Charlie Kirk's killing has shown Trump up as the self-serving hypocrite he is

The Maga establishment is weaponising and politicising the shooting, and risks even more violence

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At 3.30am on 14 June this year, Mark Hortman – husband of Minnesota’s House Speaker Melissa Hortman – answered his door to a man dressed as a police officer. Moments later, both Hortmans and their beloved golden retriever Gilbert were dead.

Earlier in the night, another Democrat in the state, John Hoffman, had been shot nine times, and his wife, Yvette, eight – miraculously, though, both survived.

The man accused of all of the shootings, Vance Boelter, was found with a list of other prominent Democratic politicians alongside abortion advocates. It was a senseless and horrifying act of political violence that shocked the state – but the national reaction was muted. Donald Trump did not even call Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz, who himself appeared on Boelter’s list. “I could be nice and call him,” Trump said, “but why waste time?”

On Wednesday, there was a similarly senseless killing of an American political figure: conservative firebrand and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who was shot and killed aged just 31, while on-stage at a campus event in Utah, engaging in a political debate.

Trump’s reaction to this killing, though, has been very different. Within hours, he had announced that flags on federal buildings across America would be at half-mast until Sunday. On Wednesday evening, Trump declared Kirk “a martyr for truth and freedom” and blamed “radical left political violence” for his death.

The response makes explicit what was previously just below the surface in America. There is now a double standard for political violence, where violence against Republicans simply matters more to the President than attacks against anyone else.

Charlie Kirk’s death is a tragedy, pure and simple – he leaves behind a wife and two young children. America is the nation of the first amendment, a near-absolute right protecting freedom of speech, and he was killed exercising that right. Violence against those engaging in constitutionally-protected speech is always abhorrent.

Kirk himself did not always hold to that standard, though this does not matter. Kirk opposed calling the people who invaded the Capitol building – some armed and carrying cable ties – “insurrectionists”. He called Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two people during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020, “a hero”.

He opposed the debate on America’s chronic gun violence that often follows assassinations or mass shootings. “I think it’s worth [it] to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” he said in 2023. “Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty.”

Kirk was not a unifying figure seeking to heal a divided America. He claimed “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them”. He called a Bible passage calling on homosexuals to be executed “God’s perfect law”. He said passing the Civil Rights Act was “a huge mistake”. When Paul Pelosi, the husband of former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked in his home by a hammer-wielding assailant, Kirk joked about it and suggested his followers should pay the attacker’s bail.

In the aftermath of Kirk’s murder, Trump and the Maga establishment have immediately denounced leftist rhetoric and blamed the left for political violence in America – while ignoring entirely the extreme vitriol coming from their own side, including from Kirk himself. To do so is to immediately, and dishonestly, weaponise and politicise his killing, and to risk even more violence in the future.

Kirk’s killing is abhorrent and must be condemned on its own terms – as Democrats, in their masses, are doing. But it raises a spectre of fear across America, as those who do not share President Trump’s politics see his clear double standard on political violence.

Trump pardoned, en masse, everyone who invaded the Capitol on 6 January, 2021, including those who attacked police officers and arrived armed for a day of violence that left five dead. He shrugged off the brutal murder of Minnesota Democrats. He openly sends in the national guard and FBI to cities which vote against him. And now one of his allies lies dead, he condemns his opponents as responsible without waiting for the basic facts.

All decent Americans oppose political violence, and most fear it. But many also worry their President only condemns it when it’s suffered by his own side.