“It hasn’t happened like this since the Nixon administration,” with its enemies lists, said Lisa Daugaard, co-director of the Public Defender Association in Seattle, now called Purpose, Dignity, Action.
I called Daugaard because her group has gotten grants from the George Soros-founded Open Society, one of the groups Trump is targeting. Much of that money went to the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, or LEAD, program, which works with police to divert some arrestees into social programs instead of jail — a program that’s part of the Trump administration’s own drug policy.
Schoettmer sighed when I told him the White House was also targeting the Ford Foundation. It’s a sponsor of such local institutions as the Seattle Art Museum.
“These are not exactly hotbeds of radicalism,” he said.
Same with Indivisible. It organizes protests that tend to be nonviolent ones, like the huge No Kings march in June.
Trump also declared “antifa” a terrorist organization. That’s theoretically a more legitimate target, as various black-clad antagonists have done a ton of protest damage in recent years. It isn’t clear though how the terrorist designation would help stop that, or what any of it had to do with Kirk’s killing.
Even Karl Rove, former President George W. Bush’s right-hand man, said the collective “they” blaming has gotten out of control.
“Charlie Kirk wasn’t killed by ‘them,’ ” he wrote this past week. “ ‘They’ didn’t pull the trigger. One person did, apparently a young man driven by impulse and a terrible hate. If there were a ‘they’ involved, law enforcement would find ‘them’ and the justice system would hold ‘them’ accountable. But ‘he’ and ‘him’ are the correct pronouns for this horrendous act.”
The fuel for Trump to collectivize the killing is extreme political polarization, Schoettmer said. Americans increasingly are viewing the world through the lens of what team they’re on, red or blue.
A study of partisan voting in Congress called VoteView, a measure of how often each representative votes with the team, shows political tribalism at record highs.
“We’re at about the same level of party uniformity as we had in the 1870s,” Schoettmer said, a time of extreme bitterness and division coming out of the Civil War.
Since the 1980s, Democrats in Congress have drifted to the left as a group, becoming marginally more liberal. Republicans have veered strongly to the right, the voting data shows. The result is the biggest gap, the least reaching across the aisle, in 150 years.
The “they” and “them” trend — it’s right there in the congressional voting record.
“The Kirk shooting though has shaken the right in a way that I don’t think we’ve seen,” Schoettmer said.
For example, former Washington state legislator Robert Sutherland, a Republican from Granite Falls who frequently gives a window into the far-right MAGA psyche, had this reaction to the Kirk shooting:
“The left (democrats) needs to be labeled as a domestic terrorist organization,” he wrote. “Hard stop. We will not be silenced. We will not bend the knee. We will not stop until you are eradicated from the face of the earth.”
Killing all the Democrats may be an outlier view (let’s hope). Seattle pollster Stuart Elway has been documenting a broader phenomenon, where Republicans and Democrats increasingly are in their own worlds, with little shared reality.
Both think it’s the other that’s “going to destroy the country,” Elway told me about a 2024 Washington state poll. “That sums up where we are right now. Whatever the worst you may think about them, they think that about you. How do you compromise or govern in an atmosphere like that?”
Maybe the terrible answer we’re seeing from Trump is: You don’t. Maybe you react to horrific political violence by pushing to crush the political opposition, whether they had anything to do with it or not. Maybe if you’re already prone to conspiracy theories, you go full autocrat, to the point of policing speech and kicking comedians you don’t like off the air.
For his Seattle U course “Politics of the End,” the first reading is uncomfortably about us, Schoettmer said. It’s from Canadian journalist Stephen Marche’s 2022 book, “The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future.”
The course is full. It ought to be required for the whole country right now.