Thom Tillis Trashes MAGA’s Response to Charlie Kirk’s Death

Republican messaging in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination is tearing the party apart.

Conservatives across the country seemingly interpreted Kirk’s death as an opportunity for more violence, intimating online that the brutal attack against the 31-year-old firebrand was a sign of “war” with their political opposition. But not every Republican was willing to hop on the dogpile.

Senator Thom Tillis was disturbed by his party’s language, telling National Journal’s Nancy Vu Thursday that he was disgusted by the way that Republicans had co-opted Kirk’s death to rack up digital attention.

“What I was really disgusted by yesterday is a couple of talking heads that sees this as an opportunity to say we’re at war so that they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this,” Tillis said. “It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend like you’re a leader of a conservative movement. And there were two in particular that I found particularly disgusting.”

Tillis did not clarify which two comments he was referring to, though plenty of conservatives have shared their own twisted takes on Kirk’s murder.

Figureheads leading the charge included Laura Loomer, who decried the political left as a “national security threat”; Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik, who blatantly stated, “THIS IS WAR”; former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who claimed that Kirk was a “casualty of war”; and podcast bro Joey Mannarino, who demanded that the Democratic Party be “classified as a domestic terror organization.”

Donald Trump, for his own part, issued a four-minute video message in which he condemned American liberals for the political climate that led to Kirk’s assassination, admonishing them for drawing historical parallels between his administration and authoritarian regimes throughout history.

“This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now,” Trump said, promising to hunt and root out left-leaning political ideologies that oppose his agenda.

Nebraska Representative Don Bacon, however, joined Tillis in pushing back. Bacon told NBC News that he wished Trump would focus on bringing the country back together in the aftermath of Kirk’s murder, rather than continue to tear it apart.

“But he’s a populist, and populists dwell on anger,” Bacon said.

In their fury, Republicans have leveraged Kirk’s murder as evidence that they are political victims—despite the fact that they currently hold the majority of power in every branch of government—all while ignoring the reality that political violence is a bipartisan issue that has also taken the lives of several prominent Democrats recently.

“I have to remind people, we had Democrats killed in Minnesota too, right?” Bacon added, referring to Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, both of whom were fatally shot in June by a Trump supporter.

President Donald Trump inexplicably claimed that Missouri’s 2024 general election had been rigged, using that falsehood as an excuse to try to convince state Republicans to redistrict.

Writing on X Thursday, Missouri Times editor Jake Kroesen said that during a meeting of Missouri state Senate Republicans the day before, Governor Mike Kehoe had called in with a surprising guest: the president of the United States.

And Trump had a mission: convince the lawmakers to pass the state’s newly gerrymandered congressional map that would erase the Democratic seat in Kansas City.

Trump ranted to lawmakers about how popular he was for about 20 minutes, reciting inflated poll numbers and claiming he could even win a third term in office.

“Trump reportedly told Senators that polling data he has seen shows he is more popular than Reagan,” Kroesen wrote. “He added that his Missouri numbers in 2024 were lower than he had anticipated and claimed the numbers were possibly rigged.”

Trump then told lawmakers he “needed their help securing another seat to maintain control of the House.”

When Trump left the call, Kehoe reportedly said, “See how hard it is to say no to him?”

In 2024, Trump won nearly 59 percent of the vote in Missouri with 1,751,027 votes, beating out Democratic challenger Kamala Harris by more than 550,000 votes. Still, he suggested that the election had been rigged in a state he’d handily won.

Trump’s efforts to personally bully state lawmakers into gerrymandering district maps betray his desperation for Republicans to keep control of the House and Senate in the upcoming midterm elections.

President Donald Trump told the country that his federal crackdown on Washington, D.C. would focus on ridding the streets of violent crime, theft, and gang violence.

In reality, that effort has been an extension of his deportation campaign, as a whopping 40 percent of arrests made since the occupation have to do with immigration, according to recent data collected by The Associated Press.

The Trump administration says that it’s arrested more than 2,300 people: around 12 for homicide suspicion, 20 for alleged gang membership, and a few hundred for drug-related crimes. But more than 940 people have been arrested by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, more than any of the aforementioned categories.

While the Trump administration claims that deportation and violent crime go hand in hand, it’s hard to see how snatching UberEats drivers off their scooters midroute, harassing anyone who looks Latino at checkpoints, and forcing street vendors to stay inside out of fear helps curtail violent crime.

