Trump is not that type of president. He often seems at his strongest, politically, when he has an adversary to fight against. <\/p>\n
My understanding is that Trump does believe that people on the left want to destroy his Maga movement. And since Kirk’s death, he has taken a very different tone from the governor of Utah.<\/p>\n
“I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less,” he said, when asked how the nation can be fixed. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime… The radicals on the left are the problem.”<\/p>\n
And he went further in his Oval Office remarks following Kirk’s killing: “Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”<\/p>\n
The framing by the president – that this was not just the deed of a twisted individual but of the radical left more broadly – is being echoed by other White House officials.<\/p>\n
“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have… to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks,” said Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff. <\/p>\n
“It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”<\/p>\n