Eighth Circuit Solicitor David Stumbo officially launched his bid for South Carolina attorney general Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2025. (Photo provided by Stumbo campaign)
The chief prosecutor for Abbeville, Greenwood, Newberry and Laurens counties officially launched his bid for South Carolina attorney general.
Eighth Circuit Solicitor David Stumbo became the third GOP candidate to announce his candidacy Tuesday during an event at the Laurens County Museum, promising to be “tough on crime.”
Stumbo, a former assistant attorney general, was first elected solicitor in 2012.
“Political promises don’t protect people – verdicts do,” he said in a statement. “For over twenty years, I’ve gone toe-to-toe with predators, traffickers, and violent criminals, and I’ve beaten them. That’s the kind of fight, and the kind of victory, you can count on with me as your Attorney General.”
Stumbo also promised to combat illegal immigration, as well as drug and human trafficking.
“Criminal illegal aliens, listen closely,” he said in a statement. “Anyone who tries to prey on our people, hear me now: you are not welcome in South Carolina.”
“Like President Trump, I will crush fentanyl, smash the cartels, and treat traffickers like the terrorists they are,” he added.
He appeared to call out both of his GOP primary opponents in his announcement.
“I am the only conservative Republican prosecutor in this race,” Stumbo said in a statement. “Others may chase headlines or switch parties when it suits them. I’ve always been a conservative, always been a Republican, and always been a prosecutor who delivers convictions that stick.”
The race for attorney general is wide open for the first time in 16 years as Republican Alan Wilson, first elected attorney general in 2010, runs for governor in 2026.
No one has announced a bid to be the Democrat nominee. South Carolina hasn’t elected a Democrat as attorney general in 35 years.
People mourning the killing of Charlie Kirk carried candles and American flags in a solemn memorial last week at the Huntington Beach Pier, long a destination for conservative gatherings ranging from protests over pandemic-era lockdowns to rallies in support of President Trump.
But on this night, things took a dark turn when dozens of men joined the crowd, chanting, “White men fight back.”
Then on Saturday, a white nationalist organization, identified by experts as Patriot Front, showed up at another beachside memorial for Kirk. The men, wearing khakis, navy blue shirts and white gaiters concealing their faces, marched down Main Street toward the beach holding a picture of Kirk. “Say his name!” they yelled. “Take back our world! Take back our land!”
By Sunday, key political leaders in the conservative Orange County city known as a hotbed for the MAGA movement were fighting to contain the situation, issuing a statement denouncing violence. Kirk’s assassination, City Hall said, “serves as a stark reminder of the devastating outcomes that can result from vitriol and violent rhetoric.”
“I despise them,” Councilman Butch Twining said of the white nationalists who disrupted the vigil. “There is no place for them here, and they disgust me.”
Huntington Beach is one of many communities grappling with the aftermath of the shooting of Kirk, a beloved activist in the conservative movement and close ally of President Trump.
In the 1980s and 1990s, skinheads converged on Main Street throwing Nazi salutes and intimidating people of color. In 1995, a pair of white supremacists fatally shot a Black man after confronting him outside a McDonald’s restaurant on Beach Boulevard.
Huntington Beach leaders have fought to rid the city of that image and tried to make clear that hate is not welcome in Surf City. But events of the last week have made these efforts more difficult.
“Typically, when there’s an opportunity like this, white supremacists and far-right folks more generally are very good about inserting themselves and seeing it as an opportunity to pull things in their direction and shift the narrative,” said Pete Simi, a professor of sociology at Chapman University in Orange County who studies extremist groups.
This is happening as Huntington Beach has emerged as a West Coast beacon for Trump and MAGA. The city has made headlines in recent years for removing the Pride flag from city properties, rewriting a decades-old human dignity resolution — deleting any mention of intolerance of hate crimes — and wading into fights with state officials over issues like transgender student privacy.
Brian Levin, the founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and professor emeritus at Cal State San Bernardino, said the U.S. is witnessing not just polarization between left and right, but a splintering within both the left and right. And that polarization, he said, is being exploited by extremist groups seeking to advance a certain message.
“The notion that these camps are unified teams just simply isn’t true,” Levin said. “I think what’s happening is we’re seeing the exploitation of civic discourse by people who are trying to outdo each other as being more authentic and how they do that is by being more eliminationist and more aggressive. Aggression and being an edgelord is considered currency.”
Barbara Richardson, who has lived in the city since the early 1970s, criticized city leaders for extending the mourning period for Kirk, flying flags half-staff through sundown on Sept. 21 — the day of his memorial service — saying that it will only contribute to rising tensions in the city.
Over the weekend, Richardson watched the videos of the white supremacists chanting downtown in horror. The moment was an unwelcome reminder of what residents grappled with decades ago.
“It’s disheartening,” Richardson said. “I think what happened at the Charlie Kirk rallies was a real black eye for Huntington Beach and it hurts tourism. It made me not want to go downtown. I remember the city in the 1980s and it was scary. I didn’t want to be around skinheads then and I still don’t.”
Last week’s memorials were for Kirk as well as Iryna Zarustka, the woman killed while riding a train in Charlotte, N.C., in a brutal attack captured on video.
Twining attended the event on Wednesday and was disturbed at what he heard from the white supremacists. He said he left quickly after they arrived and started chanting.
“They ruined a perfectly nice vigil where we recognized two people — Iryna [Zarustka] and Charlie—and prayed for them and sang Amazing Grace and had our own conversations about how much they meant to us,” he said.
He and others have stressed the vast majority of those who attended the vigils were there simply to mourn.
Twining said he and his wife have been accosted in a restaurant and at the grocery store over his presence at the vigil and the incorrect assumption that he’s supportive of white nationalists. There have been calls for him to resign and he’s even received death threats that have warranted police protection, he said.
“I reject the presence of hate groups loudly and unequivocally,” Twining said. “Their attempts to corrupt our democratic spaces will not succeed. As a leader in this community, I will not allow my voice to be twisted for extremism. I remain committed to preserving inclusive, respectful, and peaceful spaces where dialogue and remembrance can flourish untainted by hate.”
Videos of Saturday’s gathering show some attendees waving flags associated with Patriot Front, a white nationalist organization founded in 2017 by Thomas Rousseau after the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.
“They were intentionally generated to try and distance themselves from that violence and present themselves as pro-American,” Simi said. However, Simi noted, the group has also been accused of racial violence. In 2022, the Patriot Front was sued for a racist attack on a black musician in Boston and ordered to pay $2.75 million in damages.
On Saturday in Huntington Beach, resident Jerry Geyer was riding his bicycle in downtown watching as the group marched toward the pier chanting and decided to push back. He positioned his bicycle on the sidewalk in front of them in an effort to block their path. He rode next to them, shouting expletives.
“I cannot allow that to run through the streets of Huntington Beach,” he said in an interview with KCAL News. “That’s not what we are. That’s not who Huntington Beach is.”
The multimillion-dollar jousting over redrawing California’s congressional districts to boost Democrats and counter President Trump was on full display in recent days, as both sides courted voters less than a month before ballots begin arriving in mailboxes.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, national Democratic leaders including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and a slew of political influencers held an hours-long virtual rally Tuesday afternoon, urging Californians to support Proposition 50 in the Nov. 4 special election. Speakers framed the stakes of the ballot measure as nothing short of existential — not just for Democratic interests, but also for democracy.
“It’s all at stake. This is a profound and consequential moment in American history. We can lose this republic if we do not assert ourselves and stand tall at this moment and stand guard to this republic and our democracy. I feel that in my bones,” Newsom said Tuesday afternoon.
If passed, Proposition 50 would gerrymander the state’s congressional districts to favor Democrats, bolstering the fates of several Democrats in vulnerable swing districts and potentially cost Republicans up to five House seats.
California’s congressional districts are drawn by a voter-approved independent commission once a decade after the U.S. census. But Newsom and other state Democrats proposed a rare mid-decade redrawing of the districts to increase the number of Democrats in Congress in response to similar efforts in GOP-led states, notably Texas.
Tuesday’s virtual rally, which was emceed by progressive influencer Brian Tyler Cohen, was a cross between an old-school money-raising telethon and new media streaming session. Popular podcasters and YouTubers such as Crooked Media’s Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor (alumni of former President Obama’s administration), Ben Meiselas of MeidasTouch and David Pakman shared the screen with political leaders, with an on-screen fundraising thermometer inching higher throughout.
Cohen argued that people like him had been “begging” Democrats to fight Trump. And now elected officials had done their part by getting Proposition 50 on the ballot, he said, urging viewers to donate to support the effort.
Warren argued that Trump was a “would-be king” — but if Democrats could retake control of either house of Congress, that would be stopped, she posited.
“And if we have both houses under Democratic control,” Warren continued, “now we are truly back in the game in terms of making our Constitution work again.”
The exhaustive list of speakers represented the spectrum of the modern left, with standard-bearers such as Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, alongside rising stars including Reps. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) and Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.). A number of California delegates, including Sen. Alex Padilla and Reps. Ted. Lieu, Robert Garcia, Pete Aguilar, Jimmy Gomez and Sydney Kamlager-Dove, also spoke.
The event had been scheduled to take place Sept. 10 but was postponed after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk earlier that day.
Jessica Millan Patterson, the former leader of the California Republican Party and chair of an anti-Proposition 50 committee, accused Newsom of “scrambling for out-of-touch messengers to sell his scheme.”
“For Gavin Newsom, it’s all distraction and deflection. Instead of addressing the $283 million price tag taxpayers are stuck with for his partisan power grab, he’s hosting a cringeworthy webinar packed with DC politicians, out-of-state influencers, and irrelevant podcasters, all lining up to applaud his gerrymandered maps,” Millan Patterson said in a statement Tuesday.
Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who championed the creation of the independent redistricting commission while in office and has campaigned to stop gerrymandering across the nation after his term ended, forcefully denounced Proposition 50 on Monday.
“They are trying to fight for democracy by getting rid of the democratic principles of California,” Schwarzenegger told hundreds of students at an event celebrating democracy at the University of Southern California. “It is insane to let that happen.”
The former governor, a Trump foe who has prioritized good governance at his institute at USC, said the effort to dismantle the independent commission’s congressional districts to counter Trump are anti-democratic.
“They want to get rid of it under the auspices of we have to fight Trump,” Schwarzenegger said. “It doesn’t make any sense to me because we have to fight Trump, [yet] we become Trump.”
And on the morning of Sept. 10, opponents of the ballot measure rallied in Orange County, speaking about how redrawing congressional districts would dilute the voice of communities around the state.
“We’re here because Prop. 50 poses a serious threat to Orange County’s voice, to our communities and to our taxpayers. This measure is not about fairness. It’s about power grab,” said Orange County Supervisor Janet Nguyen during a rally at the Asian Garden Mall in Little Saigon, a Vietnamese hub in Westminster. “And it comes at the expense of our taxpayers, our small businesses and our minority communities.”
She noted that Little Saigon would be grouped with Norwalk in Los Angeles County if the ballot measure passes.
“Ask anybody in this area if they even know where Norwalk is,” Nguyen said.
The president is seeking $15 billion from the publication for libel and defamation
Former U.S. President Donald Trump attends a campaign event on April 02
President Donald Trump took to Truth Social on Monday to announce that he has filed a $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times.