The president said he was going to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor, and worse,” after the Big Balls mugging. The results of his efforts have not reflected that.

In light of the immigration enforcement raid on a Hyundai plant in Georgia last week, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung on Thursday issued a warning to the United States.

The raid saw hundreds of South Korean workers shackled and detained, straining diplomatic relations between Washington and Seoul, a key U.S. ally. Currently, 316 South Korean nationals and 14 others are in the process of being transported back to their country.

At a press conference, Lee said South Korean companies may think twice before establishing factories in the United States going forward, unless Washington improves the visa process for South Koreans.

“Under the current circumstances, Korean companies will be very hesitant to make direct investments in the United States,” Lee said, according to United Press International. “Companies will have to worry about whether establishing a local factory in the United States will be subject to all sorts of disadvantages or difficulties,” which “could have a significant impact on future direct investment.”

“It’s not like these are long-term workers,” the South Korean president observed, per the Associated Press. “When you build a factory or install equipment at a factory, you need technicians, but the United States doesn’t have that workforce and yet they won’t issue visas to let our people stay and do the work.”

Earlier this week, South Korean businesses reportedly suspended at least 22 projects in the United States in reaction to the raid.

“Korean workers are being treated like criminals for building factories that Washington itself lobbied for,” one executive in Seoul told The Korea Economic Daily. “If this continues, investment in the U.S. could be reconsidered.”

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is jazzing up his song and dance to further distract from the cooling economy.

Speaking with CNBC Thursday, the trade official hypothesized that the real benefits of Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs would be realized very soon—that is to say, next year.

“So now, everybody knows their tariff, right? So now you’re going to see factories getting built in America at a scale that you’ve never seen before,” Lutnick said. “More than $10 trillion of factory build coming. Alright? And so theres huge amount of construction jobs.”

“I would say the first quarter of next year will be the best quarter of construction jobs this country’s ever seen, and that’s going to roll all the way through ’26,” he continued. “So I think you’re gonna see GDP growth next year over four percent.”

“You do? Four percent? $10 trillion over what period of time, Secretary?” pressed one of the anchors.

But Lutnick’s perpetual growth promises have historically not panned out. Americans still weren’t feeling the boon of Trump’s plan by August, when the unemployment rate was 4.3 percent, up by more than 3 percent from the previous year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Applications for unemployment benefits jumped to 263,000 last week alone, the biggest spike since the pandemic, and consumer inflation grew to 2.9 percent last month—the highest point so far this year.

In the same interview, Lutnick once again said that major trade deals were still on the way—albeit with some major hiccups. A deal with India is apparently forthcoming, so long as the country “stops buying Russian oil.” Lutnick also claimed that a “big deal with Taiwan” is on the horizon, that a deal with Switzerland is “probably” in the works, and that a trade arrangement had been struck with South Korea, though Lutnick suggested that the country’s officials were dragging their feet with the paperwork. (South Korea has also threatened to indefinitely pause multiple projects in the U.S. in light of a massive ICE raid at a Hyundai factory in Georgia that saw hundreds of Korean workers arrested.)

Lutnick also said that he believed a “deal is going to be struck” on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored enterprises to support American homeownership, before the end of the year.

“We are going to take the company public. We’re going to sell. It could potentially be the largest IPO in history,” he said.

Republican lawmakers have had enough of the First Amendment in the aftermath of the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Representative Clay Higgins said Thursday that he planned to use his congressional seat to convince tech platforms to go after anyone who “belittled” Kirk’s death.

Kirk was fatally shot during a “Prove Me Wrong” table event at Utah Valley University, where he’d invited college students to debate him. Kirk’s final words were in a debate about gun violence in the United States. 

“If they ran their mouth with their smartass hatred celebrating the heinous murder of that beautiful young man who dedicated his whole life to delivering respectful conservative truth into the hearts of liberal enclave universities, armed only with a Bible and a microphone and a Constitution … those profiles must come down,” Higgins wrote on X. 

“So, I’m going to lean forward in this fight, demanding that big tech have zero tolerance for violent political hate content, the user to be banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER,” he continued. “I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked.

“I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination,” he said. “I’m starting that today. That is all.”

Ironically, Higgins was the subject of social media censorship in 2020 after he posted on Facebook threatening Black Lives Matter protesters, writing that he would shoot and “drop any 10 of you where you stand.” Higgins’s post was removed for inciting or facilitating “serious violence.” 

