Rhetoric from conservative leaders — especially since Trump’s rise to power — has grown more and more extreme, often promoting or even embracing violence as an answer to America’s problems.
In his 2016 campaign for president, for example, Trump implied that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, could be prevented from becoming president by getting shot, saying that “Second Amendment people” could do something to stop her. In 2019, he mused about shooting migrants in the legs at the border. In 2020, he struggled to condemn the white supremacist group the Proud Boys. And in 2021, he met with and defended Kyle Rittenhouse, the young right-wing vigilante who shot three people, killing two of them, in demonstrations protesting police shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Trump also incited an insurrection after he lost the 2020 election, unleashing a mob on the US Capitol that included Proud Boys and members of other right-wing paramilitary groups — a marked departure from the peaceful transition of power that Americans had come to take for granted. During his 2024 campaign, he called those who took part in the Capitol siege “patriots,” and when he returned to the White House this year, he pardoned them.
It’s not just Trump. Other prominent Republicans have excused or embraced violence. After Melissa Hortman, a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota, was assassinated in her home earlier this year, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah posted on X, “This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way.” He also posted a photo of the suspect with the caption “Nightmare on Waltz Street” — seemingly a reference to the Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Other influential Republicans peddled conspiracy theories and joked about the assault on Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Contrast that with how prominent Democrats have responded to Kirk’s assassination — unequivocally condemning the act and calling for nonviolence.
In public polls, while most Americans still oppose political violence, there seems to be a growing acceptance of resorting to violence to achieve political goals. When United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was killed in December 2024, for example, an Emerson poll found that 22 percent of Democratic respondents said that the killing was at least “somewhat” acceptable, compared to 12 percent of Republicans. The acceptability of the killing was especially pronounced among young people. But when it comes to political violence more broadly — that is, when voters are asked about their general views on political violence rather than a specific case — Republicans were more supportive of the idea than Democrats. According to a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll last year, for example, one in five Americans believe that violence could be the answer to getting the country back on track, though Republican respondents were more than twice as likely to believe that than Democratic respondents.
Political violence is a serious problem that only seems to be getting worse in the United States. But it’s still hard to say that this is a problem that plagues both sides of the political aisle equally. While Democratic leaders have certainly escalated their rhetoric when attacking Republicans, calling the MAGA movement an existential threat to democracy, they haven’t engaged in the kind of rhetoric that routinely flows from Trump and his allies — a rhetoric that winks and nods at resorting to violent tactics and, in some cases, explicitly endorses violence.
So while there is growing concern about the rise of political violence on both the right and left, it’s important to note that Trump’s rhetoric and leadership — bolstered by a supportive party and media apparatus — is the context in which all this is happening. And so far, there is no Democratic counterpart to Trump that could equally share the blame for fanning the flames.
That context is what makes this moment especially worrisome: Despite Trump’s promotion of violence over the years, his framing of political violence as a problem that is solely coming from the left is an implicit admission that some forms of violence don’t count as violence — at least not in his eyes.
At minimum, he does not appear to find violence from his supporters or allies, or against his political opponents, as worthy of condemnation. Doing so, after all, would undermine the narrative he wants to spin: that a violent left-wing is relentlessly attacking his supporters and the entire nation, and only he can protect them. As Trump prepares to crack down on Democrats and leftists, as he indicated he would in his Oval Office address, he’ll continue to ignore far-right extremists. That, alone, might only embolden them.
