Arguably the most remarkable aspect of the aftermath of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination is how irrelevant its actual perpetrator was to the immediate discourse. I saw the finger-pointing online even before I saw the news that Kirk had been shot. At that point, there was hardly any information about the incident—let alone details about the shooter or a motive.

Before the president of the United States announced on this morning’s broadcast of Fox & Friends that the man who’d assassinated Charlie Kirk was finally in custody—“I think, with a high degree of certainty, we have him”—he had already told the American people who was to blame.
Within hours of Kirk’s killing, when law enforcement had not released so much as a photograph of the suspected shooter, Donald Trump addressed the nation, accusing the “radical left.

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Updated at 7:23 p.m. ET on September 12, 2025
One small relief in an awful week is that Utah Governor Spencer Cox was the man leading the official response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

From the moment an assassin shot Charlie Kirk, my social-media feed began filling up with people decrying the attack. The sentiment of horror—both at the murder itself and at what it portended for American political culture—was overwhelming and cross-ideological.
From the pro–Donald Trump conservatives in my timeline, however, I detected another sort of response.

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A panic attack can feel like the end of the world. In his new novel, Pan, Michael Clune writes that during such an episode, “your consciousness gets so strong it actually leaps out of your mind entirely. It starts vibrating your body. It shakes meat and bone.