Kirk seemingly supported the free expression of political ideas—no matter how controversial.

Now lawmakers disturbed by his horrific death want not only to curb free speech on the internet but to punish it too. 

Already, the notorious hate account Libs of TikTok has launched a doxxing campaign targeting apparent Democrats who made callous comments celebrating Kirk’s death on the internet, as part of a newly declared “war” on liberals. 

Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna also called on social media platforms to remove the videos of the shooting, and Representative Lauren Boebert agreed. 

“He has a family, young children, and no one should be forced to relive this tragedy online,” Luna wrote on X. “These are not the only graphic videos of horrifying murders circulating—at some point, social media begins to desensitize humanity.”

Boebert replied, “Thank you!!! I agree completely! I NEVER want to see that again!! I hate that I saw it at all.”

Lily Tang Williams, a Republican congressional candidate from New Hampshire, also responded: “I respectively disagree. Freedom of speech includes content we don’t like or hate,” she said.  

“It hurts to watch the video, but we must defend free speech as the foundation of our Republic, no matter how horrible it is,” she wrote. “Where would you draw the line?  Who decides what people can see?  Censorship is one of the primary tools of authoritarians for a reason—always couched in terms of safety or sentiment. Censorship is not the answer.”

Williams wrote that Kirk “would want us to speak the truth, protect free speech and practice civil discourse which he did!”

Team Biden has struck back after former Vice President Kamala Harris offered scathing criticism of her former boss in an excerpt from her forthcoming book, 107 Days.

In the memoir, Harris called former president Joe Biden’s decision to remain in the race amid rampant health concerns “recklessness,” and decried his ego and ambition.

One former Biden administration member sounded off on Harris in comments made to Axios, arguing that the former vice president’s own deficiencies were the problem.

“Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job,” they said. “She had basically zero substantive role in any of the administration’s key work streams, and instead would just dive bomb in for stilted photo ops that exposed how out of depth she was.”

“[President Biden was] not the reason she struggled in office or tanked her 2019 [presidential] campaign,” they continued. “Or lost the 2024 campaign, for that matter. The independent variable there is the vice president, not Biden or his aides.”

In the memoir excerpt, Harris wrote that although she thought it was clear that Biden shouldn’t run again, she never felt comfortable expressing that earlier in his campaign because she thought it would look bad.

Biden’s staff, however, wasn’t buying it.

“I’m not sure the very robust defense of not having the courage to speak up in the moment about Biden running is quite as persuasive as she thinks it is. If this is her attempt at political absolution: Lots of luck in your senior year,” an aide said. “If she had spent a fraction of the time and energy doing the work that she did on complaining, about how she was perceived, she would have been perceived a whole lot better.”

Not all of Biden’s former staffers felt the same contempt for Harris and her memoir, though.

“We all know that the Biden folks treated her and her team like shit. We never thought she would actually say anything,” another aide said, corroborating the claims Harris made in 107 Days. “The staffers across a range of ages and positions that I’m talking to are proud of her.”

Both sides of this conflict feel extremely unsatisfactory. It seems abundantly clear at this point that Biden should have dropped out earlier, and the chorus of staffers and party leaders that told everyone to shut up until it was undeniable should be held accountable.

At the same time, for Harris to come out with all this well after the fact, when she could have tried to make a difference in the actual moment, feels like too little and far too late.

“There were others on the Biden team, though, who really tried to help her thrive as VP. But she and her team did not seize that support and make the most of it,” yet another staffer told Axios. “It is all a tragedy.”

President Donald Trump on Wednesday ordered American flags to be flown at half-staff after the deadly shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk—something he did not do when Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, was assassinated months ago.

“In honor of Charlie Kirk, a truly Great American Patriot, I am ordering all American Flags throughout the United States lowered to Half Mast until Sunday evening at 6 P.M.,” Trump wrote on Truth Social after Kirk was shot and killed Wednesday, later issuing a proclamation to that effect. The president also announced Thursday that he would posthumously award Kirk the presidential medal of freedom.

Observers online noted that such commemorative measures were not extended to Hortman when she and her husband were fatally shot in June by a gunman who also targeted State Senator John Hoffman and his wife (both of whom survived).

On Truth Social, Trump described the June Minnesota shooting as an instance of “horrific violence” that “will not be tolerated in the United States of America.” Asked the next day if he’d called Minnesota Governor Tim Walz about the incident, the president said, “I could be nice and call him, but why waste time?”

