Who’s Part of Trump’s “Radical Left”? Maybe You.

President Donald Trump at a press conference in England on Thursday. Evan Vucci/AP

Following the horrific murder of MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump has blamed what he calls the “radical left” for political violence in the United States and has vowed to demolish it. Of course, Trump is peddling BS when he insists the left bears sole responsibility for violence while any emerging from the right is excusable. But his rhetoric never clarifies: Who is this “radical left” Trump seeks to stamp out? His use of this term has been rather elastic, affording him the leeway to pursue anyone he considers an opponent or detractor.

Even, possibly, you.

I asked Perplexity AI to help me determine when Trump first began assailing the “radical left.” It could not pinpoint the original instance, but the chatbot noted that during a press conference after the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in which one woman was killed—the event had prompted Trump to refer to “very fine people on both sides”—he remarked, “What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right? Do they have any assemblage of guilt?” At the time, ABC News reported, “It's unclear what he meant by the ‘alt-left.’”

During a June 22, 2020, speech at a conference held by Kirk’s Turning Point USA—in the wake of protests against police brutality that erupted across the country following the killing of George Floyd—Trump repeatedly referred to the “radical left.” He hailed the attendees for refusing “to kneel to the radical left.” He declared, “The radical left demands absolute conformity from every professor, researcher, reporter, journalist, corporation, entertainer, politician, campus speaker, and private citizen.” He asserted the “radical left” hate “our history, they hate our values, and they hate everything we prize as Americans.” And the “radical left,” he maintained, was “waging war on timeless American values like freedom of speech, which is what we’re just talking about. Anyone who dares to speak the truth is canceled, censored, de-platformed, fired, expelled, harassed, abused, boycotted, deprived of a livelihood, or even physically assaulted.”

Before this audience of Kirk devotees, Trump insisted Democrats in charge of big cities were aligned with the “radical agenda” of the “radical left.” Bedlam, he said, “will come to every city near you, every suburb and community in America, if the radical-left Democrats are put in charge.”

As he campaigned for reelection, he turned the “radical left” into his chief boogeyman. A few months later, in his acceptance speech at the GOP convention, Trump, looking to exploit the Floyd protests, which in some cities had been accompanied by looting and violence, once more leaned heavy into this “radical left” pitch. He brayed that the “election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life, or whether we allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.” He excoriated Joe Biden, the Democrats’ nominee, for not possessing “the strength to stand up to wild-eyed Marxists like Bernie Sanders and his fellow radicals.” He warned that Biden was a partner of the “radical left” and that “if the radical left takes power, they will apply their disastrous policies to every city, town, and suburb in America.” Trump was essentially saying the Democrats were a key component of the “radical left.” And it was everywhere!

Trump’s conflation of the Democratic Party with the “radical left” was a dramatic shift from his 2016 acceptance speech, when he had lashed out at Hillary Clinton for being the “puppet” of “big business, elite media, and major donors.” In four years, according to Trump, the Democrats had shifted from being lapdogs for 1-percenters to being in cahoots with communists. Quite the 180.

During the post-2020 election stretch, when Trump was conniving to overturn the election results and subvert the republic, he relied on this trope to whip up his base and sell his lie. He blamed the “radical left” for having rigged the contest against him. At the speech he gave on January 6, 2021, which incited the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol, he proclaimed, “All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they're doing. And stolen by the fake news media.” Fact-checkers who vetted his social media posts were also part of the “radical left,” he said. And he told the crowd, “The radical left knows exactly what they're doing. They're ruthless and it's time that somebody did something about it.” Put simply, anyone who had a role in the free and fair election that he lost was a member of the “radical left.”

Demonizing an amorphous “radical left” and linking it to the Democrats did not win the election for Trump, but he stuck to this line of attack when he ran for the White House again. On Veterans Day in 2023, at a rally in New Hampshire, he gave a speech that historians compared to those of Hitler and Mussolini. “We pledge to you,” he bellowed, “that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country." He added, “The real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left. It's growing every day, every single day. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”

After Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee in the summer of 2024, Trump blasted her as a “radical left lunatic.” Months later in an interview with Fox News, he raised the prospect of “radical left lunatics" disrupting the election and noted they could be “easily handled” by the National Guard or US military. He also branded Democrats like then-Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who led the first impeachment against Trump, as “lunatics” and part of “the enemy within.” He called them “more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries."

It's no shocker that Trump’s use of derogatory and dangerous language is imprecise. He and his MAGA henchmen rail against antifa—but they can’t define it. (Does it even have an office or PO box?) On Thursday, he proclaimed that it was a “major terrorist organization” and should be designated as such.

