The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a dreadful crime, and the killer is likely to be executed for what he has done. But no one who opposes President Donald Trump for his anti-democratic excesses should ease up for even a moment in the campaign to spotlight and denounce those transgressions.
If you are pointing out dangerous actions and behaviors in reasonable words and are not encouraging the use of violence, you should consider yourself to be in the clear and should press on with speaking truth to this corrupt power.
Keep challenging Trump’s overreach and the GOP-led Congress’s cowardly dereliction of its duty to be a check on the executive branch. Continue telling that same Congress that we are watching for it to rouse itself and hypocritically rediscover its voice when the next Democratic president takes office and tries to effect his or her agenda. Keep telling Congress that the executive excesses on which it is silent today are establishing precedents that tomorrow’s presidents — Republican and Democrat — will be able employ to constrain disapproving voices, throttle the courts and to stifle the inconvenient rights of the sovereign people.
Keep pointing out that under Trump, the executive branch is, more than ever, a center of power pursuing the interests of the occupant of the Oval Office to the detriment of the common good.
Trump’s supporters seem to have calculated that they will be safe because Trump is their man and they are his people, that he will forever focus on the enemy. But who is enemy and who friend in Trump’s eyes, and for how long? Supporters of aspiring authoritarians have erred fatally in this calculation repeatedly throughout history, failing to recognize that the dictator is a pathological personality who views even his supporters and allies as tools and will turn on them the moment this becomes convenient for him.
Suddenly, they, who were the heroic people in the authoritarian’s telling yesterday, become the enemies of the people. This pattern is already plain to see in Trump’s behavior since his first term. Who can count the number of people he has embraced as the finest to serve him in government and elsewhere, only to turn on them and attack them as villainous and incompetent, even treasonous, because they have indulged in independent thinking? Who can forget his attacks on his own supporters for wanting greater transparency in the Jeffrey Epstein sex crimes case, a matter on which Trump has exhibited an interesting level of touchiness?
All those immigrant groups that supported him in the election? They fancied themselves to be among the elect. They were wrong. They found out in his immigration enforcement sweeps.
Let us deplore the killing of Charlie Kirk and commiserate with his wife and children and the wider community that loved him. But let us not be diverted from our principal purpose by noises such as Trump’s linking of Kirk’s assassination to violent rhetoric on the left. Absolutely no one in American public political discourse of the past decade has unleashed more violent and incendiary rhetoric than Donald Trump has from his perch on the extreme right of American politics.
Since he declared for the presidency in June 2015, he has demolished the guardrails of self-restraint and decency and has dragged this country’s political culture toward levels of physical confrontation not seen since the civil rights struggles of the post-World War II era.
A 22-year-old man may have fired the shot that killed Charlie Kirk in Utah, but when 79-year-old Trump looks in the mirror here in Washington, D.C., he will see someone who bears part of the blame for that heinous assassination. His supporters should wake up and see who is leading them, and to where.
Democracy Warrior 
Another very well written piece, Gilbert. But I dare say that when the esteemed gentleman looks in the mirror, he will see no such thing. He is not capable of acknowledging his shortcomings and role in anything which goes awry. With him, it’s always someone else.
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