Donald Trump and Maga allies have capitalized on the killing of rightwing influencer Charlie Kirk to expand attacks on liberal groups, donors, Democrats, and others by tarring many critics as the “enemy within” and “radical left” in a move that legal scholars and historians call authoritarian and anti-democratic.
Kirk’s killing by a lone gunman spurred Trump and top allies to quickly launch conspiratorial charges against a bevy of political foes and an investigation of billionaire liberal donor George Soros. They also threatened legal action against TV network ABC after their late-night star Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension over clumsy comments about Kirk ended.
While Kirk’s murder was a big personal blow to Trump and allies, a month on from the shocking event it seems to have provided cover for a sprawling retribution drive by the president and Maga world that endangers civil liberties against an array of critics in the media, universities, non-profits and other parts of American civil society, say scholars.
At the memorial for the slain conservative leader right after Kirk’s widow movingly said she would “forgive” his killer, Trump angrily declared: “I hate my opponents and I don’t wish the best for them,” words that scholars viewed as unpresidential with the potential to fuel more violence.
Similarly, even before the suspect in Kirk’s murder was arrested, Trump posited that “radical left” language contributed to his death. He also pledged to go after those people responsible for the violence plus “organizations that fund it and support it… We have radical-left lunatics out there, and we just have to beat the hell out of them.”
Further, Trump’s escalating offensive against foes was palpable in his talk to hundreds of top military officials last month when he warned darkly about the need to counter “the enemy within” and suggested the military could be useful in his drive against crime in mostly Democratic cities which could serve as a military “training ground” too.
On a related front on 8 October, as hundreds of national guard troops were poised to enter Chicago over the objections of the city’s mayor and the Illinois governor, both Democrats who had criticized Trump’s militarized immigration crackdown, Trump called for jailing them even though neither one had been charged with crimes.
Historians and legal experts warn that Trump and the Maga world have exploited Kirk’s killing to justify unleashing far-reaching attacks on multiple critics.
Trump and his allies are using “page one of the authoritarian playbook” in their accelerating attacks on political foes”, said Harvard government professor Steven Levitsky, who co-authored the book How Democracies Die.
“You use political violence as a pretext to go after your political enemies. Some of them have been chomping at the bit to do this. They’re going after mainstream opponents and other critics. They’re defining unacceptable behavior as broadly as possible.”
Levitsky stressed that Trump’s attacks on Soros and some other major funders of Democrats and liberal groups are part of a broad assault on civil society. “The goal is to tilt the playing field by going after anybody in civil society who could challenge them,” he said. “One way to weaken them is to go after the funders using a false pretense by linking them to violence or illegal behavior.”
Pointedly, Trump in interviews days after Kirk’s killing charged in conspiratorial and evidence-free language that the 95-year-old Soros “should be put in jail” and was a “bad guy”. He told Fox & Friends that “we’re going to look into Soros” for possible violations of the racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations (Rico) law.
The justice department (DoJ) has opened investigations into Soros’ Open Society Foundations, which over decades have poured many millions of dollars into civil rights, human rights and democracy programs, according to the New York Times.
The Soros Foundations have pushed back hard saying the accusations are “politically motivated attacks on civil society” designed to silence dissenting speech and stressed all its activities are “peaceful and lawful”.
Legal experts say Trump’s hyped up drive to have Soros prosecuted on Rico charges is antithetical to the rule of law and part of Trump’s broader drive to weaponize DoJ against old enemies such as ex-FBI director James Comey who angered Trump for investigating Russian moves to help Trump win the 2016 election.
Last month a Trump picked novice prosecutor filed a two count indictment of Comey for lying to Congress and obstruction of Congress, after Trump forced out a veteran prosecutor who didn’t pursue the charges reportedly because of the weakness of the evidence. Comey on 8 October pleaded not guilty.
The same Trump picked prosecutor in Virginia, despite the objections of veteran prosecutors who had been ousted, on 9 October brought charges of bank fraud and false statements against the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who Trump has long reviled for winning a civil case against him and others for improperly inflating his real estate assets. James called the charges against her “baseless”, and part of Trump’s “weaponization” of the US justice system.
“Trump’s invocation of Rico to investigate Soros is frivolously wrong-headed,” said ex-federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig. “It is yet another example of his weaponization of the law to target his enemies.”