Trump wrote, “Today, I have the Great Honor of bringing a $15 Billion Dollar Defamation and Libel Lawsuit against The New York Times, one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country, becoming a virtual “mouthpiece” for the Radical Left Democrat Party.”
This announcement comes shortly after The New York Times reported on a note with an explicit drawing for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday, with a signature that looks a lot like President Trump’s. The publication published articles on how the signature resembles the President’s, while Trump has been steadfastly denying. The note came out in a batch of Epstein-related materials by the House Oversight Committee.
Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for The New York Times, responded in a statement published Wednesday: “Our journalists reported the facts, provided the visual evidence and printed the president’s denial. It’s all there for the American people to see and to make up their own minds about. We will continue to pursue the facts without fear or favor and stand up for journalists’ First Amendment right to ask questions on behalf of the American people.”
In the past, Trump has gone to court with a number of other news outlets and publications. Like the multi-billion dollar settlements he has done in the past against Disney’s ABC, and Paramount’s CBS networks.
“I am PROUD to hold this once respected “rag” responsible,” Trump said in the same Truth Social post, referring to the Times.
This would not be the first time the President and The New York Times have had a run in. In the past Trump would criticize the publications’ coverage, for their ‘biased’ reporting on his administration and family business relations.
President Trump said this task force will replicate what is happening on the streets of Washington DC. The president said the goal is to essentially put an end to crime in Memphis and mirror the actions taking place in the nation’s capital. The memorandum President Trump signed on Monday did not include details on when troops would be deployed or exactly what his promised surge in law enforcement efforts would actually look like. Tennessee’s governor embraced the deployment while the mayor of Memphis is not thrilled with the plan. Crime that’s going on not only in Memphis in many cities and we’re gonna take care of all of them step by step just like we did in DC. We’ll have folks without training interacting with our citizenry, and there’s *** chance that that will compromise our due process rights. The president also mentioned he’s still looking to send National Guard troops to more Democratic-led cities like Baltimore, New Orleans, and Saint Louis. In Washington, I’m Rachel Herzheimer.
President Trump deploys the National Guard to Memphis
President Donald Trump plans to send National Guard troops to Memphis, Tennessee, as part of a federal initiative to combat crime, drawing varied responses from local leaders.
President Donald Trump is sending National Guard troops to Memphis, Tennessee, as part of his efforts to combat crime and illegal immigration.Trump said the task force will replicate what is happening on the streets in Washington, D.C., with the goal of reducing crime in Memphis. “It’s very important because of the crime that’s going on, not only in Memphis, and many cities that we’re going to take care of all of them, Trump said during an Oval Office event with members of his administration, and Tennessee’s governor and two Republican senators. “Step by step, just like we did in DC.” The memorandum President Trump signed on Monday did not specify when the troops would be deployed or detail the nature of the increased law enforcement efforts. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has embraced the deployment, but Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris expressed concerns. “We’ll have folks without training interacting with our citizenry, and there’s a chance that will compromise our due process rights,” Harris said.”I think that the National Guard is a short-term solution, and let’s be honest, these guys, these men and women, have jobs and families just like we do, and they would probably rather not be here as well,” Memphis city council member J. Ford Canale said.The president mentioned that he is still looking to send National Guard troops to more Democratic-led cities, such as New Orleans, Baltimore, and St. Louis.It looked like Chicago was going to be the next city to see troops hit the streets. The administration faced resistance from the Governor of Illinois and other local authorities. On Monday, President Trump insisted Chicago would probably be next to see National Guard troops.Keep watching for the latest from the Washington News Bureau:
Trump said the task force will replicate what is happening on the streets in Washington, D.C., with the goal of reducing crime in Memphis.
“It’s very important because of the crime that’s going on, not only in Memphis, and many cities that we’re going to take care of all of them, Trump said during an Oval Office event with members of his administration, and Tennessee’s governor and two Republican senators. “Step by step, just like we did in DC.”
The memorandum President Trump signed on Monday did not specify when the troops would be deployed or detail the nature of the increased law enforcement efforts.
“I think that the National Guard is a short-term solution, and let’s be honest, these guys, these men and women, have jobs and families just like we do, and they would probably rather not be here as well,” Memphis city council member J. Ford Canale said.
It looked like Chicago was going to be the next city to see troops hit the streets. The administration faced resistance from the Governor of Illinois and other local authorities.
On Monday, President Trump insisted Chicago would probably be next to see National Guard troops.
Keep watching for the latest from the Washington News Bureau:
America’s already roiling debate around transgender rights sharply escalated in recent days after Charlie Kirk — one of the nation’s most prominent anti-transgender voices — was fatally shot by a suspect whose life and social circles have been meticulously scrutinized for any connection to the transgender community.
Taking over Kirk’s podcast Monday, top Trump administration officials suggested they are gearing up to avenge Kirk by waging war on left-leaning organizations broadly, despite law enforcement statements that the shooter is believed to have acted alone. Queer organizations took that as a direct threat.
Kirk railed against transgender rights in life, and just prior to being shot on a Utah college campus last week was answering a question about the alleged prevalence of transgender people among the nation’s mass shooters — an idea he had personally stoked, despite pushback from statistical researchers.
Those circumstances seemed to prime the resulting outrage among his conservative base to be hyper-focused on any transgender connection.
The connection was further stoked when the Wall Street Journal reported on a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives report that suggested — seemingly erroneously — that etchings on bullet casings found with the rifle suspected as being used in the shooting included transgender “ideology.”
It was further inflamed when Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said that suspect Tyler Robinson’s roommate and romantic partner — who he said was “shocked” by the shooting and cooperating with authorities — is currently transitioning.
Leading conservative influencers, some with the ear of President Trump, have openly called for a retribution campaign against transgender people and the LGBTQ+ community more broadly. Laura Loomer called transgender people a “national security threat,” said their “movement needs to be classified as a terrorist organization IMMEDIATELY,” and said that Trump should make transitioning illegal.
LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, meanwhile, have condemned such generalizations and attacks on the community and warned that such rhetoric only increases the likelihood of more political violence — particularly against transgender people and others who have been demonized for years, including by Kirk.
“The obsession with tying trans people to shootings is vile & dangerous,” state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), one of California’s leading LGBTQ+ voices, wrote on social media. “First they try to say the shooter might be trans & WSJ amplifies that lie. Once that fell apart, they pivot to ‘he lived with a trans person.’ Even if true, who cares? It’s McCarthyism & truly disgusting.”
Many political leaders have called for calm, and for people to wait for the investigation into the suspect’s motivations before jumping to conclusions or casting blame. Cox has said that Robinson’s political ideology, different from that of his conservative family, appeared to be “part of” what drove him to shoot Kirk, but that the exact motivations for the crime remained unclear.
“We’re all drawing lots of conclusions on how someone like this could be radicalized,” Cox said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “Those are important questions for us to ask and important questions for us to answer.”
Searching for a connection
Officials were expected to release charging documents against Robinson on Tuesday that could contain more information about a motive. However, the debate has hardly waited.
Both the political right and left have searched for evidence connecting Robinson to their opposing political camp.
One of the first pieces of information to catch fire was the ATF reporting on the bullet etchings including transgender “ideology” — which turned out to be untrue, according to Cox’s later description of those etchings. That reporting immediately inspired condemnations of the entire transgender community.
“Seems like per capita the radical transgender movement has to be the most violent movement anywhere in the world,” the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. said in a Rumble livestream Thursday.
On Friday morning, President Trump said “vicious and horrible” people on the left were the only ones to blame for the political violence. “They want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone,” he said on “Fox & Friends.”
Trump was asked Monday afternoon if he thought the suspect acted alone.
“I can tell you he didn’t work alone on the internet because it seems that he became radicalized on the internet,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “And he was radicalized on the left, he is a left. A lot of problems with the left and they get protected and they shouldn’t be protected.”
The ATF declined to comment on the leaked report. The Wall Street Journal published an editor’s note walking back its reporting, noting that Cox’s description of the etchings included no references to the transgender community.
The Human Rights Campaign, a leading LGBTQ+ advocacy group, responded to the uproar by criticizing the Wall Street Journal for publishing unsubstantiated claims that fueled hateful rhetoric toward the transgender community.
“This reporting was reckless and irresponsible, and it led to a wave of threats against the trans community from right-wing influencers — and a resulting wave of terror for a community that is already living in fear,” the group said.
Spreading the narrative
The debate has heightened existing tensions around transgender rights, which Trump campaigned against and targeted with one of his first official acts — an executive order that said his administration would recognize only “two genders, male and female.”
He and his administration have since banned transgender people from military service, blocked the issuance of U.S. passports with the gender-neutral X marker, threatened medical providers of gender-affirming care for minors, and sued California for allowing transgender athletes to compete in youth sports.
In September, the Department of Justice also reportedly began weighing a rule that would restrict transgender individuals from owning firearms — a move that came after a shooter who identified as transgender killed two children and injured 18 others at a Catholic school in Minneapolis.
That shooting led prominent conservatives, including senior Trump administration officials, to link gender identity to violence. National security advisor Sebastian Gorka claimed that an “inordinately high” number of attacks have been linked to “individuals who are confused about their gender” — a trend he claimed stretched back to at least 2023, when a transgender suspect shot and killed three children and three adults at a Nashville Christian school.
After that shooting, Trump Jr. had said that “rather than talking about guns, we should be talking about lunatics pushing their gender-affirming bull— on our kids,” and Vice President JD Vance, then a senator, had said that “giving in” to ideas on transgender identities was “dangerous.”
After it was reported that Robinson’s partner is transitioning, Matt Walsh, a right-wing political commentator, wrote on X that “trans militants” pose a “very serious” threat to the country. Billionaire Elon Musk agreed, saying it was a “massive problem.”
Many in the LGBTQ+ community have strenuously pushed back against such claims, noting research showing most shootings are committed by cisgender men.
The Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University has found that the majority of shootings where four or more people were wounded in public were by men, and less than 1% of such shootings in the last decade were by transgender people.
An analysis by PolitiFact found that data do not show claims that transgender people are more prone to violence, and that “trans people are more likely to be victims of violence than their cisgender peers.”
A legacy amplified
Kirk espoused a Christian nationalist worldview and opposed LGBTQ+ rights broadly, including same-sex marriage. He called transgender people “perverted,” the acknowledgment of transgender identities “one of the most destructive social contagions in human history,” and gender-affirming care for young people an “unimaginable evil.”
Just before he was shot at Utah Valley University, Kirk had said that “too many” transgender people were involved in shootings.
It was not the first time Kirk had addressed the issue.
Days after the 2023 shooting in Nashville, Kirk went after then-White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for unrelated comments denouncing a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in state houses and saying the transgender community was “under attack.”
“It is the first shooting ever that I’ve seen where the shooter and the murderers get more sympathy than the actual victims,” he said, appearing to blame all transgender people for the attack.
The idea that liberals generally or members of the LGBTQ+ community specifically should be held accountable for Kirk’s killing has gained momentum in the days since. Vance and Trump advisor Stephen Miller seemed to allude to reprisals against left-leaning groups on Kirk’s podcast Monday, with Miller saying federal agencies will be rooting out a “domestic terror movement” on the left in Kirk’s name.
LGBTQ+ advocates called such rhetoric alarming — and said they worry it will be used as a pretext for the administration to ramp up its assault on LGBTQ+ rights.
Brazil’s Supreme Court on Thursday found former President Jair Bolsonaro guilty of conspiracies related to his failed 2022 reelection bid. The court found that Bolsonaro tried to instigate a military coup and to poison his opponent, current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro, the former president of Latin America’s largest democracy and its wealthiest country, was sentenced to more than 27 years in prison and is barred from ever seeking public office again.
Bolsonaro is one among two dozen elected presidents and prime ministers in recent history around the world who used their time in office to undermine their countries’ democratic institutions. In addition to undermining confidence in elections, the Brazilian leader weakened public and scientific institutions by defunding them. Bolsonaro’s family and political associates faced repeated scandals. As a consequence, the president governed in constant fear of impeachment — a fate that had ended the careers of two prior Brazilian presidents since the country’s return to democracy in 1998. To avoid this outcome, Bolsonaro forged alliances with an array of legislative parties and strange bedfellows. Brazilian political scientists describe the implicit agreement: “The deal is simple: you protect me and I let you run the Country and extract rents from it as you wish.”
Curiously, the decision is also a setback for President Trump here in the United States. Trump views Bolsonaro as an ally who, like him, has been persecuted by leftists and subjected to retribution by courts. The American president tried hard to stop the Brazilian court from ruling against Bolsonaro. In August, Trump sent a letter to Lula, Bolsonaro’s nemesis. Trump threatened to hike most tariffs on Brazilian exports to the U.S. to 50% should his friend remain in legal peril.
Trump’s empathy reflects the two presidents’ parallel paths. Bolsonaro, like Trump, used his time in office to test democratic norms, weaken independent public institutions and vilify his opponents. Both men express a taste for political violence. Where Trump has often mused about beating up hecklers and shooting protesters in the knees, Bolsonaro was nostalgic for military rule in his country. On the campaign trail in 2018, he asserted that Brazil would only change for the better “on the day that we break out in civil war here and do the job that the military regime didn’t do: killing 30,000.”
Both Trump and Bolsonaro tried to cling to power after losing their reelection bids. Heeding their presidents’ claims of electoral fraud, Trump’s supporters rioted in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, as did Bolsonaro’s in Brasilia, the Brazilian capital, on Jan. 8, 2023. Bolsonaro’s involvement in these post-election acts was the basis of the legal peril that has consumed him.
Trump depicts the Brazilian judge most responsible for Bolsonaro’s prosecution, Chief Justice Alexandre de Moraes, with disdain. Trump describes the case against Bolsonaro as a “witch hunt” in support of a Lula government, describing the current president as a “radical leftist.”
In fact there is little love lost between Lula and De Moraes. Lula is the leader of the social-democratic Workers’ Party; De Moraes is closely associated with the center-right PSDB and is known for his tough-on-crime stances. De Moraes’ activism dates back to the Bolsonaro presidency, when Brazil’s attorney general, appointed by Bolsonaro, was less than energetic in upholding the rule of law. To transpose the Brazilian situation and De Moraes’ activism to the U.S. context, imagine that, viewing the Justice Department’s lack of vigor in prosecuting Trump, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. had roused himself to encourage legal action against the president.
Many Americans will view Brazil and the Bolsonaro story with a certain envy. Here is a president who dealt with electoral loss by claiming fraud and by instigating his military and civilian supporters to violence, and who has been held decisively to account.
Accountability of public servants is at the heart of democracy. Voters can hold incumbents accountable in elections — political scientists call this “vertical accountability” — as can coequal branches of government, which we call “horizontal accountability.” Would-be autocratic leaders such as Bolsonaro try to escape both kinds of accountability, staying in office even when they lose (the end of vertical accountability) and undermining independent courts, agencies, central banks and whistle-blowers (there goes the horizontal version). In the end, Bolsonaro was held to account both by voters and by the courts.
Trump’s self-insertion into the Bolsonaro prosecution calls attention to another form of accountability, or at least presidential constraint, which has gone missing from our own governing administration. That is the constraint that presidents experience when advisors keep them from acting on instincts that are unwise.
If such advisors were to be found in today’s White House, they might have counseled the president not to threaten Brazil with high tariffs. Doing so risks exacerbating inflation of the prices of key consumer goods (coffee, orange juice), something that is politically dangerous because controlling inflation was an issue at the heart of Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign. The use of tariff threats as a cudgel to try to save an ally from legal peril also gives lie to the purported rationale behind tariffs: protecting U.S. manufacturers or correcting trade imbalances.
Gone, then, are the days when Americans might have served as a model of democratic governance. For all of its own problems, of which there are many, the second-largest country in our hemisphere is schooling us in what democratic accountability looks like.
Susan Stokes is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and faculty director of the Chicago Center on Democracy. She is the author, most recently, of “The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies.”
The event quickly spiraled after a request to pray for Kirk from Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado led to objections from Democrats and a partisan shouting match.
Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, a close friend of Kirk’s, told Democrats on the floor that they “caused this” — a comment she later said she stood by, arguing that “their hateful rhetoric” against Republicans contributed to Kirk’s killing.
Johnson banged on the gavel, demanding order as the commotion continued.
“The House will be in order!” he yelled to no avail.
The incident underscored the deep-seated partisan tensions on Capitol Hill as the assassination of Kirk revives the debate over gun violence and acts of political violence in a divided nation. As Congress reacted to the news, lawmakers of both parties publicly denounced the assassination of Kirk and called it an unacceptable act of violence.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said he was “deeply disturbed about the threat of violence that has entered our political life.”
“I pray that we will remember that every person, no matter how vehement our disagreement with them, is a human being and a fellow American deserving of respect and protection,” Thune said.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), whose husband, Paul, was attacked with a hammer three years ago, also denounced the fatal shooting.
A few hours after the commotion on the House floor, the White House released a four-minute video of President Trump in which he said Kirk’s assassination marked a “dark moment for America.” He also blamed the violent act on the “radical left.”
“My administration will find each and every one of those that contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it,” Trump said as he grieved the loss of his close ally.
Charlie Kirk, the conservative millennial influencer who galvanized young Americans to support the GOP and was assassinated this week in Utah, was the most influential modern-day catalyst of shifting voting trends among fledgling voters, according to Republican and Democratic strategists.
Kirk founded the nonprofit Turning Point USA in 2012 at the age of 18, and it grew into a force that promoted conservative views on high school and college campuses across the nation.
“He found something among young people that none of us identified,” said Shawn Steel, a member of the Republican National Committee from Orange County who knew Kirk for nearly a decade and invited him to speak before the RNC’s conservative steering committee.
“He found an entire movement in America that conservatives were not even aware they could find. Not only that, he nurtured and created an entire new generation of conservative activists,” said Steel, the husband of former Rep. Michelle Steel. “His legacy will endure.”
The admiration for Kirk’s political organizing skills and mental acuity cut across political lines.
“Whether you agreed with him or not — and to be clear, I didn’t — he was one of the most brilliant political organizers of his generation, and probably generations before that,” said Stephanie Cutter, a veteran Democratic strategist who served as an advisor to Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris. “He could be controversial, but he struck a nerve with people who were likely disengaged in politics prior to Turning Point and built a powerful movement.”
In addition to appealing to young voters about the economic headwinds they faced as they sought to climb the career ladder and tried to buy a house, Kirk also espoused sharply conservative views.
Beyond espousing traditional conservative views — being anti-abortion, pro-gun rights and dubious of climate change — Kirk was critical of gay and transgender rights, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, saying last year that if he saw a Black airplane pilot, he hoped he was qualified. He was accused of being an anti-Semite because of repeated comments about the power of Jewish donors in the United States, and of being Islamophobic because of comments such as describing “large dedicated Islamic areas” as “a threat to America.”
Kirk, 31 and a father of two, died Wednesday after being shot in the neck while speaking at Utah Valley University. Kirk’s assassination was the latest instance of political violence in an increasingly politically polarized country.
President Trump survived two assassination attempts in 2024 as he successfully sought reelection to the White House.
Kirk’s “mission was to bring young people into the political process, which he did better than anybody ever, to share his love of country and to spread the simple words of common sense on campuses nationwide,” Trump said Wednesday.
On Thursday, Trump told reporters on the White House’s South Lawn that Kirk was partly responsible for his victory in the 2024 presidential election and repeated that he would posthumously award Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Turning Point USA, created a month before Kirk graduated from high school, became the new face of conservatism on college campuses and had chapters at more than 800 schools. Prominent conservatives heavily funded the group; in the fiscal year that ended in June of 2024, Turning Point reported $85 million in revenue.
Longtime GOP activist Jon Fleischman, the former executive director of the California Republican Party and the former chairman of the state’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom in the early 1990s, said Kirk was pivotal to Trump’s election.
“Charlie Kirk was probably the single most prominent and successful youth organizer in the Trump movement,” Fleischman said, adding that Kirk superseded any other GOP organizer he knew at increasing conservative prospects among young voters.
“As somebody who cut their teeth as a youth organizer, I have nothing but awe for the level of sophistication he brought to that field of work,” he said.
Support for Trump among young voters exponentially increased in the 2024 presidential election, according to data compiled by Tufts University. While President Biden had a 25-point edge over Trump among voters ages 18 to 29 in the 2020 election, Harris had a four-point advantage among this cohort last year.
“This last election was the best performance Republicans have had with the youth vote, particularly male voters, in 20 years, maybe even going back to the ’80s,” said Steve Deace, a conservative radio host in Iowa who had known Kirk for a decade.
He gave credit for that success partly to work Kirk did on the ground at colleges across the country, notably being willing to amicably debate with people who disagreed with his beliefs.
“Charlie was basically a Renaissance man who was comfortable in a lot of settings. He wasn’t hoity-toity,” he said.
Deace and others added that this moment could be a turning point for the nation’s democracy and the split between the left and the right.
“We’re going to have a real conversation about whether we can share a country or not. The answer may be we can’t,” Deace said. “We have to decide if we are capable of the fundamental differences between us being adjudicated at the ballot box…. We have to decide if we can share a country. If we truly want to, we’ll figure it out. If we don’t, we won’t. That’s the conversation that needs to happen.”
Bombastic conservative commentator Roger Stone went further, arguing that modern-day Democrats are a greater threat to the nation than terrorists, drug cartels and foreign spies.
“The rot is too deep to reverse our course with mere rhetoric,” Stone wrote to supporters. “Sept. 10, 2025 was the day we crossed the Rubicon, lost our innocence and realized only one path remains to ensure humanity’s survival. The time for American renewal is at hand, and the tree of liberty shall germinate in warp speed with Charlie Kirk serving as the martyr of our glorious refounding.”
OREM, Utah — Authorities said Thursday they have fresh leads in their massive manhunt for a college-age shooter who killed influential right-wing activist Charlie Kirk with a single bullet as he spoke at a Utah college campus.
No suspects were in custody Thursday, more than 18 hours after the shooting, and officials have yet to identify the gunman. However, Robert Bohls, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Salt Lake City office, said that investigators recovered the weapon they believe was used to kill Kirk — a high-powered bolt-action rifle they found in a wooded area near the campus — as well as the suspect’s footprints and palm prints.
“We are and will continue to work nonstop until we find the person that has committed this heinous crime, and find out why they did it,” Bohls said.
A close ally of President Trump who founded the conservative youth group Turning Point USA, Kirk was killed Wednesday by a single shot fired from the rooftop of a nearby building as he addressed a question about mass shootings at a Utah Valley University campus in Orem.
