The Retribution Has Begun

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

The Retribution Has Begun

 

Sept. 19, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/opinion/political-violence-trump-administration.html

Peter Beinart

By Peter Beinart

Mr. Beinart is a contributing Opinion writer.

 

When historians look back on this moment in American history, the date that may stand out to them is not Sept. 10, when a gunman took the conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s life. They may focus instead on Sept. 15, when the vice president of the United States promised that the federal government would use the assassination to begin cracking down on leftist organizations.

 

On that day, while guest hosting “The Charlie Kirk Show,” a podcast, JD Vance pledged that the Trump administration would “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence,” though he provided no evidence that progressive nongovernmental organizations do any such thing. One of his guests on the show, Stephen Miller, President Trump’s top policy advisor, vowed to “uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks.” It is this use of antiterror rhetoric to outlaw political opponents that makes the current moment distinct. Not the domestic terrorism itself.

 

Mr. Vance and Mr. Miller seemed to be following President Trump’s lead. Two days after the assassination of Mr. Kirk, Mr. Trump appeared on Fox News. One “Fox & Friends” host noted that America has radicals on the right and the left and asked Mr. Trump, “How do we come back together?” The president spurned the call for reconciliation. “Radicals on the left are the problem,” he said.

 

The vile and inexcusable murder of Mr. Kirk was part of a pattern. After the assassination of a Minnesota state representative, Melissa Hortman, and her husband, the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, and the campaign trail attempts on Mr. Trump’s life, there is no question that the United States has a serious problem with politically motivated violence.

 

But that problem isn’t new. Political violence was worse 50 years ago. Between 1963 and 1972, people murdered — or tried to murder — John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy and George Wallace. In 1975, Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts in the same month. Three years later, Harvey Milk and the mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone, were assassinated.

 

These were only the highest-profile attacks. During an 18-month span between 1971 and 1972, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States suffered almost five bombings per day on average, many of them by organizations dedicated to overthrowing the government.

 

Consider how other presidents and their administrations responded to that violence. Five days after the murder of President Kennedy, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, told a joint session of Congress that he hoped “the tragedy and the torment of these terrible days will bind us together in new fellowship, making us one people in our hour of sorrow.”

 

At least one of Ford’s would-be assassins came from the radical left. But Ford refused, in the words of the University of Virginia historian Ken Hughes, to “play up the drama or the danger” of the attacks against him. In Ronald Reagan’s address to Congress roughly a month after he was shot, he denied that America was a “sick society” and spoke of ordinary Americans who had wished him well without referring to their party or political views. After a white supremacist killed nine Black congregants at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Barack Obama said the killer’s efforts to divide the nation along racial lines would fail. He called on Americans of all backgrounds to tap into their “reservoir of goodness.”

 

It is not yet clear what the threat of civil crackdowns from Mr. Trump’s orbit portend. His administration could cripple progressive nonprofits by revoking their tax-exempt status, a threat Mr. Trump has already leveled against universities. It could intensify its crackdown on labor unions, which constitute a key part of the Democratic coalition. The Federal Communications Commission could revoke the licenses of television stations that don’t parrot the administration’s line, as the president has demanded, and thus starve Democrats of media coverage, as Viktor Orban has done to his rivals in Hungary. We’re seeing evidence of this happening already, most notably when ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel this week.

 

The Trump administration is not the first in American history to go after domestic rivals. In the 1960s and 1970s, the F.B.I. or C.I.A. spied on Black, feminist, American Indian, Mexican American, Puerto Rican and antiwar groups. But, as many researchers have detailed, Mr. Trump’s claim that political violence stems largely from the left is inaccurate. His administration is leveraging that disinformation to suppress his would-be opponents and justify criminalizing his political foes.

 

His Democratic rivals don’t do that. After Jan. 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob injured over 140 police officers while trying to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s election, Kamala Harris could have sworn to use the power of her position as vice president to crush organizations that she claimed were fomenting or promoting violence. One such group might have been Mr. Kirk’s Turning Point Action, which helped send seven buses of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally. Mr. Biden’s top policy advisor could have even designated some groups — and politicians — terrorists.

 

But, of course, Biden officials did no such thing. It is virtually unthinkable that they would have. Because while political violence in America today is robustly bipartisan, the response to it is not. When Mr. Miller declared on Aug. 25 that the Democratic Party was “a domestic extremist organization,” he was presaging a crackdown not merely against anti-government activists but against the nation’s opposition political party itself. It’s that state-led repression that historians will remember when they look back upon this time.