Trump Claims Person Who Shot Charlie Kirk Has Been Arrested

President Donald Trump announced Friday that the suspected killer of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has been apprehended.

“I think, with a high degree of certainty, we have him in custody,” Trump said on Fox and Friends.

“Essentially, somebody that was very close to him turned him in,” the president continued, noting that additional details would be provided later that day. “I just heard about it five minutes before I walked in. As I’m walking in, they said, ‘Looking real good.’ They have the person that they wanted.”

“So you have breaking news, don’t you, eh? You always have breaking news, Ainsley,” he added, turning to host Ainsley Earhardt, before joking that Sean Hannity, who hosts another show on the network, would “be very disappointed that we’re not doing it on his show.”

“He’ll be very thankful and appreciative of the police officers that got this guy,” Earhardt replied.

Trump later expressed that he hopes the gunman “gets the death penalty.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Kirk’s death on Wednesday was announced not by his family or local authorities, but by Trump himself.

During the ensuing manhunt, the FBI’s MAGA partisan director, Kash Patel, faced criticism for a clumsy and confusing response.

On Wednesday, Patel prematurely declared that “the subject for the horrific shooting today” was in custody—a claim that was almost immediately contradicted by local officials, and which Patel later backtracked on, writing that the “subject” was released.

Former FBI Director Andrew McCabe is perplexed by current FBI Director Kash Patel’s decision to head to Utah himself to search for Charlie Kirk’s assassin.

“That one’s really hard to figure out. There are many good reasons why you wouldn’t go if you’re the director. You would not go out to the scene of an ongoing crisis, post–crisis investigation … you know, typically, directors don’t do that,” McCabe told CNN’s Abby Phillips.

McCabe continued, saying: “The presence of the director imposes a huge burden on the field office. There’s all kinds of arrangements that have to be made. There’s all kinds of security concerns that arise. Transportation becomes very complicated. And that’s the last thing you wanna do to the field office while they’re in the middle of investigating a critical incident,” he said.

“So, again, strange to go out there under those circumstances. Why he went and then did not say anything at the press conference, I really, I really don’t know. I’m a bit at a loss to understand, like, what was the purpose of going out there,” McCabe concluded.

Patel’s visit comes after a series of blunders. First, he announced that “the subject for the horrific shooting today that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody,” a few hours after Kirk’s murder, as if the case was closed.

Then, just hours later, he said the “subject” was free to go.

McCabe wasn’t the only one concerned with Patel’s handling of the situation.

“What’s clear is that the information flow to [Patel] has not been accurate, or he is not interpreting it correctly, because it was just remarkable to have him say that—essentially imply that the shooter had been caught and then two hours later announcing that that person was not, in fact, the shooter and had been released. That just doesn’t happen in these situations,” NBC intelligence correspondent Ken Dilanian said Wednesday on MSNBC.

He also noted that Patel had fired the decorated and experienced head of the FBI’s Salt Lake City Office just two weeks before Kirk’s assassination.

On Friday morning, President Donald Trump announced on Fox & Friends that they have Kirk’s shooter in custody (again).

“With a high degree of certainty, we have him in custody,” the president said. This has not yet been confirmed by Patel and the FBI.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decried Republican condemnation of the left in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination as the FBI still struggles to detain the shooter, much less parse their politics and motive.

“[The president] in his speech, he was very critical of left-wing violence,” a reporter asked Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday. “What do you think of that message, and do you agree with them that left-wing violence is a problem?”

“There is no understanding as we know publicly, of who this individual is, what their motivations were, where they came from. Whether it is a member of Congress, whether it is the president of the United States—to assume and assert, cast blame, when the FBI has failed to even apprehend the assailant, is absolutely an irresponsible action,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Conservative officials, talking heads, and influencers have all been calling for war against the left over the past 24 hours, as if they were given marching orders.

“The left is the party of murder,” Elon Musk wrote. “THIS IS WAR,” posted right-wing social media account Libs of Tiktok. “They’ve declared war,” political commentator Gunther Eagleman weighed in. “They are at war with us,” Fox host Jesse Watters contributed. “Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. And what are we going to do about it?”