Investigators are tracking a suspect who appeared to be college age and blended in on the university campus, Bohls said at a Thursday morning news conference. They have scoured dozens of feeds from campus security cameras and collected footwear impressions, a palm print and forearm imprints for analysis.
Video of the crowd captured by an attendee shows a lone figure in black dashing across the rooftop of the Losee Center, a building about 150 yards from where Kirk was speaking.
Beau Mason, commissioner of the Utah Department of Public Safety, said investigators “are confident in our abilities to track” the shooter and had “good video footage” that they were not ready to release.
“We are working through some technologies and some ways to identify this individual,” he said.
After scouring camera security footage, investigators believe the shooter arrived on campus at about 11:52 am and moved through the stairwells, up to the roof, across the roof to the shooting location, Mason said.
“We were able to track his movements as he moved to the other side of the building, jumped off of the building and fled off of the campus and into a neighborhood,” Mason said. “Our investigators worked through those neighborhoods, contacting anybody they can, with doorbell cameras, witnesses, and have thoroughly worked through those communities trying to identify any leads.”
Bohls said investigators recovered a high-powered, bolt-action rifle in a wooded area where the shooter had fled. Bohls did not answer reporters’ questions whether the rifle had been traced to an owner.
The Utah Department of Public Safety said Wednesday night its State Crime Lab is working “multiple active crime scenes” — from the site where Kirk was shot to the locations he and the suspect traveled — with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Utah County Attorney’s office, the Utah County Sheriff’s office, and the local police departments.
Hope for a speedy capture of the suspect faded Wednesday night after the F.B.I. released the man its director, Kash Patel, had said was a subject of the investigation. After thanking local and state authorities for taking into custody “the subject for the horrific shooting,” Patel announced that the man had been released after an interrogation by law enforcement.
“Our investigation continues,” Patel said.
Another man who was taken into custody a few hours earlier was later released after being booked by Utah Valley University police on suspicion of obstruction of justice.
Speaking at the Pentagon Thursday at an event commemorating the Sept. 11 attacks, President Trump said he would posthumously award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Kirk.
“Charlie was a giant of his generation, a champion of liberty and an inspiration to millions and millions of people,” Trump said.
The shooter is believed to have fired about 20 minutes after Kirk began speaking Wednesday on a grassy campus courtyard under a white canopy emblazoned with the slogan “PROVE ME WRONG.” The event, attended by about 3,000 people, was the first stop on Kirk’s American Comeback Tour of U.S. campuses.
Some experts who have seen videos believe that the assailant probably had experience with firearms, given the precision with which the single shot was fired from a considerable distance.
“Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?” an audience member asks.
“Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk responds.
Almost immediately, a shot rings out. Kirk falls back, blood gushing his neck. Video show people screaming and fleeing from the event.
The killing — the latest incident in a spate of violent attacks targeting American politicians on the left and the right — led to swift condemnation of political violence from both sides of the ideological divide. But it also led to a blame game.
After President Trump celebrated Kirk as a “patriot who devoted his life to the cause of open debate” and “martyr for truth and freedom,” he said in an evening video broadcast from the Oval Office that “‘radical left” rhetoric was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.”
Even as the House of Representatives observed a moment of silence for Kirk Wednesday when he was still in critical condition, the floor descended into chaos when some Democrats pushed back on a Republican legislator’s request that someone lead the group in prayer.
Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a former conservative influencer and close friend of Kirk, pointed angrily at Democrats. “You all caused this,” she shouted.
Kirk, 31, was one of the Republican Party’s most influential power brokers.
The founder of the influential conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, Kirk had a vast online reach: 1.6 million followers on Rumble, 3.8 million subscribers on YouTube, 5.2 million followers on X and 7.3 million followers on TikTok.
During the 2024 election, he rallied his online followers to support Trump, prompting conservative podcast host Megyn Kelly to say: “It’s not an understatement to say that this man is responsible for helping the Republicans win back the White House and the U.S. Senate.”
Just after Trump was elected for a second time to the presidency in November, Kirk frequently posted to social media from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, where he had firsthand influence over which MAGA loyalists Trump named to his Cabinet.
Kirk was known for melding his conservative politics, nationalism and evangelical faith, casting the current political climate as a state of spiritual warfare between a righteous right wing and so-called godless liberals.
At a Turning Point event on the Salt Lake City campus of Awaken Church in 2023, he said that gun violence was worth the price of upholding the right to bear arms.
“I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the 2nd Amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” he said. “That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
He also previously declared that God was on the side of American conservatives and that there was “no separation of church and state.” In a speech to Trump supporters in Georgia last year, he said that “the Democrat Party supports everything that God hates” and that “there is a spiritual battle happening all around us.”
Two assassination attempts on President Trump. The assassination of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband and the wounding of others. The shooting death of a top healthcare executive. The killing of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington. The storming of the U.S. Capitol by a violent mob intent on forcing the nation’s political leaders to their will.
And, on Wednesday, the fatal shooting of one of the nation’s most prominent conservative political activists — close Trump ally Charlie Kirk — as he spoke at a public event on a university campus.
If it wasn’t already clear from all those other incidents, Kirk’s killing put it in sharp relief: The U.S. is in a new era of political violence, one that is starker and more visceral than any other in decades — perhaps, experts said, since the fraught days of 1968, when two of the most prominent figures in the civil rights movement, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, were both assassinated in a matter of months.
“We’re very clearly in a moment where the temperature of our political discourse is extremely high,” said Ruth Braunstein, an associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University who has studied religion and the far right in modern politics. “Part of what we see when that happens are these outbursts of political violence — where people come to believe that violence is the only solution.”
While the exact motives of the person who shot Kirk are still unknown, Braunstein and other experts on political violence said the factors shaping the current moment are clear — and similar to those that shaped past periods of political violence.
Intense economic discomfort and inequity. Sharp divisions between political camps. Hyperbolic political rhetoric. Political leaders who lack civility and constantly work to demonize their opponents. A democratic system that many see as broken, and a hopelessness about where things are headed.
“There are these moments of great democratic despair, and we don’t think the political system is sufficiently responsive, sufficiently legitimate, sufficiently attentive, and that’s certainly going on in this particular moment,” said Jon Michaels, a UCLA law professor who teaches about the separation of powers and co-authored “Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy.”
“If we think there are no political solutions, there are no legal solutions, people are going to resort to forms of self help that are really, really deeply troubling.”
Michaels said the country has been here before, but also that he worries such cycles of violence are occurring faster today and with shorter breaks in between — that while “we’ve been bitterly divided” for years, those divisions have now “completely left the arena of ideas and debate and contestation, and become much more kinetic.”
Michaels said he is still shaken by all the “defenses or explanations or rationalizations” that swirled around the country after the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City in December — which some people argued was somehow justified by their displeasure with UnitedHealthcare’s policies or frustration with the American healthcare system.
That the suspect, Luigi Mangione, would attract almost cult-like adoration in some circles seemed like an alarming shift in an already polarized nation, Michaels said.
“I understand it is not the beliefs of the typical person walking down the street, but it’s seeping into our culture slowly but surely,” he said — and in a way that makes him wonder, “Where are we going to be in four or five years?”
People across America were asking similar questions about Wednesday’s shooting, wondering in which direction it might thrust the nation’s political discourse in the days ahead.
How will Kirk’s many conservative fans — including legions of young people — respond? How will leaders, including Trump, react? Will there be a shared recognition that such violence does no good, or fresh attempts at retaliation and violence?
Leaders from both parties seemed interested in averting the latter. One after another, they denounced political violence and defended Kirk’s right — everyone’s right — to speak on politics in safety, regardless of whether their message is uplifting or odious.
Democrats were particularly effusive in their denunciations, with Gov. Gavin Newsom — a chief Trump antagonist — calling the shooting “disgusting, vile, and reprehensible.” Former President Obama also weighed in, writing, “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.”
Many seemed dismissive of such messages. In the comments on Obama’s post, many blamed Obama and other Democrats for rhetoric demonizing Republicans — and Trump and his followers in particular — as Nazis or racists or fascists, suggesting that the violence against Kirk was a predictable outcome of such pitched condemnations.
Trump echoed those thoughts himself Wednesday night, blaming the “radical left” for disparaging Kirk and other conservatives and bringing on such violence.
Others seemed to celebrate Kirk’s killing or suggest it was justified in some way given his own hyperbolic remarks from the past. They dug up interviews where the conservative provocateur demonized those on the left, suggested liberal ideas constituted a threat to Western civilization, and even said that some gun violence in the country was “worth it” if it meant the freedom to bear arms.
Experts said it is important to contextualize this moment within American history, but with an awareness of the modern factors shaping it in unique ways. It’s also important to understand that there are ways to combat such violence from spreading, they said.
Peter Mancall, a history professor at USC, has delved into major moments of political violence in early American history, and said a lot of it stemmed from “some perception of grievance.”
The same appears to be true today, he said. “There are moments when people do things that they know are violating their own sense of right or wrong, and something has pushed them to it, “ he said. “The trick is figuring out what it is that made them snap.”
Braunstein said that the robust debate online Wednesday about the rhetoric of leaders was a legitimate one to have, because it has always been true that “the way our political leaders message about political violence — consistently, in public, to their followers and to those that don’t support them — really matters.”
If Americans and American political leaders truly want to know how we got here, she said, “part of the answer is the intensification of violent political rhetoric — and political rhetoric that casts the moment in terms of an emergency or catastrophe that requires extreme measures to address it.”
Democrats today are talking about the threats they believe Trump poses to democracy and the rule of law and to immigrants and LGBTQ+ people and others in extremely dire terms. Republicans — including Kirk — have used similarly charged rhetoric to suggest that Democrats and some of those same groups, especially immigrants, are a grave threat to average Americans.
“Charlie Kirk was one of many political figures who used that kind of discourse to mobilize people,” Braunstein said. “He’s not the only one, but he regularly spoke about the fact that we were in a moment where it was possible that we were going to see the decline of Western civilization, the end of American society as we know it. He used very strong us-vs.-them language.”
Particularly given the wave of recent violence, it will be important moving forward for politicians and other leaders to reanalyze how they speak about their political disagreements, Braunstein said.
That’s especially true of Trump, she said, because “one of the most dangerous things that can happen in a moment like this is for a political leader to call for violence in response to an act of violence,” and Trump has appeared to stoke violence in the past, including on Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol and during racist marches through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
Charlie Kirk speaks during a town hall meeting in March in Oconomowoc, Wis.
(Jeffrey Phelps / Associated Press)
Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Centers for Violence Prevention at UC Davis, agreed messaging is key — not just for responding to political violence, but for preventing it.
Since 2022, Wintemute and his team have surveyed Americans on how they feel about political violence, including whether it is ever justified and, if so, whether they would personally get involved in it.
Throughout that time frame, a strong majority of Americans — about two-thirds — have said it is not justified, with about a third saying it was or could be.
An even smaller minority said they’d be willing to personally engage in such violence, Wintemute said. And many of those people said that they could be dissuaded from participating if their family members, friends, religious or political leaders urged them not to.
Wintemute said the data give him “room for hope and optimism,” because they show that “the vast majority of Americans reject political violence altogether.”
“So when somebody on a day like today asks, ‘Is this who we are?’ we know the answer,” he said. “The answer is, ‘No!’”
The job of all Americans now is to reject political violence “out loud over and over and over again,” Wintemute said, and to realize that, if they are deeply opposed to political policies or the Trump administration and “looking for a model of how to resist,” it isn’t the American Revolution but the civil rights movement.