The threat of more attacks on non-profits was underscored when Democracy Defenders Fund announced on 1 October that more than 3,700 groups signed a letter sharply criticizing the administration for launching a campaign to “intimidate and silence charitable groups through executive action”.
Besides Trump’s retribution moves, Trump’s radical deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has branded the Democratic party “a domestic extremist organization” and blamed “terrorist networks” for Kirk’s murder, vowing the administration would be going after a “vast domestic terror network”.
To realize this goal, Trump signed an executive memo two weeks after Kirk died dubbed “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence”.
Citing Kirk’s killing, the memo laid the groundwork for a coordinated effort by among others the attorney general, the treasury secretary, the IRS commissioner. The memo called for a “national strategy to investigate, prosecute and disrupt entities and individuals engaged in acts of political violence and intimidation designed to suppress lawful political activity or obstruct the rule of law”.
As part of that effort, Trump designated the leftist Antifa movement a “domestic terrorist organization”, although under US law no such designation exists.
Specifically, Trump instructed his administration to “utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt and dismantle any and all illegal operations – especially those involving terrorist actions – conducted by antifa.”
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Similarly, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, a leading Trump ally, instructed his office to launch sweeping investigations into “radical leftist organizations engaged in or providing support to those performing political violence”.
Despite the Trump administration’s focus on linking the “radical left” to political violence, a study in 2024 that used to be on DoJ’s website stated that “the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”
A recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that leftwing violence in the first half of 2025 had hit a 30-year high, but it noted that overall since 2016 rightwing violence has been much higher: the study cited 41 attacks by leftwing extremists compared to 152 from the far right in these years.
Legal scholars warn that Trump administration actions against a range of liberal political targets and critics since Kirk’s death reflect growing authoritarian tendencies.
“Hallmarks of authoritarian regimes include that they seek to undermine independent media outlets and NGOs, dissolve legal boundaries between the state and civil society, vilify critics and marginalized groups, personalize politics, and make dissent more costly,” Columbia law professor David Pozen told the Guardian. “ All of these authoritarian tendencies have been on display in the Trump administration’s response to the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk.”
Historians too fear that Trump is using Kirk’s death to invoke conspiracies for political gains and revenge.
“Since Charlie Kirk’s murder, President Trump has amplified and extended his penchant for leveling conspiracy charges,” said Russell Muirhead who chairs Dartmouth’s department of government.
“The target is “domestic terrorist organizations”, which seems to include such peaceful pro-democratic anti-communist entities as George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. The effect is to describe the entirety of “the left” as a conspiracy, bent on destroying the country – including the Democratic party.
Muirhead added: “The risk here is clear: conspiracy charges convert peaceful political opponents into enemies. Once that is accomplished, they no longer need to be respected or tolerated. They can be folded into shadowy ‘domestic terrorism networks’ and imprisoned – or worse.”
Muirhead’s concerns were underscored in Trump’s 30 September speech warning of the “enemy within” to an audience of hundreds of top military leaders where he declared flatly that “America is under invasion from within,” claiming that “Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape.”
Trump called these cities “very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one,” a task that would be a “major part” of what some military leaders will be doing. Trump also bluntly suggested that the military “should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds”.
Trump’s radical suggestions to the military crowd seemed to ignore the almost 150-year-old Posse Comitatus Act that curbs using federal troops in law enforcement matters on US soil with some loopholes and exceptions.
Legal experts too have raised loud alarms at Trump’s radical military schemes.
“A president with dictatorial ambitions declaring that people in Democratic led cities are the ‘enemy within’ who have to be controlled by the use of the military is contrary to the very principles upon which this country was founded,” said Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission who now teaches law at American University.
“One cannot help but wonder whether he will continue to expand the Democratic cities in which he will use the military and whether that military presence will continue through the 2026 midterm election, in an effort to try to undermine free and fair elections.”
Pozen concurred that “President Trump’s latest comment to military leadership about the enemy ‘from within’ is yet another familiar authoritarian trope – an especially scary one”.
More broadly, legal scholars say Trump’s far flung attacks on the radical left endangers the” laws and traditions” that underpin democracy.
“Trump deploys outrageous rhetoric to try to legitimate his unconstitutional overreach,” said Peter Shane, who teaches constitutional law at New York University. “Whether it’s the baseless withholding of funds from private institutions that fail to bend the knee or fantasizing about the use of cities with Democratic mayors to train the military, Trump is running roughshod over the laws and traditions that have long sustained a robust American democracy.”
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