Obviously, the goal is to cast as wide a net as possible to vilify his critics and political foes. If Kamala Harris is a radical leftist, then just about every Democrat is a radical leftist—and a prime target for their new Red Scare. Trump is trying mightily to delegitimize the Democrats and all political opposition. White House aide Stephen Miller recently snarled on Fox that the Democratic Party “is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” He called Democrats “evil.” Anyone associated with the party is the enemy deserving of Trump’s wrath.

This is an old playbook. Since the days of McCarthyism, the right has endeavored to portray liberals and Democrats as intimately tied to radicalism or godless communism. Nixon did that in the 1960s. During the 1980s, there was a cottage industry of conservative media outlets and nonprofits that concocted elaborate wire diagrams seeking to show that Soviet-funded organizations were connected to left-wing groups in the US that were tied to mainstream liberals and Democrats. Right-wing commentator Glenn Beck did something similar during the Obama years, with chaotic chalkboard scribbles and flow charts that supposedly depicted a vast left-wing conspiracy that ran from the far left straight into the Oval Office with predictable detours involving billionaire philanthropist George Soros. (A gunman on his way to attack the offices of a foundation at the center of Beck’s byzantine conspiracy theory was stopped by police officers and apprehended after a furious shootout.) And Sarah Palin claimed Obama had been “palling around with terrorists.” Now Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and their MAGA conspirators claim they are going to smash the networks of the “radical left” and everyone to which it is linked.

Trump grouses that he’s the victim of witch hunts every time he’s the subject of an investigation. He now seems determined to launch his own, as part of a huge smear campaign that equates Democrats with violent extremists. When anyone he considers a political threat can be called the “radical left,” anyone can become a target of the assault to come.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

Shortly after reading the recent and alarming Atlantic piece on the MAGA influencers who are rehabilitating Hitler or aiding those who are—a group that includes prominent right-wingers Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens—I came across this clip from Browser Ballett, a German satire show, which, surprisingly, I had not seen before. Even though it came out six years ago, it is still so on the nose that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. (Note: You don’t need to brush up on your German to understand it.)

In the wake of the brutal killing of Charlie Kirk, the sheer volume of dumbass comments are overwhelming. Let’s start with how Trump and his MAGA crew have amped up the disinformation machine to claim that only the left is responsible for political violence in this nation. Here are two examples:

During a Fox News conversation with host Martha MacCallum, Donald Trump Jr. exclaimed, “When the left realizes that they're losing arguments, they resort to this violence. I see the constant ‘the violence goes both ways.’ And it does not, Martha. The violence is going one way."

Hosting what was once Kirk’s podcast, Vice President JD Vance asserted, “People on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence. This is not a both sides problem. If both sides have a problem, then one side has a much bigger and malignant problem and that is the truth.”

Well…January 6. January 6. And January 6.

Ignoring one of the most significant acts of political violence since the Civil War—and Trump’s pardons for these violent domestic terrorists—is major gaslighting. But after all, that’s what memory holes are for.

One of the most idiotic contributions to the growing Kirk hagiography came from Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas). During a House Judiciary Committee hearing with FBI Director Kash Patel, Nehls observed, “I would say if Charlie Kirk lived in the biblical times, he'd have been the 13th disciple."

During a 2023 podcast, Kirk said President Joe Biden should be executed. I am sure Jesus would have loved that.

It would be nice if the attorney general knew some basic constitutional law. Following Kirk’s killing, AG Pam Bondi remarked, “There's free speech and then there's hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society...We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech."

Hate speech is constitutionally protected speech. It’s vile but it does fall under the heading of free speech.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who has ended child vaccine mandates in the Sunshine State, has won the last two installments of this contest for his misguided comments on vaccines. He came close to a threepeat. This week, he suggested that no one should be able to receive an mRNA vaccine shot: “The goal with the mRNA is for that not to be available to anyone, because no one should be using that one.”

The Covid vaccines are mRNA vaccines. His statement seems to mean he wants to block anyone in Florida—including the large and vulnerable population of senior citizens in the Sunshine State—from getting a Covid shot. These vaccines have saved an estimated 14 million to 20 million lives worldwide. With the full support of Gov. Ron DeSantis, Ladapo has become that state’s Number 1 public health threat.

Fox host Brian Kilmeade came close to winning this week with his suggestion that unhoused mentally ill people ought to be executed. When Lawrence Jones, his colleague on Fox & Friends, remarked that homeless people ought to either accept public programs offered them or be locked up in jail, Kilmeade interjected, “Or involuntary legal injection. Or something. Just kill them.”