President Donald Trump himself put out a four-minute-long video announcement Wednesday, stating that “radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives. Tonight, I ask all Americans to commit themselves to the American values for which Charlie Kirk lived and died.”

All of these comments conveniently ignore the troubling trend of right-wing violence—from the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to the attack on Representative Nancy Pelosi’s husband, the assassination of state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband—and the fact that no one has any idea right now what the political leanings of Kirk’s assassin were.

Senator Elizabeth Warren also chimed in on the discourse surrounding political violence.

“Oh please,” she said when asked if the left needs to tone down its rhetoric. “Right, why don’t you start with the president of the United States? And every ugly meme he has posted, and every ugly word.”

MAGA conservatives are leveraging Charlie Kirk’s death to advance their transphobic policies.

A bulletin circulated among law enforcement officials Thursday described the weapons used by Kirk’s killer, stating there were symbols on rifle ammunition that expressed “transgender and anti-fascist ideology,” according to The Wall Street Journal. But that unverified description may have been completely incorrect.

“A senior law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation cautioned that the report had not been verified by A.T.F. analysts, did not match other summaries of the evidence and might turn out to have been misread or misinterpreted,” reported The New York Times.

Those kinds of early status reports are usually not made public due to their low reliability, mixing together accurate and inaccurate information in order to give officers a breadth of material to work with in the early stages of an investigation.

Still, that hasn’t stopped some far-right personalities from deliberately targeting and wishing the worst for an already disenfranchised and vulnerable demographic.

“If the person who killed Charlie Kirk was a transgender, there can be no mercy for that species any longer,” wrote far-right podcast bro Joey Mannarino, who has more than 631,000 followers on X. “We’ve already tolerated far too much [from] those creatures.”

In another post, Mannarino claimed that “transgender terrorism is a true problem in America and until we properly address it we cannot have a peaceful nation.”

“The Second Amendment applies to people, not science experiments,” he added.

In yet another post Thursday, Mannarino said that “two weeks ago, I called for transgenders to be rounded up, detained and studied due to their propensity for mass murder.”

“I don’t know what more needs to happen for that suggestion to be taken seriously,” he said.

The federal government ran a $345 billion deficit for the month of August, according to a monthly report from the U.S. Treasury Thursday.

The figure exceeded expectations, as economists had forecast a shortfall of about $300 billion, according to CNBC. In reality, the government spent $689 billion while taking in $344 billion, including $30 billion from tariffs: a monthly record that still was woefully inadequate to close up the budget gap, as August saw the third-largest deficit on record this year.

In the fiscal year thus far, the United States has racked up a deficit of $1.973 trillion. That figure is $76 billion higher than it was at the same time last year, and, according to Bloomberg, is surpassed only by the years 2020 and 2021, when the U.S. was “spending extraordinary amounts to cope with the Covid crisis.”

Some House Republicans are pushing for Charlie Kirk to get a statue in the Capitol, and equating his impact to that of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in the process.

NOTUS’s Reese Gorman posted on X that far-right Representative Anna Paulina Luna is collecting signatures for a letter addressed to Speaker Mike Johnson, calling for him to erect a statue of Kirk in the Capitol Building.

“To honor this legacy, we call upon you to direct that a statue of Charlie Kirk be placed in the United States Capitol,” the letter reads. “This is not a symbolic gesture, but a permanent testament to his life’s work, his courage, and his sacrifice.”

Kirk was shot and killed at an event at Utah Valley University Wednesday afternoon. The FBI has identified a person of interest, but no suspect is currently in custody.

Kirk founded the conservative group Turning Point USA and was an active presence on the right, taking his influence all the way to the White House, as an advocate and unofficial adviser to President Donald Trump.

Gorman asked Georgia Representative Andrew Clyde—who once described the January 6 insurrection as “tourism”—about Luna’s letter. Clyde agreed with the idea, saying, “We have a statue of MLK in the Capitol, don’t we?”

King is known for fighting for African Americans to be treated like full human beings, spreading a theology of peaceful civil disobedience, and being one of the most powerful orators ever.