“People did not paint over how terrible things were,” he said. “People said, ‘I will resist, but I will resist without violence. Violence may be done to me, I may die, but I will not use violence.’”
It was President Trump who announced that conservative commentator and activist Charlie Kirk had died after he was shot during a Turning Point USA event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday afternoon. The president, who was close to Kirk, praised his appeal to young Americans and mourned him in a social media post.
“The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The president also ordered flags to be lowered to half-staff until Sunday evening to honor Kirk.
Later Wednesday, Mr. Trump released a video statement about Kirk, blaming the “radical left” for his killing. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said in a video posted to Truth Social. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
Democratic and Republican politicians alike condemned Kirk’s murder, although among some in Congress, there were disagreements about how to observe his death on the House floor. Speaker Mike Johnson attempted to hold a moment of silence for Kirk. Then, according to the House gallery, GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado asked for a point of order — she reshared an X post that said she had asked for a moment of prayer. A Democrat yelled, “No.” Boebert and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, then started to speak out, as other lawmakers who appeared to be Democrats responded. One yelled, “There was just a shooting in Colorado!” Another said “Pass some gun laws!” Johnson repeatedly called for order.
In an appearance on Fox News, Johnson explained what had happened. “A motion was made on the floor to have a vocal prayer, and it turned into an argument,” he said, adding, “You know, that’s where our politics are in the country right now. We have got to turn the heat down a little bit. We got to have civil discourse.”
“The great tragic irony about this, one of the tragedies, is that Charlie represented that, the best of it,” Johnson continued. “He’s the guy that was the champion out on the front lines having the debate, but he he loved the people that disagreed with him …. He loved it, and he loved the debate.”
“That’s what’s so important for us to remember,” Johnson said. “We shouldn’t regard one another as enemies. We’re fellow Americans, and we should have vigorous debate, but it cannot lead to political violence. It’s just too much.”
File: Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, enters the plaza and talks with his supporters, May 1, 2025. / Credit: Michael Ho Wai Lee/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Biden says there’s “no place in our country for this kind of violence”
Former President Joe Biden decried the attack on Kirk in a post on social media.
“There is no place in our country for this kind of violence. It must end now. Jill and I are praying for Charlie Kirk’s family and loved ones,” he said in a post shared to X.
Obama calls Kirk’s killing an act of “despicable violence”
Former President Barack Obama condemned the shooting, calling it “despicable violence” in a post on X.
“We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy,” Obama said. “Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie’s family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children.”
Bush says “violence and vitriol must be purged from the public square”
In a statement, former President George W. Bush said, “Today, a young man was murdered in cold blood while expressing his political views. It happened on a college campus, where the open exchange of opposing ideas should be sacrosanct.”
“Violence and vitriol must be purged from the public square. Members of other political parties are not our enemies; they are our fellow citizens. May God bless Charlie Kirk and his family, and may God guide America toward civility,” he said.
Bill Clinton calls for “serious introspection”
Former President Bill Clinton said in a social media post that he was “saddened and angered” by the shooting.
“I hope we all go through some serious introspection and redouble our efforts to engage in debate passionately, yet peacefully,” he said.
Melania Trump mourns Kirk, saying now, his children will be raised “with stories instead of memories”
First lady Melania Trump imagined what the loss of Kirk will mean to his children as they grow up.
“Charlie’s children will be raised with stories instead of memories, photographs instead of laughter, and silence where their father’s voice should have echoed,” she said in a post on X.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox “heartbroken” over Kirk’s death, vows justice will be served
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, said that he and his wife are “heartbroken” about Kirk’s death, and said they are praying for the conservative activist’s wife and two children.
“I just got off the phone with President Trump. Working with the FBI and Utah law enforcement, we will bring to justice the individual responsible for this tragedy,” he wrote in a social media post on X.
Sen. Mike Lee praises Kirk’s “boundless energy and great love for his country”
Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah told CBS News he spoke with Mr. Trump about Kirk, and said the president told him, “‘I’m sure they’ll stay after him,’” referring to the shooting suspect, and “‘they need to catch this guy.’”
“Whether you agree with him or not, you have to respect his boundless energy, his commitment to making the world a better place,” Lee also said.
In a post on X, Lee called Kirk an “American patriot, an inspiration to countless young people to stand up and defend the timeless truths that make our country great.”
He condemned Kirk’s murder, writing on X that it was “a cowardly act of violence, an attack on champions of freedom like Charlie, the students who gathered for civil debate, and all Americans who peacefully strive to save our nation.”
“The terrorists will not win,” he continued. “Charlie will. Please join me in praying for his wife Erika and their children. May justice be swift.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson says Kirk will be “sorely missed”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, told reporters that Kirk was “a close friend” and “confidant.”
“He will be sorely missed,” he said. “And we need every political leader to decry the violence and do it loudly.”
Eric Trump says Trump properties will fly flags at half-staff
Eric Trump described Kirk as a “dear friend” to the entire Trump family. He said all Trump properties would fly their flags at half-staff to honor him.
Donald Trump Jr.: “I love you brother”
Donald Trump Jr, who was close with Kirk, wrote on social media: “I love you brother. You gave so many people the courage to speak up and we will not ever be silenced.”
“There is no question that Charlie’s work and his voice helped my father win the presidency,” Trump Jr. wrote in a lengthy follow-up post. “He changed the direction of this nation…I know Charlie’s legacy doesn’t end here. He poured into millions of young people who will carry forward the torch he lit. He built something that will outlast him, because it was grounded in faith, in truth, and in courage. And as his friend, I will never forget him. I’ll honor him by loving boldly, speaking truth without fear, and continuing his spirit of courage. His fight lives on in all of us who loved him. This is an unimaginable loss.”
Gabby Giffords “horrified” to hear of Kirk’s shooting
Gabby Giffords, a former U.S. congresswoman from Arizona who suffered a serious brain injury when she was shot in 2011, said in a post on X, “I’m horrified to hear that Charlie Kirk was shot at an event in Utah. Democratic societies will always have political disagreements, but we must never allow America to become a country that confronts those disagreements with violence.”
House Oversight Chairman James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, said shooting was “awful”
GOP House Oversight Chairman James Comer of Kentucky said he watched the video of the shooting and said it was “awful.”
“It’s just, it’s just terrible. I mean, I think we’ve been saying for months now the political temperature is too high in America, and we’ve got to tone it back,” Comer told CBS News. “And political violence is on the rise. And, you know, I know that most of my colleagues and myself included are getting a lot more threatening calls, and it’s just, it’s a terrible environment now and again. I just feel awful for Charlie Kirk and his young family.”
GOP Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina: Kirk meant a lot to “the right to speak freely and share your beliefs”
Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, told CBS News at the Capitol that “there’s no room for violence, and it’s terrible. She said she’s encouraged by the bipartisan response to the attack on Kirk and noted the House Oversight Committee had paused for a moment of prayer for Kirk.
Foxx told CBS News that Kirk represented “a category of people in our culture that’s very important,” and noted he was “very proud of the fact that he doesn’t have a college degree.”
“He means a lot, and he means a lot, not just to the conservative movement and to the, and to that aspect of our culture, but again, the right to speak freely and share your beliefs and be safe in our country, and it’s just so unfortunate. It’s unfortunate when anybody has violence perpetrated on them, whether you’re liberal or conservative. It’s just wrong.”
GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia: “There really aren’t words”
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said of Kirk’s shooting, “There really aren’t words,” and told reporters that it will “be hard for anybody to fill his shoes.”
“Charlie Kirk leaves a huge legacy,” she said.
GOP Rep. Chip Roy of Texas suggests Kirk’s killing “is going to be one of those things that, you know, changes some things”
Far right Republican Chip Roy said of Kirk, “This is a guy that you can disagree with him — I disagreed with him on most things.” But Roy admired that “he was trying to open up dialog and engage in civil discourse across college campus, appeal even those that disagree with them.”
Roy suggested that Kirk’s murder, “is going to be one of those things that you know changes some things.”
“I haven’t quite yet figured out how or what, but you know, it’s, you know, this one, this one hits,” he told reporters at the Capitol.
“We should be able to speak freely and speak with passion and regard about what we believe, without it coming to that. That’s the thing … we’re here for something bigger and greater than all of ourselves,” Charlie lived it, tweeted out three days ago about his faith in his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, so, I know where he is.”
He blamed “a country that’s turning its back on our collective faith as a nation,” saying that “this is why we’re seeing a breakdown and our ability to band together. We got to do something about that.”
GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna blames Democrats
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, blamed Democrats for Kirk’s shooting. “They did cause this — that type of rhetoric. You calling people fascists? You basically saying that we’re Nazis, taking away people’s rights. Charlie Kirk was literally murdered,” she told reporters. Law enforcement does not have a suspect in custody.
Nancy Pelosi calls shooting “reprehensible”
House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, condemned the shooting in a post on X, calling it “reprehensible.”
“Political violence has absolutely no place in our nation,” she said, adding Americans should “hold the entire UVU community in our hearts as they endure the trauma of this gun violence.”
Pelosi, whose husband Paul Pelosi was bludgeoned with a hammer by a man who broke into Pelosi’s San Francisco home in 2022, has frequently condemned political violence.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom calls on Americans to “engage with each other”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who hosted Kirk on his podcast earlier this year, wrote on social media that Kirk’s killing is “a reminder of how important it is for all of us, across the political spectrum, to foster genuine discourse on issues that deeply affect us all without resorting to political violence.”
“The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate — never through violence,” Newsom said. “Honest disagreement makes us stronger; violence only drives us further apart and corrodes the values at the heart of this nation.”
SIMI VALLEY — Jadyn Winsett twisted her new engagement ring around her finger, scanning the sea of navy sport coats, sailor stripes and string pearls at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library for a glimpse of a Supreme Court justice.
Across the room stood Amy Coney Barrett, the high court’s youngest member, who could hardly have picked a more dramatic moment to turn up.
A day earlier, Barrett joined the conservative majority in a decision that cleared federal immigration agents to detain people in Southern California simply because they have brown skin or speak Spanish.
The response across much of Los Angeles was outrage and concern that the 4th Amendment has been trampled.
But at the Reagan Library, the mood was triumphant.
Winsett, 23, and her fiance were among the admirers who gathered to hear Barrett speak about her new memoir, “Listening to the Law.” For the supporters who turned up, Barrett evokes values cherished by President Trump’s faith-driven acolytes: beatific motherhood, Southern charm, Christian piety and steadfast constitutional originalism.
A Texas native, Winsett’s partner had popped the question two days before at Yosemite National Park. She said the proposal was the highlight of the couple’s California holiday. But the chance to meet Barrett at Reagan’s final resting place was a close second.
“I sent [my fiance] so many text messages in the span of a couple minutes just being excited that this event was going on, and we had to come,” Winsett said. “I’m a really big fan of Justice Scalia … so knowing [Barrett’s] book is supposed to bit of an expansion on Justice Scalia’s ‘Reading Law,’ that’s gonna be really cool. “
Jadyn Winsett, left, and Reese Johnson, a newly engaged couple from Texas, planned their trip to attend the justice’s book launch.