After an uproar, Kilmeade apologized on air “for that extremely callous remark.” Unlike Jimmy Kimmel, Kilmeade was not taken off the air for his comment. And as my colleague Julianne McShane noted, this is hardly the first time Kilmeade had to apologize for a bone-headed comment. She compiled a list of previous occasions, including when he said in 2010, “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim.” 

These contenders, though, lost out to Kilmeade’s fellow Foxer, Greg Gutfeld, who wormed his way into the winner’s circle with a comment related to the Kirk murder that in dumbassery surpassed those of Trump Jr. and Vance cited above. Denying that political violence from the right was a problem, he dismissed the assassination of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, with this rant:

You want to talk about Melissa Hortman. Did you know her name before it happened? None of us did….I never heard of her until after she died….There was no demonization, amplification about that woman before she died. It was a specific crime against her by somebody who knew her….The fact of that matter is the both-sides-argument—the fact that it doesn’t fly. We don’t care. We don’t care about your both sides argument. That shit is dead.

There’s not much to say about this remark other than: What an asshole. Gutfeld, no shocker, was wrong. The alleged killer in the Minnesota case, Vance Boelter, had hit lists of dozens of potential targets, most of them Democrats or supporters of abortion rights. He did not target one person because he knew her. He was on a politically motivated killing spree. But Gutfeld sure was telling the truth when he screamed, “We don’t care.”

Many readers were distressed by the killing of Charlie Kirk and the subsequent efforts of Donald Trump and his supporters to lionize Kirk, blame the left for political violence, and exploit the tragedy. This week’s mailbag was full of painful venting.

John D’Orazio emailed:

Where do I start? The disinformation surrounding the horrible assassination of Charlie Kirk is dangerous and volatile. I applaud you for calling out Democrats to take control of the narrative. It amazes me that only a handful of Democrats and reasonable Republicans are speaking out. Do they think that the midterms are gonna solve the issues that are confronting us today? It may be too late to turn the tides around. What amazes me is that we were all warned of what a Trump presidency would bring. Two respected generals, Gen. Mark Milley and Gen. John Kelly, straight out identified Trump as fascist to the core. This is no longer a debate about issues. This is about a fight between good and evil. It amazes me that a large portion of the American electorate felt it was OK to vote for a felon, a racist, and a misogynist, and a would-be authoritarian.

That’s the key thing. The problem is not Trump. The problem is that 77 million Americans voted for him. As Trump’s approval rating plummets, the question is, how many of those who now disapprove of his actions will do anything to oppose him and his supporters?

Cheri Pierce sent in this gripe:

The DJT crowd, especially Stephen Miller and Trump himself, have learned that projection —ascribing to the left traits they themselves embody—works for them. They run circles around the left to pin all the blame for society’s ills on the left. The left has to do a better job of pointing this out every day!

Harvey Berman wrote:

To Trump, every relationship is purely transactional. All he ever cares about is what you can do for him. Since right wing extremists are his foot soldiers, he regards anything they do as not merely permissible, but actually praiseworthy. Hence, he will deny, minimize, or rationalize any of their worst excesses. Condemnation of violence only occurs to him, if the violence has been committed by his political opponents. He is consciously refusing to do anything to try to stop those most likely to perpetrate violence in the first place: right-wing extremists. We can expect more violence from right-wing extremists convinced they are doing Trump's bidding.

As I noted recently, Trump last week went so far as to excuse right-wing violence, noting it understandably arose from justifiable frustration with bad policies and declaring it was not anything to fret about. That sure seemed like encouragement. This comment did not receive sufficient media attention.

Marie Infante had a different gripe:

How can you applaud the Emmy wins by The Pitt and completely overlook that Katherine LaNasa, who a surprise Emmy for her role as Dana Evans in that series? Did you mean to be so forgetful? Nurses, particularly seasoned professionals like the one LaNasa portrayed so well, are the backbone of any highly functioning ER (or other healthcare unit, for that matter). Please correct that oversight and give the nurses and LaNasa their due credit. 

My bad. LaNasa is formidable in the series and deserves all the accolades. And as the recipient of some wonderful hospital treatment in recent years, I’m a big fan of nurses. The Pitt does a great job of depicting the crucial role they play.

“Moxie, it’s been a tough stretch. Any words of advice for our readers?”
“I don’t really understand what’s going on. But I’ll say this: ‘Be kind.’”
“Be kind? That’s it?”
“Scientific studies show practicing kindness can improve mood and decrease blood pressure and cortisol. That’s a hormone related to stress.”
“How do you know this?”
“The black lab I play with in the park—her person works at the NIH.”