Kirk's Assassination Brings Trump's Authoritarianism into Even Clearer Focus

I have long argued that Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party are the greatest threat this nation has ever faced. Greater than Nazi Germany; greater than the Soviet Union; greater than al-Qaida.

That claim may strike some as overstatement, but it is not. None of those external enemies ever succeeded in capturing one of our two major political parties. None had millions of Americans willing to surrender the rule of law, civic peace, and even basic facts to a single man. Trump has done what no foreign foe ever could: He has turned a major American party into an instrument of authoritarian power.

From the beginning, Trump has governed not as a president, but as a strongman. The institutions of government — the courts, the military, federal law enforcement — he sees not as independent guardians of the Constitution but as weapons to be bent to his will. The Republican Party has not resisted this transformation; it has welcomed it. What was once a party of limited government and traditional conservatism has become a vessel for fascism, white Christian nationalism, and the normalization of political violence.

I said these things before Charlie Kirk was murdered. They were true then. They remain true now. Kirk’s death has not changed that reality — and Trump’s grotesque exploitation of the tragedy only underscores it.

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