The Minnesota shooting went notably unmentioned in Trump’s Wednesday address about Kirk’s death, in which he decried a general increase in political violence—but attributed it only to the “radical left,” overlooking myriad recent examples of right-wing violence.

Russia has followed up its recent incursions against Poland with threats to other NATO members.

Nineteen Russian drones, many originating from Belarus, crossed into Polish airspace late Tuesday, forcing the Eastern European nation to shut down four of its airports as it scrambled to fire up its defense systems. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk invoked Article 4 of the NATO Treaty the following day, calling the ​​situation the “closest” that Poland had come to armed conflict since World War II.

But rather than de-escalate the situation, the Kremlin has decided to stoke more fear. Deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev—who has also served as the country’s president and prime minister, and remains a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin—warned in a statement that Finland could collapse “forever” if it decided to oppose Russia’s power.

“The Finnish establishment mustn’t forget: Confrontation with Russia can lead to collapse of Finnish statehood—this time forever,” said Medvedev. “Unlike in 1944, no one will go soft on them this time.”

Any attack on Finland would invoke Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which would call all other NATO members into a unified defense strategy. The article has only ever been activated once during the 70-year history of the international alliance: 24 hours after September 11, 2001.

Medvedev also made reference to the Mannerheim Line, a defensive fortification that Finland built against the Soviet Union roughly a century ago. In the statement, he implied that Finland’s “new” version of the defense strategy had been interpreted by Russian leadership as a retaliatory measure.

The statement also linked out to a lengthy Telegram post that baselessly accused Finland of committing “genocide and war crimes” against the Soviet Union, and of being “a satellite of Nazi Germany.”

Speaking with CNN Wednesday, Poland’s Deputy Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said that the drone incursion was accompanied by a massive Russian disinformation campaign, and that attempts to blame the drones’ presence on other countries, especially Ukraine, were little more than propaganda.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who claims he has a good relationship with Putin, has yet to meaningfully comment on the drone incursion into Poland. On Wednesday, he wrote on Truth Social, “What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!”

Republicans have decided that they are at war following the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk, while simultaneously complaining about violent rhetoric on the left.

Without knowing the identity of the shooter, their politics, or what motivated them, grief-fueled right-wingers quickly launched into preparations for a battle against liberals.

“THIS IS WAR,” declared Libs of TikTok, the notorious far-right hate account with the Trump administration’s ear, on Wednesday afternoon, before setting off on a doxxing spree of Democrats who’d posted callously about Kirk’s death.

Former DOGE czar Elon Musk helped lead the charge, using combative rhetoric to condemn violence from the left—even though the political affiliation of the assassin was still unknown.

“The Left is the party of murder,” he wrote on X. In another post, he said: “If they won’t let us live in peace, then our choice is fight or die.”

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said that right-wingers were “in a war” during a livestream Wednesday. “The Left has been saying, ‘Put a bullseye on Trump, put a bullseye on his supporters,’” he said.

Speaking about the corporate media “bastards,” Jones said, “They love death and scum, we’re gonna get them. We’re gonna save this country and the world together.”

MAGA architect Steve Bannon also called Kirk “a casualty of war” while speaking on his War Room podcast.

Fox News host Jesse Watters unloaded a list of violent acts targeting the right, including Trump’s failed assassination and the vandalization of Musk’s Teslas. “They are at war with us,” said Watters. “Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us, and what are we gonna do about it? How much political violence are we gonna tolerate?”

“This is a turning point, and we know which direction we’re going,” he added.

At least Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire called for unity … to mount an attack against Satan’s army.

“The entire Right has to band together. Enough of this in-fighting bullshit. We are up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell,” he wrote on X. “They’re killing us in our churches. They tried to kill our president. They killed Charlie, one of our greatest advocates. Put the personal squabbles aside. Now’s not the time. This is existential. A fight for our own existence and the existence of our country.”

President Donald Trump delivered an address Wednesday evening blaming the “radical left” and their rhetoric for political violence by “demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year in the most hateful and despicable way possible,” but had no similar message for those on the right.

For a group that’s begun complaining about the supposedly violent rhetoric of the left, perhaps they should take a good look at their own.

Meanwhile, the deadly shooting was swiftly condemned by Democratic leaders, such as former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, former Vice President Kamala Harris, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (whose state suffered a political assassination in June), and Representatives Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi.