Trump uses levers of power to respond to Charlie Kirk killing

The Trump administration is aiming to use any levers of power it has to respond to Charlie Kirk’s killing, in part to send a message to political opponents.

ABC taking comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air for his comments on Kirk this week is just one major highlight of the administration’s enormous pressure on ideological opponents it aims to punish.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is trying to find a way to bring federal charges against Kirk’s suspected shooter, Tyler Robinson, and the White House is weighing a policy response to combat political violence, mulling over routes Trump can take to respond to Kirk’s killing.

An official said the White House is “exploring a wide variety of options to put pen to paper to address left-wing political violence and the network of organizations that fuel and fund it,” adding that specifics continue to be discussed.

Trump is steering the response through his own rhetoric over the last few days, insisting that the “radical left” is responsible. Top officials have made clear they would use Kirk’s death to target left-wing groups, with Vice President Vance at one point suggesting they would be dismantled. 

The president suggested on Thursday late-night shows in particular should not be allowed to overwhelmingly be critical of him when asked about Kimmel’s indefinite leave.

“They’re 97 percent against; they give me only bad press….I would think maybe their license should be taken away,” Trump said, adding that the decision would ultimately be left up to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr.

A former aide to Trump’s first term said Kimmel being pulled off the air is “a good case study” in the “lever pulling happening with speech and censorship.”

“There isn’t as much handwringing over what constitutes ‘hate speech’ – they are more focused on what regulatory levers they can pull to put intense pressure on liberal Hollywood media,” the former aide said. “The White House is now using the FCC against Disney in a way we haven’t seen, threatening with license risk, merger scrutiny, spectrum headaches – and suddenly now the affiliates and advertisers are doing the policing on the White House’s behalf.”

Republicans, meanwhile, seem to have Trump’s back on any actions he makes in the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, argued Sam Geduldig, managing partner at GOP lobbying firm CGCN.

“Tragically what Charlie Kirk did for the party— unified it entirely. When Trump decides what he wants to be for, the party will get in line because they’re so unified over the Charlie Kirk situation,” he said.

Geduldig also pointed to the Biden-era Department of Homeland Security Disinformation Governance Board to argue “government getting involved in speech is not new.”

“If the shoe were on the other foot and someone on the left was assassinated and people were making untruthful monologs— at worst, horrible jokes and at best, political commentary based in disinformation, what would the Biden disinformation czar have done? The left started this with shadow banning and deplatforming social media influencers. Kimmel lost his job, not his freedom of speech,” Geduldig said.

Trump this week said he would designate the far-left activist movement Antifa as a terrorist organization after warning that groups on the left will be investigated. The White House is also weighing executive actions like targeting left-leaning nonprofit groups with anticorruption laws, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins wrote in a Newsweek op-ed published on Thursday that “agents of chaos must be exorcized from our nation without apology and without compromise.”

“Charlie's murder is proof that the radical left won't allow Americans to make our country great again without a fight. Now is the time to wage war, not through aimless violence, but with a legal and rational crackdown on the forces that are desperately trying to annihilate our nation,” she wrote.

Other top administration officials are also calling for action, including Vice President Vance, who on Monday hosted “The Charlie Kirk Show” and called on Americans to call the employers of people they see “celebrating Charlie’s murder.”

He suggested the administration could specifically target the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations, both of which have ties to liberal megadonor George Soros. And, Justice Department officials have suggested they could use federal racketeering laws, known as RICO, to target groups on the left that they claim are working together to target others through doxxing.

Attorney general Pam Bondi was in hot water this week for saying the administration will “go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech” and separately threatened to prosecute Office Depot over an employee’s refusal to print posters for a vigil honoring Kirk. In an effort to clarify Bondi’s comments, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said hate speech is “of course” protected by the First Amendment.

Businesses have taken note of the rhetoric and actions out of the administration over the last week and are evaluating how they function moving forward.

One Democratic lobbyist described the feeling: “It’s straight forward: give what’s expected, get what’s needed, and stay low when there’s no gain in being visible.”

And, the entertainment industry in particular, in the wake of the Kimmel incident, is evaluating their risks when decision-making, the former aide in Trump’s first term said.

“We’re going to see a lot more of this in a post-Kirk assassination world— the White House is playing hard ball and giving the entire entertainment industry a wakeup call that they are a businesses, not propaganda machine,” the former aide said.

The source added, “Both boardrooms and local affiliates are now recalculating risk, and Hollywood is learning that gaslighting half the country now carries real costs.”