Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, said on Monday that there is something "fundamentally wrong" with the way the Trump administration has responded to the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Kirk was killed last week when a gunman shot him in the neck during a talk at Utah Valley University. A 22-year-old suspect has been arrested in the case, and is allegedly not cooperating with authorities, according to officials.
Kirk's death set off a firestorm on the right, with some political leaders calling for a permanent national divorce. President Donald Trump has described the Democratic Party as an extremist organization and Vice President JD Vance said during a podcast interview on Monday that there can be "no unity" with people who celebrated Kirk's murder.
Longwell noted that there is a "hypocrisy" behind the Trump administration's posturing on the issue during a new episode of "Bulwark Takes" on Monday.
"The hypocrisy is obviously self-evident," Longwell said. "I think the bigger problem is that it's pretextual."
Longwell said the Trump administration and others on the right have equated Kirk's murder with George Floyd's death in 2020, which set off nationwide protests.
After Floyd's death, private citizens publicly shamed people who celebrated the death on social media, which caused some people to lose their jobs. Republicans protested the shaming then, but are now using the powers of government to the same ends, Longwell argued.
"It's deeply asymmetric, but also wrong. It is just fundamentally wrong," Longwell said. "But that's what they are doing. They are trying to use this as a reason to shut down funding and chill funding structures on the left so that they can try to keep people from beating them in elections."
