Top Trump Officials Using Charlie Kirk’s Killing as America’s Reichstag Fire to Crack Down on Liberals and the Left

It is very true: top officials in the Trump administration — including Vice-President Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, White House senior advisor Steven Miller — and Trump himself — are using the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk a week ago as America’s version of the Reichstag fire that broke out in Berlin, Germany in 1933.

What’s this? you may ask. What was the Reichstag fire?

Turning immediately to Wikipedia, we find the following:

The Reichstag fire was an arson attack on the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on Monday, 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. …The Nazis attributed the fire to a group of Communist agitators, used it as a pretext to claim that Communists were plotting against the German government, and induced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree suspending civil liberties and pursue a “ruthless confrontation” with the Communists.This made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany. …

After the Fire Decree was issued, the police – now controlled by Hitler’s Nazi Party – made mass arrests of communists, including all of the communist Reichstag delegates. This severely crippled communist participation in the 5 March elections. After the 5 March elections, the absence of the communists allowed the Nazi Party to expand their plurality in the Reichstag, greatly assisting the Nazi seizure of total power. Wikipedia

An historic note: the German Communist Party was one of the largest political parties in the German parliament, if not the second largest.

All these officials, Vance, Bondi, Miller and Trump are claiming that liberal organizations and the left are responsible for creating a wide network of terrorists and violent extremists and are solely responsible for political violence in this country. They all reject the ‘two-sideisms’ — a recognition at least that both sides, the right and the left, have committed political violence here. They act like only Kirk has fallen victim to political extremism, totally ignoring the assassination of Minnesotan Melissa Hortman, who was the speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives when she and her husband were assassinated in their own home by a right-wing Trump supporter (who also shot their dog) who went on that day and fired shots into another state official and his wife. He also had a hit list of 42 Democratic politicians.

They also conveniently forget that hammer attack on 81-year old Paul Pelosi by a deranged Trump supporter, screaming, “Where’s Nancy?” At a Californian Republican Party convention, speakers continually downplayed and mocked that attack and it became a punch line for Trump.

And of course, they refuse to acknowledge the worst case of recent political violence when thousands of Trump supporters laid siege to the US Capitol building on that fateful January 6 assaulting 140 police officers, which led to the death of at least one officer.

Why the Justice Department’s own study stated that right-wing violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States. The study has very recently been deleted from the DOJ website. The study, published in 2024 and conducted by the National Institute of Justice, is titled, “What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism.” The first words are: “Militant, nationalistic, violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”

“Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives,” the study noted. “In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.” (Our emphasis.)

The publication The New Republic surmises that “It’s highly likely that the DOJ took this study down because it doesn’t fit with the narrative the GOP is trying so desperately to push about the left being to blame for the bulk of political violence in this country, willfully ignoring countless examples of that not being the case at all.” The New Republic 

In addition, the Cato Institute, a libertarian organization, has also studied domestic terrorism. Here’s a conclusion:

Since January 1, 2020, terrorists have murdered 81 people in attacks on US soil that account for about 0.07 percent of all homicides during that time (estimated for 2025 so far). Right-wing terrorists account for over half of those murders, Islamists for 21 percent, left-wingers for 22 percent, and 1 percent had unknown or other motivations. There are not many politically motivated terrorist killings in the United States. (Our emphasis.)

As stated above, Hitler then used the false claim that some leftist was responsible for the Reichstag fire and used it as his excuse to eliminate the left in Germany. Which enabled him, of course, to then eliminate 6 million Jews and all kinds of other “undesirables.”

These Trumpists want to eliminate the left, crack down on dissent, outlaw criticisms of Trump — exactly what Hitler did nearly one hundred years ago which led to a global disaster. And in order to “justify” all of it, Trump & Co. rewrite our history and lie about Trump’s own role in stoking political violence — something he’s done ever since he emerged on the national political scene, ten years ago.

The rest of us certainly cannot forget that history, for dissent is as old as America.