Just imagine if Charlie Kirk were shot while speaking at a college in Chicago instead of a college in Provo, Utah. Imagine if it happened after President Joe Biden spent years calling Republicans the enemy from within and sick people, radical-right lunatics who must be destroyed by the military. Imagine if it followed just months after Bidens FBI director accused him of underfunding that agency.The right might have a thing or two to say about that, and they would be justified. Related Trump & Musk are moving fast because they know their time is limited Donald Trump has already blamed the radical left for the shooting despite the fact that no suspect is currently being detained and no one knows who the shooter was or what their motive was. But this is what Trump does he accuses people of murder before knowing the first thing about what happened. His goal is always to immediately provoke and enrage the public. And thats the opposite of what we need right now. Dive deeper every day Join our newsletter for thought-provoking commentary that goes beyond the surface of LGBTQ+ issues Subscribe to our Newsletter today Trumps reaction is part and parcel with the rights response, which reads almost as if theyre feeling more vindicated by Kirks death than sad about the loss of a comrade. Kirks body was still warm when leaders on the right were already publicly discussing how they were going to use his death for political ends. The shooting is the American Reichstag fire, conservative commentator Matt Forney wrote on X, referring to the 1933 burning of the German parliament building in Berlin that the Nazis blamed Communists for and used as a pretext for suspending civil liberties. It is time for a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO. Every libtard commentator must be shut down.Deeply disturbing rhetoric is spreading from influential MAGA figures (including the President of the United States and the owner of this website). They have no idea who the shooter is, and many of these same people mocked Democrats when they were victims of political violence in pic.twitter.com/nWQYBV25Ok MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) September 11, 2025 If they wont leave us in peace, then our choice is to fight or die, Elon Musk wrote on X in the wake of the shooting. THIS IS WAR, wrote Chaya Raichik, aka the hateful Libs of TikTok. They are at war with us, Jesse Watters said on Fox News. Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. And what are we going to do about it?It might come as a surprise to liberals that, apparently, the right wasnt already trying to destroy the left with violence. There were already political assassinations of Democratic lawmakers this year in Minnesota; Trump refused to even call the states governor, calling it a waste of time to express condolences for the deaths of Democrats. Trump has been posting AI-generated pictures of Chicago being bombed. Trumps super-loyal police force, ICE, has been kidnapping people and beating protesters.Trump got into office through lies and exaggerations designed to make people want to exact violent revenge on others, mostly trans people and immigrants. And, in the wake of the shooting, while Democrats have generally been calling on people to tone down the rhetoric and condemn violence, the right Trump included have been amping things up. Its a long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree, Trump said. The same Trump who claims that trans peoples superhuman strength must be kept at bay through government action. The same Trump who accused immigrants of eating their neighbors cats and dogs. The same Trump who accused Mexican immigrants of being rapists and said that immigrants are causing the opioid epidemic in the U.S. Just this week, a schizophrenic man on a train in North Carolina stabbed a woman because she was reading my mind. It was tragic, and the alleged killer should definitely not be on the street, but its also not a sign of a brewing civil war, which is how the right described it. The rights biggest voices, like Matt Walsh, Elon Musk, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), claimed it was an anti-white hate crime with no evidence other than that the attacker was Black and the victim was white, and Trump blamed the states Democratic governor.That is, the rights first instinct was to politicize that violent act without knowing even 5% of the facts of that case and use it to get their base riled up and angrier. And theyre doing the same thing with Kirks death, hoping that itll allow them to finally claim to be the victims that they already thought they were. Currently, we dont know who the shooter was or what motivated them. We do know that they were in a deep-red part of the country and were good enough with guns that they were able to get the weapon into the area where Kirk was speaking and shoot him from 200 yards away. Conservatives are always saying how much better they are than the rest of us at using guns, and there are plenty of internal debates on the right that could easily lead to someone choosing violence as a solution.This doesnt mean that the shooter was on the right, the left, or the center. They might not have had a political motivation or any coherent or discernible political beliefs. They might have had a personal beef with someone in the room who wasnt even Kirk, or they might have just had mental health issues. We dont know, but there is definitely no reason to act like the only possibility is that the shooter was on the left and trying to start a civil war.But we do know that this happened under Trumps watch. The Trump administration fired the FBIs leadership earlier this year and replaced them with incompetent political operatives like FBI Director Kash Patel and former Fox host and current Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino. And even conservatives are getting mad at the FBIs incompetence in handling this investigation after they demonized the agency for years for investigating Trump for allegedly stealing classified documents. We also know that Trump has taken every opportunity over the last five years to make the Republican base as angry as possible. The amount of heat in any political discussion instantly goes right up to 11, and Trump always does what he can to keep it there. Trump doesnt want anyone to calm down, and he doesnt want anyone to be disarmed. Weve been living on edge with no peace for the last nine months, in large part because thats how Trump wants everyone to be. He wants workers to be afraid for their jobs. He wants people to be afraid to go for walks in cities. He wants people to be deathly afraid of immigrants.So one of the few things that we do know about this shooting that it occurred on Trumps watch seems really relevant right about now. Its time for everyone to calm down and learn to have political discussions without calls to go to war in U.S cities. Its time for Trump to tone down his aggressive rhetoric before another political assassination occurs.Subscribe to theLGBTQ Nation newsletterand be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.