(Al Seib / For The Times)
Barrett said almost nothing about her controversial rise to the court or the jurisprudence behind her most contested decisions during Tuesday’s event, instead dishing out details about Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s race with the Nationals’ foam-headed Lincoln and Roosevelt mascots and how she’d brought Starbucks coffee to the Supreme Court cafeteria.
But the previous day’s immigration raid ruling still hovered in the air.
When asked to explain the court’s “shadow docket”, she ad-libbed a hypothetical all but identical to Monday’s real decision.
“Let’s say that some policy of the administration has been enjoined,” Barrett said. “The administration might say, ‘While we are litigating this case, having this injunction in place is irreparably harming us in a way we can’t recover from, so in the interim, please stay this injunction.’”
A packed room listens and watches monitors as Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett takes questions at the launch of her new book.
(Al Seib / For The Times)
Later, when asked about constitutional interpretation, she opined about the slippery text of the 4th Amendment, the same amendment implicated in Monday’s unsigned order.
“[Look at] the protection against unreasonable search and seizures,” she invited the audience.
“When you have a word like that, ‘unreasonable,’ there’ll be a range where everybody will say, outside of this, we all agree this is unreasonable,” Barrett explained. “Then, there’s a range right here where we all say this is reasonable. But then there’s going to be a band where there’s room for disagreement. One of the great things about the Constitution is that it leaves some of that play in the joints.”
People line up to get their book signed at the Reagan Library.
(Al Seib / For The Times)
Earlier in the evening, Barrett and her husband, Jesse, had paid their respects at the Reagan Memorial and briefly admired the chunk of Berlin Wall, flanked by a coterie of federal agents while protests raged outside.
Many in the crowd said they, like the Catholic justice, were devout Christian believers and credited her with casting the decisive vote to end abortion as a constitutional right in the United States.
“I’m a born-again Christian and I believe it was the hand of God that put her on the court … to be able to overturn Roe vs. Wade,” said Glovioell Dixon of Pasadena, who’d arrived hours before the program to beat the crowds.
Others were taken with Barrett’s command of the law — several mentioned the fact she’d barely used notes at her confirmation hearing — and her poise under pressure.
“She’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever observed,” said Elizabeth Pierce of Newbury Park, the lone red baseball cap in a field of cognac loafers and Chanel-inspired skirt suits. “This is the chance of a lifetime.”
A few even credited the justice for realizing their American dream.
Sean Chen, 52, of East Los Angeles said he’d just attended his daughter’s medical school white coat ceremony and praised Barrett’s 2023 ruling to strike down race-based affirmative action in the case Fair Admissions vs. Harvard.
“That’s directly related to the future of my kids,” Chen said. “Without the work from the Supreme Court [overturning affirmative action], maybe I wouldn’t even have that chance.”
A Chinese immigrant, Chen called the opportunity to learn from one of the nation’s nine law-givers part of his journey to becoming “spiritually American.”
Barrett divulged little Tuesday about her memoir, for which she was paid $425,000 in 2021, the first tranche of a reported $2-million advance, according to financial disclosures.
“We’re gonna pray we’re gonna get our books signed!” an event coordinator encouraged those near the back of the line as the sun set over the golden hills.
Die-hard fans were reminded not to try to snap selfies, though keepsake photos would be taken and could be purchased after the event.
Julia Quiroz, 23, left, and her mom, Gaby Quiroz, in line waiting to get their book signed by the Supreme Court justice.
(Al Seib / For The Times)
Julia Quiroz, 23, waited with her mother to have her book signed.
“I see her as exemplary in her vocation as a mother,” Quiroz said of Barrett.
Her mom, Gaby, agreed — mostly.
As a Catholic, Quiroz said she agrees with Barrett’s rulings on abortion, but despaired of realizing the family’s dream of ending the procedure from coast to coast.
“She’s going to do the right thing for the country and the law,” Gaby Quiroz said. “I don’t know that her decisions will always align with ours.”
Other attendees said they were in lockstep with Barrett and her rulings in support of the president’s agenda — whatever its impact on their neighbors.
“I’m very happy,” said Kevin Rivero of Palmdale. “She is ensuring the president has the power to do what the executive branch is empowered to do. As an L.A. citizen, I’m for it.”
Dixon, the Pasadena Christian, said she agreed with the Supreme Court’s ruling on immigration raids even though her ex-husband was once an undocumented immigrant, who could have faced deportation had they not gotten married.
“America’s for everyone. We’re a welcoming country, you know?” Dixon said. “Bring us your poor — what was that saying on the Statue of Liberty? That line? I’m all for that. But do it in a way that honors our country.”
Washington — Charlie Kirk, a right-wing political activist and influential voice for young conservatives in the digital age, died Wednesday after he was shot in the neck at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. He was 31.
Kirk, a father of two, was shot as he was speaking to students at an event for Turning Point USA, an organization for young conservatives he co-founded in 2012.
“The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead,” President Trump wrote. “No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us.”
According to video shared on social media, an audience member asked Kirk about mass shootings in the U.S. before Kirk was hit in the neck and slumped in his chair. Two eyewitnesses told CBS News a large volume of blood poured from his neck. He was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said at a news conference Wednesday evening that a “person of interest” was in custody, but did not elaborate.
Mr. Trump, who survived an assassination attempt at an outdoor political event last year, told the New York Post, “He was a very, very good friend of mine and he was a tremendous person.” Democrats and Republicans alike expressed their outrage, prayers and concern on social media upon news of the shooting.
Charlie Kirk speaks on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson on Oct. 17, 2024. / Credit: OLIVIER TOURON/AFP via Getty Images
Kirk, a close Trump ally, was the key to energizing and mobilizing the youth vote for the president throughout his campaigns. He was critical to the Trump ground game effort for voter turnout and built out significant parts of the Trump campaign in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Kirk stood by the president during what could be described as his political winter, soon after he announced his second presidential campaign, when skeptics doubted he could become president again.
Kirk also made it his mission to engage more young people in politics, and register them to vote. Kirk was also a close friend of the president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr.
Kirk spoke at Mr. Trump’s inauguration parade in January, and the president appointed him to the Air Force Academy Board of Visitors in March.
“For those of you that have always had the president’s back throughout these last couple of years, when we were at our darkest moment four years ago, this is your victory,” Kirk said as he opened his speech at Mr. Trump’s inaugural parade.
But Kirk’s politics weren’t without controversy. Kirk pushed false claims about voter fraud after Mr. Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, stoked skepticism about the COVID-19 pandemic and spread anti-trans rhetoric. He also amplified the “Great Replacement” conspiracy, which is based on the belief that there’s a plot to replace White people with minorities.
After casting doubt early on about mail-in voting, Kirk pushed GOP voters to embrace the methods in 2024.
He pointed to Kari Lake’s loss in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial race as a moment where he realized that Republicans must embrace “Election Month,” as he put it, not just Election Day.
“It triggered a lot of introspection on our team. And I was like, why are we not embracing, you know, this sort of methodology, we might not love it, but losing feels a lot worse,” Kirk said. “I think that the movement is looking at it the same.”
Born Oct. 14, 1993, Kirk grew up in the Chicago suburbs and briefly attended community college, but dropped out to pursue political activism full time.
Kirk was the host of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” a daily conservative talk radio show and amassed millions of followers on social media.
Kirk is survived by his wife, Erika, and their two young children.
The services of a life-preserving, ego-boosting retinue of intimidating protectors — picture dark glasses, earpiece, stern visage — were cited by more than one Harris associate, past and present, as a factor in her deliberations. These were not Trumpers or Harris haters looking to impugn or embarrass the former vice president.
According to one of those associates, Harris has been accompanied nonstop by an official driver and person with a gun since 2003, when she was elected San Francisco district attorney. One could easily grow accustomed to that level of comfort and status, not to mention the pleasure of never having to personally navigate the 101 or 405 freeways at rush hour.
That is, of course, a perfectly terrible and selfish reason to run for governor, if ever it was a part of Harris’ thinking. To her credit, the reason she chose to not run was a very good one: Harris simply “didn’t feel called” to pursue the job, in the words of one political advisor.
Now, however, the matter of Harris’ personal protection has become a topic of heated discussion and debate, which is hardly surprising in an age when everything has become politicized, including “and” and “the.”
There is plenty of bad faith to go around.
Last month, President Trump abruptly revoked Harris’ Secret Service protection. The security arrangement for vice presidents typically lasts for six months after they leave office, allowing them to quietly fade into ever greater obscurity. But before vacating the White House, President Biden signed an executive order extending protection for Harris for an additional year. (Former presidents are guarded by Secret Service details for life.)
As the first female, first Black and first Asian American vice president, Harris faced, as they say in the protective-service business, an elevated threat level while serving in the post. In the 230-odd days since Harris left office, there is no reason to believe racism and misogyny, not to mention wild-eyed partisan hatred, have suddenly abated in this great land of ours.
The president could have been gracious and extended Harris’ protection. But expecting grace out of Trump is like counting on a starving Doberman to show restraint when presented a bloody T-bone steak.
“This is another act of revenge following a long list of political retaliation in the form of firings, the revoking of security clearances and more,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass angrily declared.
True.
Though Bass omitted the bit about six months being standard operating procedure, which would have at least offered some context. It wasn’t as though Harris was being treated differently than past vice presidents.
Gov. Gavin Newsom quickly stepped into the breach, providing Harris protection by the California Highway Patrol. Soon after, The Times’ Richard Winton broke the news that Los Angeles Police Department officers meant to be fighting crime in hard-hit areas of the city were instead providing security for Harris as a supplement to the CHP.
Not a great look. Or the best use of police resources.
All well and good, until the conservative-leaning Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union representing rank-and-file officers, saw fit to issue a gratuitously snarky statement condemning the hasty arrangement. Its board of directors described Harris as “a failed presidential candidate who also happens to be a multi-millionaire, with multiple homes … who can easily afford to pay for her own security.”
One person in the private-security business told Winton that a certain household name pays him $1,000 a day for a 12-hour shift. That can quickly add up and put a noticeable dent in your back account, assuming your name isn’t Elon or Taylor or Zuckerberg or Bezos.
Setting aside partisanship — if that’s still possible — and speaking bluntly, there’s something to be said for ensuring Harris doesn’t die a violent death at the hands of some crazed assailant.
The CHP’s Dignitary Protection Section is charged with protecting all eight of California’s constitutional officers — we’re talking folks such as the insurance commissioner and state controller — as well as the first lady and other elected officials, as warranted. The statutory authority also extends to former constitutional officers, which would include Harris, who served six years as state attorney general.
Surely there’s room in California’s $321-billion budget to make sure nothing terrible happens to one of the state’s most prominent and credentialed citizens. It doesn’t have to be an open-ended, lifetime commitment to Harris’ protection, but an arrangement that could be periodically reviewed, as time passes and potential danger wanes.
Serving in elected office can be rough, especially in these incendiary times. The price shouldn’t include having to spend the rest of your life looking nervously over your shoulder.
Or draining your life savings, so you don’t have to.
SIX MEMBERS OF THE SUPREME COURT do not seem to understand what any high school student knows about the importance of checks and balances to protecting American democracy. Why not?
Widely used textbooks and lesson plans, popular encyclopedias, and even the federalgovernment’sownwebsites all stress the Framers’ wise decision to diffuse power among three branches of government, creating a system in which each branch can block or challenge another’s assertion of power.
This power of each branch to check the ambitions of the others is not merely a theoretical power that should rest limp in the hands of feckless officials. It is a constitutional duty the Framers established to guard against excessive aggregations of power.
