Hours after Americans learned of Charlie Kirk’s death, Donald Trump had an opportunity to demonstrate responsible leadership and deliver a unifying message about the scourge of political violence. The president chose not to take advantage of that opportunity.
In unsettling remarks delivered from the Oval Office, Trump, despite knowing literally nothing about the alleged shooter, pushed a partisan message that condemned “the radical left” while ignoring a wide variety of examples from recent years of far-right radicals committing acts of violence against Democrats.
The scripted remarks made it sound as if the Republican wasn’t just positioning himself as president of half the country, he was also preparing to use Kirk’s death to justify a new offensive against his political opposition.
A day later, Trump on Thursday told reporters that “we have radical left lunatics out there, and we just have to beat the hell out of them.”
On Friday morning, however, the president pushed this line to an even more dramatic level. The New York Times reported:
President Trump said on Friday that the ‘radical left’ was responsible for much of the political violence in the country, and walked to the edge of excusing violence on the right, saying that most on the extreme right of the political spectrum were driven there because ‘they don’t want to see crime.’
During Trump’s latest appearance on Fox News, co-host Ainsley Earhardt acknowledged the fact that there are “radicals” on the right and asked how the nation can be fixed. Instead of answering the question, the president challenged the premise.
EARHARDT: We have radicals on the right as well. How do we fix this country?TRUMP: I'll tell you something that's gonna get me in trouble but I couldn't care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime. The radicals on the left are the problem.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-09-12T12:34:09.469Z
“Well, I’ll tell you something that’s gonna get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less,” he replied. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They don’t want to see crime. They’re saying, ‘We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.’
“The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.”
In other words, as the president sees it, far-right radicals have a good reason to be radical. The extremists on the right, Trump believes, only take radical steps because of their eagerness to help.
Why does this matter? Right off the bat, it’s the sort of rhetoric that signals to violent extremists that the incumbent American president is comfortable excusing radicals whom he sees as political allies. It’s an extension of the “stand back and stand by” comments Trump made about the Proud Boys in 2020, which sparked celebration among extremists.
What’s more, the evidence suggests the president is plainly and demonstrably wrong, and that right-wing violence has been more dangerous in the U.S. in recent years than left-wing violence. The New York Times’ David Leonhardt explained in 2022, the American right “has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left.” A newly published piece in The New Republic added: Right-wing attacks and plans accounted for the majority of all terrorist incidents between 1994 and 2020, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Between 1975 and September 2025, individuals motivated by right-wing ideologies such white supremacy, involuntary celibacy, and anti-abortion beliefs committed 391 murders, according to the Cato Institute. Comparatively, people motivated by left-wing ideologies were responsible for 65 deaths. Finally, there are related concerns about the Trump administration’s focus in the near future. NBC News reported in 2021 that there was a consensus among former Department of Homeland Security officials — from Democratic and Republican administrations — who agreed that Trump’s first administration had failed to focus on “the rise of domestic threats,” leading to a four-year era of “inadequately monitoring and communicating the rising threat of right-wing domestic extremists.” Around the same time, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration “diverted” federal law enforcement and domestic security agencies, pressuring officials to “uncover a left-wing extremist criminal conspiracy that never materialized,” even as “the threat from the far right was building ominously.” The report added that the FBI, “in particular, had increasingly expressed concern about the threat from white supremacists, long the top domestic terrorism threat, and well-organized far-right extremist groups that had allied themselves with the president.” Those concerns, however, were not prioritized during the Republican administration. As Trump justifies right-wing radicals to a national television audience, there’s reason anew to worry about whether recent history will repeat itself on failing to take domestic security threats seriously.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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