How Trump is seizing on Charlie Kirk’s killing for a campaign of vengeance

The Guardian -  On Sunday the late rightwing activist Charlie Kirk is set to be hailed by Donald Trump as a martyr of the Make America great again (Maga) movement.

But Kirk’s memorial service at a 63,000-seat football stadium in Arizona could, critics fear, be exploited by the US president to serve a darker purpose: turning collective grief into a campaign of vengeance against America’s enemy within.

Trump has spent the past 10 days escalating threats against what he calls the “radical left” after the fatal shooting of Kirk, 31, on a university campus in Utah.

The White House is considering classifying some groups as domestic terrorists and revoking tax-exempt status for certain non-profits, even though there is no evidence linking these groups to the killing.

Trump and his allies have also sought to undermine the legitimacy of the Democratic party, branding it an extremist organization despite it having roundly condemned the attack on Kirk.

Although officials insist that their focus is preventing violence, critics see an extension of Trump’s campaign of retribution against his political foes and an erosion of free speech rights. They warn that, in an echo of authoritarian governments around the world, his administration is trying to harness outrage over Kirk’s killing to crush dissent.

“Political violence is very often used as a pretext to crack down on civil liberties and on opponents – this is page one of the autocrats’ playbook,” said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University and co-author of the book How Democracies Die.

“I’m a Latin Americanist by training and the language we’ve heard lately reminds me a lot of the outsized response of military dictators in South America in the 1970s and that was a response to much higher levels of political violence than we see in the United States.”

Levitsky added: “One is hard pressed to find an authoritarian government that did not take advantage of either a terrorist attack or a political assassination – an episode of political violence – to further crack down on civil liberties. This is mainstream authoritarian stuff.”