In case after case, however, the six Republican-appointed members of the Supreme Court1 have flouted this crucial principle, abdicating their constitutional obligation to restrain presidential arrogations of unauthorized power. Instead of operating as a check against an overly aggressive presidency, the majority has repeatedly written blank checks allowing President Trump to insert any amount of power that he chooses to fill in.
In a stream of recent decisions, including many conducted on the so-called shadow docket without the benefits of full litigation, the majority has summarily unleashed the Trump administration from constraints that scores of federal judges—many of them appointed by Republican presidents, including Trump himself—have deemed constitutionally necessary.
At the end of its most recent term, the six-justice majority stayed injunctions that three different federal judges had issued enjoining President Trump’s executive order purporting to nullify “birthright citizenship,” despite the explicit declaration in the Fourteenth Amendment that “all persons born in the United States” are American citizens. The majority could not quite bring themselves to read this provision out of the Constitution, so they ruled that the lower courts should not use broad injunctions to interfere with the president’s policies.
The majority complained that, when a federal court “enters a universal injunction against the Government,” it improperly “intrudes” on executive branch prerogatives and “prevents the Government from enforcing its policies against nonparties,” even if those policies are unconstitutional. It is hard to imagine a more stunning abdication of the federal judiciary’s obligation to keep an anti-constitutional executive branch in check.
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In July, without even bothering to explain its reasons, the justices simply indulged President Trump’s desire to rule by decree, without the niceties of obtaining congressional approval or support. This unsigned decision stayed lower-court rulings that had blocked implementation of his executive order calling for massive restructuring of the government, closing down various operations chartered by Congress, and firing tens of thousands of public servants.2
In another enhancement of raw presidential power at the expense of legislative authority, the six-justice conservative majority summarily granted a stay allowing the president to push forward in dismantling the Department of Education. Created by Congress, the cabinet-level department is tasked with performing vital functions that are now left in limbo.
Three times in the past few months, the majority knowingly and summarily disregarded a major Supreme Court precedent that had constrained another president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he attempted to unravel the federal government’s system of bipartisan regulatory agencies. In that 1935 precedent, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the Supreme Court concluded unanimously that presidential power does not extend to firing, for mere policy differences, officials serving in independent agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission. Back then, the Court found that Congress had arranged for commissioners to be removed during their multi-year terms only for misconduct or similar cause.
Nevertheless, the current majority continued to indulge President Trump’s most extravagant assertions of presidential power, allowing him to sack the Democratic members of various regulatory agencies solely for partisan reasons. In these latest cases, the president’s targets were the Democratic appointees on the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit System Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission. As Justice Kagan recognized in dissenting in the NLRB/MSPB case, Congress had provided for federal regulators “to serve their full terms, protected from a President’s desire to substitute his political allies.” But when the majority of the current Court has to choose between Congress and President Trump, the president invariably wins.
Another blank check came last month when, once again, the majority summarily suspended two lower courts’ rulings that barred the government from canceling commitments for $800 million in grants for ongoing medical research. As Justice Jackson noted in her dissent, the majority’s expedited action to allow President Trump to cancel any grants that might violate the administration’s anti-DEI policies obstructed “potentially life-saving scientific advancements.”
After cataloguing the majority’s pattern of intervening at the earliest possible moment to give the Trump administration free rein, Justice Jackson observed that, “unfortunately,” this action was simply the “newest entry in the Court’s quest to make way for the Executive Branch.”
SO WHAT EXPLAINS this abject deference to President Trump’s whims and wishes? There are several theories on offer.
Some court-watchers have argued over the years that the conservative justices are motivated by a desire for conservative policy outcomes. (The mirror critique has also long been made about the liberal justices: that, notwithstanding their legal reasoning, their real desire is to see liberal policy outcomes.) But that argument, whatever its merits in the past, does not match today’s circumstances, as Trump’s court victories largely relate to policies that are radical rather than recognizably conservative.
A second theory is that the Court, guided by Chief Justice John Roberts, is keeping its powder dry—choosing to minimize clashes with Trump now so that it will retain its institutional legitimacy in case of a later, dire showdown. But there is zero evidence for this theory; it amounts to wishful thinking, doesn’t make logical sense, and becomes less plausible by the day.
I’m persuaded by a third theory often aired: that several of the Republican-appointed justices have embraced the notion of the “unitary executive,” a strain of constitutional interpretation that holds, in essence, that all power in the executive branch is derived from the presidency, that all officers in that branch are merely exercising power on behalf of the president, and that no parts of the executive branch ought to be considered independent of the president or beyond his power to order or fire. This theory, popular among members of the Federalist Society, was spelled out in the Reagan era (although it has earlier antecedents). The justices who served in the executive branch under Republican presidents (Roberts in the Reagan White House, Clarence Thomas elsewhere in the Reagan administration, and Brett Kavanaugh in the George W. Bush White House) seem especially partial to it.
But even the unitary executive theory doesn’t fully capture the radicalism of where this Court has gone. The vision of the presidency spelled out by Chief Justice Roberts on behalf of the six justices in last year’s Trump v. U.S. is like the unitary executive theory but on steroids. That opinion holds that President Trump (and, indeed, any president) enjoys constitutional immunity to commit federal felonies, making him exempt from accountability in federal courts for violating criminal laws enacted by Congress. (In Senate testimony last year, I explained why that decision is patently wrong, defies both the text of the Constitution and our constitutional history, and is profoundly dangerous.)
When Roberts, in that ruling, wrote “the President is a branch of government” unto himself, the chief justice may have thought he was merely spelling out a Reagan-era vision of a stronger presidency and a unitary executive. But, as Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith argued earlier this year, Trump v. U.S. is not just a “presidential immunity shield” but also “an executive branch sword”—an aggressive interpretation of the role of the president. With that ruling and the Court’s string of decisions granting Trump an unlimited bank account of power on which to draw, the Court set the stage not for a strong and stable presidency but for chaos in the executive branch, and a reckless and anti-constitutional presidency wielding power without fear of checks and balances. If the Court doesn’t change course, and soon, history will judge these six justices harshly.
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Chief Justice John Roberts (appointed by President George W. Bush) and Associate Justices Clarence Thomas (George H.W. Bush) and Samuel Alito (George W. Bush), along with the three associate justices appointed by Trump in his first term (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett).
Because it was an unsigned stay, we don’t know precisely how the justices voted, only that a majority of them, including in this case the liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor for technical reasons, backed Trump. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson alone wrote in dissent.
Immigrants with removal orders are being fined up to $998 each day and sued by the Trump administration for non-compliance
The case stems from an arrest during a routine ICE check-in.Credit: Courtesy Neal via Adobe Stock
The Trump administration is now issuing large fines to immigrants with removal orders and suing those who do not comply in an effort to force self-deportation, immigration lawyers told ABC News.
As per the Trump administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has begun using a 1996 law to issue fines to individuals with removal orders. Notices warned immigrants to leave the U.S. voluntarily to avoid financial penalty.
In June, the Trump Administration announced that it would impose new fines, decrease the time for appeal and no longer give a 30-day notice period. ICE claimed they issued over 10,000 fines within that same month. Said fines range from $100-$500 for each unlawful entry or attempted entry, and up to $998 daily for up to five years.
In June, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that the fines apply to those who enter the country illegally, ignore removal orders or do not comply with “voluntary departure orders.”
“Financial penalties like these are just one more reason why illegal aliens should use CBP Home to self-deport now before it’s too late,” Tricia McLaughlin, DHS Assistant Secretary, said in the statement.
Before July, people received a notice of intent, which they could appeal. Now, however, individuals are simply receiving invoices, Florida immigration attorney John Gihon told ABC News.
Those who received fines and did not comply are now being sued by the Trump administration. Gihon noted that one of his clients was unable to comply due to a lack of proper travel documents. New York immigration attorney Edward Cuccia told ABC News that his clients have received million-dollar fines despite the fact that they work minimum wage jobs.
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Attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, Merle Kahn, told ABC News, “They could be fined over $1.8 million if they have an outstanding deportation order and didn’t leave.”
BEIRUT — Israel on Tuesday ordered the evacuation of the entire city of Gaza, the first time it has done so in the run-up to its planned full invasion of the largest urban center in the Gaza Strip’s north.
Home to roughly 1 million residents before the war, Gaza City still has hundreds of thousands of residents who are enduring famine conditions and fearful of displacement to other parts of an enclave where nowhere has proven safe in Israel’s almost-two-year campaign to destroy Hamas.
Six Palestinians died of hunger on Tuesday, according to Palestinian health authorities, increasing the death toll of starvation victims to 399.
“There’s no place left to go, not in the south, not in the north, nothing,” said Bajess AlKhaledi, a Gaza resident interviewed on Tuesday by Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera English. “We’re completely trapped.”
The evacuation order came the same day Israel launched an attack on Hamas leaders in the Qatari capital of Doha.
Some 50,000 have left northern Gaza to areas south, according to the United Nations and partner humanitarian agencies on Sunday. They warn that hundreds of thousands are expected to stay put in Gaza City because of logistical and financial difficulties, and that plans for large-scale displacement would amount to forced migration — a war crime under international law.
It remains unclear when the Gaza City invasion will start, though Israel has already called up tens of thousands of reservists and destroyed dozens of high-rise residential towers in recent days. The Israeli military said the towers were being used by Hamas, a charge Hamas denied.
The Israeli military says it controls some 40% of the city.
“All of this is only the introduction, only the beginning of the main intensive operation — the ground incursion of our forces, that are now getting organized and gathering, into Gaza City,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised address on Monday.
“To the residents of Gaza, listen to me carefully: You have been warned; get out of there!”
Israel claims Hamas remains bunkered in Gaza City and has vowed to destroy its remaining bastions there to prevent it from regrouping, despite repeated warnings by the U.N. and rights groups that no area in the enclave could handle large-scale displacement.
“Gaza is being obliterated, reduced to a wasteland,” said Philippe Lazzarini, head of the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, in a social media post on Tuesday.
“There is no safe place in Gaza, let alone a humanitarian zone. It is a large and growing camp concentrating hungry Palestinians in despair,” Lazzarini wrote.
The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza, meanwhile, called for “immediate protection” of hospitals and medical crews, and warned of “a humanitarian catastrophe that threatens the lives of thousands of patients and wounded individuals.”
The majority of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents have already suffered multiple displacements since the war began, as Israel’s military campaign has attacked designated “safe zones” and left wide swaths of the Strip obliterated. Famine, spurred by a months-long total blockade by Israel, stalks additional victims every day.
Israel’s plans to invade Gaza City continue even as torturous back-and-forth negotiations with Hamas received a push from President Trump over the weekend.
On Sunday, Trump issued what he called a final warning to Hamas to accept a deal he proposed.
Details remain scant, but the agreement stipulates the Palestinian group release all hostages in its custody in exchange for the release of an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israel jail.
“The Israelis have accepted my Terms. It is time for Hamas to accept as well,” Trump said on Truth Social. “I have warned Hamas about the consequences of not accepting. This is my last warning, there will not be another one!”
Hamas responded in a statement on Sunday that it was ready to “immediately” sit at the negotiating table to release all hostages. In return, Hamas wants “a clear declaration” from Israel to end the war, a complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and the formation of an independent committee to administer the Strip.
It added that it wanted guarantees Israel would adhere to the agreement. Israel broke a U.S.-brokered ceasefire in March. It did not respond to another U.S. proposal in August that Hamas accepted.
Israel has also demanded Hamas surrender and lay down its arms. The group says it will not disarm until Israel agrees to the creation of an independent Palestinian state over Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which would have East Jerusalem as its capital. East Jerusalem is considered occupied under international law, though Israel says it is part of its capital.
Over the weekend, President Trump shared a doctored AI image of himself as Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, the crazed cavalry commander in the 1979 Vietnam War film, “Apocalypse Now,” crouched in a black Stetson hat in front of a flaming Chicago skyline abuzz with black helicopters.
“‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
Trump has long promised to deploy the National Guard to America’s major urban hubs. But his unprecedented push this summer to deploy military convoys into Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. — and drumbeat of threats to send yet more into cities from Baltimore to San Francisco — has left many Americans divided on whether his administration is trying to protect people in Democratic-controlled cities or wage war on them.
When Trump first sent troops into L.A. in June, he argued federal immigration agents needed protection from locals who tried to obstruct them from fulfilling their mission. In August, he deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., seizing on instances of violent crime to claim a public emergency.
And now he has paired the issues of crime and immigration as he threatens Chicago, deploying militaristic imagery and rhetoric that break longstanding American norms.
As Trump goads Democratic-led cities, dubbing them poorly run “hellholes,” Americans are grappling with a fundamental question of American democracy: Is Trump simply fulfilling his election mandate to ramp up deportations and combat crime, as he and his supporters argue, or ushering in a new era of American authoritarianism?
Trump’s critics warn that he is exaggerating crime in American cities to score political points. In deploying troops to Los Angeles and D.C., they argue, Trump is setting up a military police state that targets political opponents, tramples on due process, installs loyalists over institutionalists, and erodes longstanding distinctions between the military and domestic law enforcement.
“This is how authoritarians behave, this is not how the leader of a free democracy behaves.” said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “He is taking a page from authoritarian rulers around the world who have used crime as an excuse to consolidate power and suppress rights.”
Conservatives tend to brush aside such concerns, arguing that Trump’s deployment of troops simply delivers on a campaign promise. They note he ran on a platform of mass deportations and fighting crime in major cities.
“There’s a problem to be dealt with there,” said James E. Campbell, professor emeritus of political science at the University at Buffalo. “He has the constitutional authority to employ the National Guard, and that’s part of the powers of commander in chief in Article II. What’s peculiar here is some cities don’t want the help — or at least the leaders of the cities.”
While the courts will ultimately settle the legal questions of what Trump can do, he seems to be betting that he can put Democratic leaders in a defensive position at a time when polls show the vast majority of Americans are worried about crime.
When Illinois’ Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker pushed back this weekend against Trump’s Chicago plans, accusing the president of “threatening to go to war with an American city,” Trump insisted he was not spoiling for a fight.
“We’re not going to war,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We’re going to clean up our cities.”
Democrats say Trump is scaremongering about crime in American cities to score points against his political enemies, noting that homicides and other violent crimes have dropped over the last five years in cities across the nation.
According to a recent analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice, a policy think tank, violent crime is lower in most cities than the pandemic peak of 2020-21. But the report noted that most of the decline in the national homicide rate has been driven by large drops in cities with high homicide rates, such as Baltimore and St Louis. More than half of sample cities continue to experience homicide levels above pre-2020 rates.
For many Americans, crime remains a potent political issue.
But it remains to be seen if Americans will warm to Trump’s hard-line tactics: about 55% of Americans in the AP poll said it’s acceptable for the U.S. military and National Guard to assist local police in big cities, but less than a third support federal troops taking control of city police departments.
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Throughout the 2024 election, Trump threatened to deploy the National Guard to fight crime.
“In cities where there has been a complete breakdown of law and order, where the fundamental rights of our citizens are being intolerably violated,” he promised in his Agenda47 campaign platform. “I will not hesitate to send in federal assets including the National Guard until safety is restored.”
Still, there was some shock when Trump deployed the National Guard and U.S. Marines to L.A. in June after a clash erupted in the heavily Latino city of Paramount as immigration agents ratcheted up his deportation agenda.
The conflict fell short of an all-out collapse of law and order. After Border Patrol agents were spotted setting up a staging area outside a Home Depot, hundreds of protesters gathered, some hurled rocks at federal vehicles as agents fired tear gas and flash-bang grenades at the crowd. Within hours, Trump ordered 2,000 National Guard soldiers to L.A.— against the will of California Gov. Gavin Newsom — to protect federal agents and property.
Sending in the National Guard without a governor’s consent was a highly unusual step. The last time it happened was in 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect civil rights marchers marching from Selma to Montgomery.
But L.A. was not a one-off for Trump. In August, Trump announced he would take federal control of Washington, D.C.’s police department and activate National Guard troops to help “reestablish law and order.” The city, he said, had been “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.”
Dist. Atty. Brian Schwalb, the elected attorney general of the District of Columbia, argued “there is no crime emergency” in D.C. “Violent crime in DC reached historic 30-year lows last year,” Schwalb noted, “and is down another 26% so far this year.”
And he has adopted a similar strategy as he threatens to send troops to Chicago, highlighting a violent Labor Day weekend, in which nine people were killed and more than 50 injured across the city.
Chicago has long struggled with violent crime, but city officials note that homicides and shootings have declined, putting the city on track for its lowest homicide rate in half a century.
Mayor Brandon Johnson said homicides are down 30% in the last year in Chicago and his police department has taken 24,000 guns off the street, most of which came from Republican-led states, since he took office in May 2023.
“This stunt that this president is attempting to execute is not real. It doesn’t help drive us towards a more safe, affordable, big city,” Johnson said last month as he called on Trump to release $800 million in violence prevention funds that the federal government cut in April.
Already, Trump has declared implausibly quick results in curbing crime in Washington, D.C..
“D.C. was a hellhole and now it’s safe,” the president declared less than two weeks after deploying troops to the nation’s capital. “Within one week, we will have no crime in Chicago.”
When asked about Trump’s strategy, Adam Gelb, the president and chief executive of the Council on Criminal Justice, said the obvious challenge was the Trump administration’s solutions tended to be, “by definition, short term dopamine hits and not sustainable long term solutions.”
“That’s what history tells us: we can have short-term impact with shocks to the system like this, but they tend to be fleeting.”
Asked what would happen if the shock to the system was permanent, Gelb said he did not know.
“It hasn’t been tested,” Gelb said, “not in this country with respect to deployment of troops in massive numbers.”
Ultimately, Gelb said, Trump’s incursion into cities was “testing Americans’ tolerance for crime and militarization.”
“If there’s a perception that these tactics are responsible for dramatic reductions in crime,” he asked, “will people become more tolerant of them?”
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Trump has suggested that Americans will allow him unlimited powers if he is perceived as stopping crime.
“Most people are saying, ‘If you call him a dictator, if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants,’ ” Trump said last month in a televised Cabinet meeting. “I am not a dictator, by the way,”
“I’m the president of the United States,” he added. “If I think our country is in danger — and it is in danger in these cities — I can do it.”
Daniel Treisman, a professor of political science at UCLA, said Trump is “the most extreme case yet of a leader who comes to power in a long-established democracy and wants to act like an authoritarian — to break down all restrictions on his power and intimidate his enemies.”
Most alarming of all, he said, was the Trump administration’s purging of professionals from federal agencies such as the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation in favor of loyalists.
The co-author of “Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st century,” Treisman said Trump’s aims appeared to closely resemble those of Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, or Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador.
“I would like to believe that he will face a lot more obstacles than those leaders did,” Treisman said.
Even if a majority of Americans think Trump is right that crime is a problem — or a substantial number support indefinite occupations of American cities or the elimination of due process — some argue that doesn’t make it democratic.
“There’s no such thing as electing a president to undo democracy and violate the rule of law,” Goitein said. “He can’t say, ‘Well, the American people elected me to shred the Constitution.’ ”
On Monday morning, the jury selection process began in the case of Ryan Routh, the man who allegedly attempted to shoot Donald Trump on his Palm Beach golf course
On Monday morning, at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, Florida, the jury selection began in the case of the man who allegedly attempted to kill Donald Trump on his golf course last year. Jury selection is expected to take three days, followed by a month-long trial. Attorneys will question three sets of 60 people to settle on twelve jurors and four alternates.
Ryan Routh, a 59-year-old construction worker from North Carolina and Hawaii, pleaded not guilty to five criminal charges that carry a life sentence, including attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate, using a firearm in furtherance of a crime, assaulting a federal officer, possessing a firearm as a felon and using a gun with a defaced serial number.
Despite the fact that he lacks legal training, Routh has chosen to defend himself in court. According to court filings, since he has begun defending himself, Routh has requested a “beatdown session” with Trump, asked to compete for his freedom in a round of golf with the president and suggested being part of a prisoner swap rather than going to trial.
“I will be representing myself moving forward; It was ridiculous from the outset to consider a random stranger that knows nothing of who I am to speak for me,” Routh wrote in a letter to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in July. “I am so sorry, I know this makes your life harder.”
Judge Cannon- a Trump appointee who oversaw and dismissed one of Trump’s criminal cases- is letting Routh defend himself, but has outlined strict rules. If he demonstrates “vexatious, obstructionist, or obstreperous behavior,” Cannon threatened to sanction Routh or revoke his ability to maintain his pro se status. He was also barred from asking most of his proposed jury questions due to them being “politically charged” and not relevant. Routh will dress in formal attire during the trial and be allowed to use a podium, but he will not be able to roam the courtroom freely.
Prosecutors must prove that Routh not only planned to kill Trump, but that he also took at least one “substantial step” to carry out his plan.
Prosecutors allege that during the early hours of September 15th, 2024, Routh hid in the bushes of Trump’s Palm Beach golf course with a rifle, which was spotted by a Secret Service agent. He allegedly fled after the agent fired at him, and was later arrested after being stopped on a nearby interstate. Prosecutors claim that Routh planned this attack for months, acquiring the military-grade rifle, over a dozen burner phones and researching Trump’s movements and campaign events.
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Prosecutors also claim that, a month before his alleged assassination attempt, Routh attempted to purchase anti-aircraft weapons, communicating with someone who he thought was a Ukrainian, with access to military weapons.
According to court filings, months before the assassination attempt, Routh gave a friend a box with a handwritten letter detailing his plans. Routh claimed prosecutors are misrepresenting this letter by only using part of it, and that the note in its entirety is actually about “gentleness, peacefulness, and non-violent caring for humanity.”
“This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, but I failed you. I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster. It is up to you now to finish the job; and I will offer $150,000 to whomever can complete the job,” the note read. “He [Donald Trump] ended relations with Iran like a child and now the Middle East has unraveled.”
It was alleged that Routh communicated similar thoughts in his 2023 book, where he prompted readers to “assassinate Trump” in part due to his foreign policy with Iran. Prosecutors also accuse Routh of bragging about his alleged crimes in emails from jail.
Prosecutors have shared over 40 potential witnesses and hundreds of exhibits, including forensic evidence allegedly tying Routh to the weapon found at the crime scene. Routh’s witness list encompassed two dozen people, including a group of Palestinian activists and professors, his son, a former girlfriend and Trump himself. Routh claimed two of his proposed witnesses will likely be unavailable to testify, one fearing deportation.
