Some social traits get assigned conservative, others progressive, even though individual traits themselves don’t necessarily have much to do with one another.
NY Times, opinion by Lydia Polgreen, 19 Sept 2025: The Fallout From Charlie Kirk’s Killing Reveals Two Truths of Trumpism [gift link]
This is about Charlie Kirk’s killing, the right’s hysteria about transgender people, and how these two things came together.
This fixation on finding a transgender connection to Kirk’s horrific murder is as awful as it is dangerous. But it does reveal two psychological truths about Trumpism.
First, for all of MAGA’s reverence for masculine self-determination, one of its central tenets is the blamelessness of its adherents. Whatever is going wrong in this country, it is not their fault.
With a list of things MAGA blames for their problems: immigrants, foreign countries, “greedy pharmaceutical companies and scheming scientists,” and transgender people.
The insistence that something President Trump and his supporters call “transgender ideology” was behind the killing lays bare another core belief of theirs: They are obsessed with contamination and contagion, seeing it as the site of despicable difference. Again and again they deploy metaphors of disease and disfigurement.
With examples of immigrants, vaccines, the “woke mind virus,” and so on. The article goes on to explain how these two reflexes come together in their blaming transgender people for things they can’t otherwise explain. Ending by noting how similar Kirk and Robinson were.
The divergence of their natural paths as young, white American men requires some explanation. For Trumpists, the only acceptable one is the intercession of some alien intervention — contamination, pollution, infestation. In this fantasy, Robinson is a blameless dupe deserving our prayers and the diabolical agent can be only a trans person, who seeded and steered a heinous crime. Except, of course, it wasn’t.
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Related, from JMG: Heritage: FBI Must Designate Trans People As Terrorists. Their point isn’t that transgender people should automatically be designated terrorists, but that being transgender makes one more prone to violence (for which I’m certain they have no evidence), and that this tendency is behind “the majority of mass shootings at schools,” which I don’t believe for a moment. They’re paranoid.
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Once again, it seems that Republicans have no actual principles, aside from protecting the tribe from perceived threats, and never mind the Constitution.
NY Times, media memo by Jim Rutenberg, 18 Sept 2025 (on today’s front page): Trump Administration Wields Its Full Toolbox to Bring Media to Heel, subtitled “ABC’s decision to “indefinitely” suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show illuminates the administration’s efficacy so far.”
President Trump received thunderous applause during his second inaugural address in January when he vowed to “immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.”
It was in keeping with the popular free-speech refrain of his long march out of the political wilderness and his first-term broadsides against “cancel culture,” which he had called “the very definition of totalitarianism.” His message had particular resonance with his supporters. After all, major social media companies banished him and others from their services in the days and weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, riots.
Yet he is now conducting the most punishing government crackdown against major American media institutions in modern times, using what seems like every tool at his disposal to eradicate reporting and commentary with which he disagrees.
There are similar pieces today about FCC chairman Brendan Carr (here’s one at CNN), and other top officials. There was a “that was then, this is now” spread citing Vance, Rubio, and the other usual suspects, and how their current statements contradict what they said years ago, but I didn’t note the link.
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Heather Cox Richardson‘s perspective today is how Trump defines anyone he doesn’t like, including nominal Republicans, as “Democrats”: September 18, 2025
Since he took office in 2017, President Donald J. Trump has worked hard to convince Americans that they are divided into two partisan camps: Republicans, whom he defines as those people loyal to him, and Democrats, a group made up of everyone else. In his first term, when actual Republicans, some of whom he appointed himself, challenged him, he simply redefined them as Democrats. In his telling, major figures in the investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s association with Russian operatives, including special counsel Robert Mueller and his staff, FBI director James Comey, and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, were all Democrats.
And he insisted that those people were organized as “Antifa,” despite advice that antifa is an ideology, not an organization.
Dividing a population into friends and enemies is a tool of authoritarians, clearly articulated by Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, who is enjoying a burst of popularity right now in the American right wing. MAGA figures have pushed the idea that the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last week, apparently by a lone gunman, could be blamed on “Democrats” or “THEM.” Last night, after news broke that ABC was suspending comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s television show, the Trump administration announced it was putting the teeth of the government into this division of the world.
Amazingly, some Republican traditionalists are pushing back. Heather notes:
Yesterday, Republican political strategist Karl Rove, who was a key member of President George W. Bush’s administration, pushed back against the friends and enemies distinction in the Wall Street Journal. “No,” he wrote. “Charlie Kirk wasn’t killed by ‘them.’ ‘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…. Using Charlie’s murder to justify retaliation against political rivals is wrong and dangerous. It will further divide and embitter our country. No good thing will come of it.”
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And today, right now, on CNN.
CNN, 19 Sept 2025: ‘Dangerous as hell’: Ted Cruz compares FCC chair’s threats against ABC to mob tactics
He still approves of Jimmy Kimmel getting fired.
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One more.
Salon, Melanie McFarland, 19 Sept 2025: Jimmy Kimmel and the strongman’s fear of comedians, subtitled “ABC’s latest sacrifice to Trump comes straight out of a playbook followed by other authoritarian governments”
Beginning with an example of Putin and a 1994 comedy show that mocked him.
And it suggests that maybe it was something else Kimmel said that drew Brendan Carr’s wrath. A reporter asked Trump how he was hold up, in the wake of Kirk’s killing.
Trump responds, “I think very good. And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks? They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years, and it’s gonna be a beauty.”
“Yes,” Kimmel deadpans, “he’s at the fourth stage of grief: construction.”
Trump was more interested in bragging about his ballroom, than saying anything about Charlie Kirk.