Kirk, for his part, is known for his online debates, right-wing views that include banning abortion with no exceptions and unconditional support for the Second Amendment, and starting a conservative movement on college campuses throughout the country in reaction to what he saw as an environment that was too liberal and too empathetic. The comparisons between him and MLK Jr. are perplexing, to say the least.

Kirk held particularly negative views about MLK Jr. and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which King fought tirelessly for, and he wasn’t shy about sharing them.

“MLK was awful,” Kirk said at America Fest, a political convention, in 2023. “He’s not a good person.” Later, at the same festival, Kirk described passing the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s as a “huge mistake.”

Kirk criticized King last year on his podcast as well, saying, “This guy is not worthy of a national holiday. He is not worthy of godlike status. In fact, I think it’s really harmful.”

And on the anniversary of King’s birthday in 2024, Kirk posted on X: “Who was MLK? A myth has been created and it has grown out of control … while he was alive most people disliked him, yet today he is the most honored, worshipped, even deified person of the 20th century.”

Now conservatives are trying to deify Kirk in the same way because of their similarly brutal deaths. But the lives they lived couldn’t have been more different.

Shortly after receiving an ultimatum from a frustrated North Carolina Republican, the Trump administration Thursday announced millions in federal disaster aid to the Tar Heel State for last year’s Hurricane Helene.

“I am proud to approve nearly $32 Million Dollars [sic] in assistance for the Great State of North Carolina,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

The president also announced disaster aid to Kansas, Wisconsin, and South Dakota. In each post, he was sure to note that the funds were going to states in which he’s had electoral successes in the past. In North Carolina, for example, he wrote, “I WON BIG all six times” (six, that is, because he included Republican primaries in his count). Notably, in his post about Wisconsin, Trump repeated his false assertions that he actually won the state in 2020.

Trump credited North Carolina Republicans such as Senator Ted Budd for requesting the aid. Two days prior, Budd had skewered Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security for delays in the disbursement of $5.95 billion in Federal Emergency Management Agency funds—$4.2 billion of which the state was reportedly still waiting for as of June.

“Here we are, nine months later, we still haven’t seen the reimbursements,” Budd told CNN Tuesday. The senator assigned significant blame to Noem, citing her controversial policy requiring all DHS expenditures exceeding $100,000 to receive her approval.

“We’ve let leadership know we’re going to place holds on all DHS nominees until we get an appropriate dialog and response on the outstanding invoices that have not been paid to western North Carolina from FEMA,” he said.

Later that day, Noem announced FEMA grants to North Carolina amounting to $12 million.

On X Thursday, Budd responded to Trump’s announcement with gratitude. “Dramatically addressing the backlog of projects waiting for funding is great news for [western North Carolina] communities as we approach this storm’s 1-year anniversary,” the senator wrote.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau threatened Thursday to deport noncitizens that don’t demonstrate the requisite amount of sadness and sobriety about Charlie Kirk’s death.

“In light of yesterday’s horrific assassination of a leading political figure, I want to underscore that foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country,” Landau wrote on X. “I have been disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action.”

He also asked to be notified of any such “comments by foreigners” so that the State Department could “keep Americans safe.” In a separate post, the secretary said people should reply to his post with examples, and he’d “direct consular officials to monitor the comments to this post.”

Beneath Landau’s post, users on X submitted posts they’d seen making jokes about Kirk’s death. Each time, the secretary responded with an image of the Department of State seal, captioned with “El Quitavisas,” which roughly translates to “The Visa Revoker.”

Disturbingly, some of the posts Landau responded to didn’t include jokes. One post sent to Landau was of a news group describing Kirk as an “extremist,” which he was. Apparently, accurately describing a public figure’s political statements is now a privilege reserved only for American citizens.

In the aftermath of Kirk’s death Wednesday, some Republican lawmakers have begun a push for censorship online. Right-wing influencers such as Libs of TikTok and Laura Loomer have launched sweeping campaigns to dox and intimidate anyone whose characterization of Kirk doesn’t match their own.

Landau’s threat represents the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s campaign to strip noncitizens of First Amendment protections that began with the government’s vicious crackdown on foreign students’ pro-Palestinian speech.

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.