On Tuesday morning, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, shared a post reflecting his vision for how the administration and the movement should move forward from a week in which discourse has been strained and stretched by the murder of Charlie Kirk.
“The path forward is not to mimic the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] of the mid-90s. It is to take all rational steps to save Western Civilisation.” The first to comment was Elon Musk, owner of the platform on which Miller was posting. “Yes”, Musk responded.
In the fretful days since Kirk was shot dead in the midst of his ‘American Comeback’ college campus tour in Utah, one of the most prominent voices has belonged to Miller. Even in the best of times, his speaking style is one of belligerent anger. After the killing of his friend and Maga colleague, the wrath remained but the voice was quieter. On Monday, he appeared on the latest episode of Charlie Kirk’s podcast, which was guest-hosted by vice-president JD Vance.
It was in itself an extraordinary spectacle as a succession of the White House administration’s leading figures, from press secretary Karoline Leavitt to chief of staff Susie Wiles, passed through to reflect on Kirk’s legacy. At one stage, Vance and health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr reflected on Kirk’s facility as what Kennedy termed as “an impresario strategist” who not only ushered Vance into the Trump family orbit but also brokered the alliance of Kennedy and Trump during last year’s election.
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Vance even struck the kind of conciliatory note which many millions of Americans have been waiting to hear over the past week when he remembered a conversation he had with Kirk last September, the day after he had met Tim Walz in the vice-presidential candidates’ debate in New York.
“He asked what I thought of Tim. Honestly, you know, you get in this bunker mentality in the campaign, it’s us against them. And I said, honestly, even though I am glad I did well and certainly I don’t want to this guy to become vice-president, I actually kind of liked him afterwards, after 90 minutes of talking with him. And Charlie said: ‘that’s why I do all these debates. You can disagree vehemently with someone but if you are communicating with them you can appreciate them a little as a human being.’”
But it was Miller who provided the strongest and most ominous message of the podcast, allowing that he was speaking from a place of “incredible sadness” but also “incredible anger”.
“And the thing about anger is that unfocused anger or blind rage is not a productive emotion. But focused anger, righteous anger, directed for a just cause, is one of the most important agents of change in human history. And we are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organised campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks. The organised doxxing campaigns, the organised street violence, the organised campaigns of dehumanisation and vilification, posting people’s addresses and combining that with messaging designed to trigger and incite violence, and the actual organised cells that carried out and facilitated the violence: it is a vast domestic terror movement. And as God is my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice and Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
The vow raised a series of simultaneously ringing alarms as to whom it was directed. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California and one of the few leading Democratic figures to meet and publicly engage with Kirk, was clear in his interpretation. “Wake Up America. Stephen Miller has already publicly labeled the Democratic Party as a terrorist organisation. This isn’t about crime and safety. It’s about dismantling our democratic institutions. We cannot allow acts of political violence to be weaponized and used to threaten tens of millions of Americans,” he posted on X.
Shortly before he left for a two-day visit to England on Tuesday morning, where he will be hosted by king Charles and, on Thursday, by prime minister Starmer, president Trump stopped to speak at the White House lawn. ABC reporter Jonathan Karl wanted to know what Trump thought about Pam Bondi targeting purveyors of “hate speech”.
“A lot of your allies say hate speech is free speech,” Karl hinted.
“She’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me unfairly,” Trump replied.
“It’s hate. You’ve a lot of hate in your heart. ABC paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech.”
As with many of Trump’s engagements with the pool of reporters who cover him on a daily basis, the exchange could be interpreted as another example of his off-the-cuff trolling and sparring – or as direct intimidation of a respected reporter by a sitting president.
In the same huddle, he castigated an Australian reporter who asked him about the personal wealth he had accumulated since he was sworn in. “You’re hurting Australia very much right now. They want to get along with me. Your leader is coming over to see me soon – I’m going to tell him about you. You set a very bad tone.”
In a separate development, it emerged that president Trump is to sue the New York Times for $16 billion on a claim of defamatory coverage during the 2024 election campaign.
The publisher of the Times, A.G. Sulzberger, dismissed the lawsuit as “frivolous” in a note to staff while a statement was issued declaring that “the New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics. We will continue to pursue the facts without fear or favour and stand up for journalists’ First Amendment right to ask questions on behalf of the American people.”
The note to staff on Tuesday added that “everyone, regardless of their politics, should be troubled by the growing anti-press campaign led by President Trump and his administration.”
In the long interlude between Kirk’s assassination and the memorial service that will take place in Arizona on Sunday, both sides of the political spectrum continue to drift farther apart. In Utah on Tuesday, prosecutors filed a notice to seek the death penalty for Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old charged with a series of offences, including aggravated murder. In laying out the sequence of events before and after the shooting, Utah county attorney Jeff Gray revealed that when Robinson’s parents asked their son why he committed the crime, he had replied that “there is too much evil and this guy spreads too much hate.”
Kirk’s vast following continues to mourn and remember him as what Vance described as a “joyful warrior” of free speech while fragmented Democratic voices warn against a mounting persecution against the First Amendment right to free speech. Mainstream Democrats continue to walk the fine line between natural empathy for the victim of an appalling act of political violence without whitewashing the extremist views that victim had advocated, views which entire swathes of Americans found deeply objectionable.
Nobody has yet managed to emulate the tone of reconciliation that Utah’s Republican governor Spencer Cox struck in his call for a national pause and coming together in the days after the killing. And after all of the countless words and arguments spoken by Charlie Kirk and sent into the social media orbit, coming into the sharpest focus of all is his personal view on the subject of “hate speech”.
“Hate speech does not exist legally in America,” Kirk wrote in a social media post last year. “There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”
