Trump Is Expanding His Masked Thugocracy

Two weeks ago, a mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis shocked the country. On Wednesday of this week, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated in front of several thousand students whom he was addressing in Utah. Heartbreakingly, his wife and two young children were also at the event.

Both events were appalling—and both were immediately, and cynically, latched onto by President Donald Trump and his allies in the hard-right political and media ecosystems as reasons to stomp on yet more civil liberties of yet more groups of people.

In the wake of the Minneapolis killings, carried out by a transgender woman, the Department of Justice launched an effort to define all transgender Americans as being mentally ill and thus ineligible to own guns. Within minutes of Kirk’s death, with the assassin still on the loose and with no proof of what the shooter’s motives were, Trump and his allies declared that now was the time to use the full force of the state to, according to at least some of Trump’s more outspoken supporters, eradicate the leftist menace. Some talked of a civil war; others of the need to “exterminate” people they see as “anarcho-terrorists.” In a short address to the nation from the Oval Office, Trump blamed the radical left for political violence in this country and promised to crack down on organizations that, he said, without providing names or evidence, were funding this violence.

The responses both to the Minneapolis shootings and the killing of Kirk are, of course, extraordinarily selective readings of recent history.

There have been several hundred mass shootings already this year in the United States, and, as I write this, according to the Gun Violence Archive, 15 of those have occurred in the 13 days following the events in Minneapolis. None of these hundreds of mass shootings, with the singular exception of the Minneapolis atrocity, have led the GOP or Trump to propose meaningful gun-control laws. In fact, in January 2024, candidate Trump responded to a similar school shooting in Iowa by telling the mourning community that they “have to get over it.”

In recent years, there have been several high-profile political assassinations or assassination attempts, including the killing of Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman (a Democrat) in June and the attempted murder of ex-speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, who was critically injured in a hammer attack in October 2022; and yet in these cases, the GOP’s grandees remained largely silent, with Trump and his minions even mocking the victims or joking about the motives.

Yet in the one instance in which a transgender person was identified as the shooter, the administration leaped into the fray to use the carnage as an excuse to categorize an entire group of Americans, constituting more than 2 million people, as mentally ill and to deny them rights constitutionally granted to and protected for almost every other category of adult in the United States.

After the Minneapolis shooting, the right-wing media claimed transgender people were statistically more likely to be violent. This is nonsense. The Violence Prevention Project at Minnesota’s Hamline University has estimated that less than 1 percent of mass shootings are carried out by transgender people.

Let’s be clear: One can believe in untrammeled gun-ownership rights, as do most Republicans, or one can believe in sensible gun-control regulations, as do most Americans; but what one can’t do is pick and choose which categories of non–criminally convicted people merit these rights. A state can ban a particular individual from gun ownership based on their criminal history—there’s long been legal precedent on this. But one can’t offer “thoughts and prayers” when a heterosexual, cis-gendered, white male goes on a killing spree and then offer across-the-board gun bans on all transgender Americans when a transgender person does the same.

As soon as one bans gun ownership not because of what an individual has done but because of that person’s gender identity, as soon as one redefines a group as being mentally ill, one is opening the door to the pink star—to marking a category of people for discrimination or worse.

If all transgender people can be identified as mentally ill based on a shooting carried out by one troubled individual, then what’s to stop a return to the days when sexuality was a legitimate reason to bar people from federal employment or from teaching or any array of other jobs? What is to stop the government from imposing coercive medical and mental health “treatments” and incarceration on this—or any other marginalized—group of Americans? Given Trump’s propensity to view all things 1950s (or for that matter 1850s) as Making America Great Again, it’s hardly a leap to imagine a Lavender Scare of the sort that President Dwight Eisenhower launched in 1953, with his Executive Order 10450, and which resulted in thousands of men and women being fired from their jobs.

If, as seems likely, Trump uses the Kirk assassination to initiate a broad civil-liberties crackdown on groups and individuals he views as being “radical leftists,” this too will further scarify a political landscape already damaged by the Trump regime, one that has seen a huge expansion in state-inflicted violence on ordinary residents just trying to go about their lives.

A week ago today, Trump signed an executive order penalizing countries that are “state sponsor[s] of wrongful detention.”

Now, you know that proverb about not throwing stones in a glass house, right? Last I looked, Trump’s US was operating snatch-and-grab operations in cities throughout the country, opening concentration camps with monikers such as Alligator Alcatraz and Deportation Depot, and flying deportees off to South Sudan, Eswatini, and El Salvador on the scantest of rationales. Last I looked, stories are a dime a dozen of detained immigrants sleeping on the floor for days and begging for food, water, and medical care as they continue to be warehoused in facilities never designed to hold detainees. Last I looked, Trump had unleashed military personnel on Washington, DC, to help ICE detain such high security threats as DoorDash delivery workers (including many with work permits), and was repeatedly threatening to declare “war” on Chicago, while his odious immigration enforcers defended his rhetoric and cheered on his escalating attacks against cities and the immigrants who have made this country thrive.

In another scandalous emergency ruling showing just how morally bankrupt the Roberts court is, the Supreme Court this week greenlighted wholesale racial profiling by immigrant-snatchers across the nation. A day later, armed men swarmed a car in Van Nuys, a suburb in the San Fernando Valley. While bystanders fired up their cell-phone video functions, these masked cowards dragged the car’s occupants, including a visibly pregnant woman, onto the street, wrestled them to the ground, and, with their heavy weaponry pointed at their heads the whole time, arrested them. More notches on their belts as they work to meet Stephen Miller’s daily arrest quotas.

A friend of the occupants later told local media that two of the three in the car were legal permanent residents and the third was a US citizen.

What we are seeing on American streets is caudillo politics—the law of the strong man and the rule of the uniformed, masked thugocracy. We are seeing federal agents essentially acting as paramilitaries to fulfill the violent fantasies of those running the government. Now, as the administration appears poised to use the horrific killings of the children in Minneapolis and of Charlie Kirk in Utah as raisons d’être for a much broader assault on civil liberties, the scope of that state-inflicted violence could well expand. Trump is, and always has been, a political arsonist. The events of the past two weeks have provided him perfect cover to light more fires.