We must not let Charlie Kirk’s shooting become the fire Reichstag of Trump | David Van Reybrouck

IF 2025 already promises to be the worst year of the century for the World Order based on the post-1945 rules, last week was its most destructive week to date. Israel has deepened its contempt for international conventions by sending 10 hunting planes to Qatar, bombing a delegation from Hamas participating in cease-fire talks in Doha. The last significant forum for diplomatic negotiations may have increased in smoke.

At least 19 Russian drones violated Poland’s airspace. For the first time in its history, NATO Airpower was engaged against enemy targets in a NATO country. Whether the foray is a technical accident or a deliberate survey by Moscow, as Western experts think, it was “the closest that we were to open the conflicts since the Second World War,” said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

And then Charlie Kirk, a Conservative activist of Firebrand and Close Donald Trump Ally, was shot down by addressing the students and supporters of Maga in a University of Utah. Without proof of the shooter’s identity or motivations, Trump immediately blamed “those on the radical left”, accusing them of rhetoric “directly responsible for terrorism that we see in our country today”.

When asked how the divided nation could heal after Kirk’s assassination, Trump said he “doesn’t care”. His explanation for this was frightening: “The radicals on the right are radical because they do not want to see the crime … The radicals on the left are the problem – and they are vicious and horrible and politically wise.” This is how polarization hardens tribalism. This is how the hate spiral accelerates towards a point of no return.

In reality, more than three-quarters of all murders linked to extremists in the United States in the last 10 years have come from right-wing extremists, the left radical responsible for a fraction of them. Trump condemned political violence in general the next day – but did not recognize the recent wave of attacks on Democrats, including several murders. For him, the problem is always “them”, never the “wonderful Americans” who make up its base.

The political and cultural replicas of Kirk’s death will undoubtedly take place in the coming weeks, but the greatest danger of a polarized climate is that the shooting becomes the fire Reichstag of our time. This criminal fire attacks on February 27, 1933 marked the pivot of Germany from fragile democracy at the pure and simple dictatorship. Hitler, freshly installed as Chancellor, seized the time to extinguish the freedoms of the Weimar Constitution – Expression, Press, Association, Assembly.

“Whoever goes on our way will be reduced,” he said, inspecting the burned building. Thousands of communists have been imprisoned, including the 81 communist deputies in Parliament. With the neutralized left, the Nazis quickly consolidated power.

In the United States today, Kirk’s death seized the country, galvanizing the Maga movement and Trump supporters, and he knows. White supremacist Matt forney harvested the arrest of each democratic politician, openly affirming the murder as the moment of the Reichstag of the movement.

The reality is that here is the event that could save an increasingly unpopular presidency marked by a sharp drop in employment figures, a dollar in weakening and a housing crisis. Trump cried Kirk as if it were family, but rhetoric suggested that it would be as much to continue the enemies of Trump as justice. Just after the assassination, Trump promised to continue “each of those who contributed to this atrocity … including the organizations that finance and support it”. He distinguished George Soros, the American-Hungarian philanthrope and a democratic donor. “It’s a villain,” Trump told NBC News, he should be put in prison. “

The reason behind the kirk murder is not clear. The political opinions of the suspect, Tyler Robinson, 22, seem as confused as those of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20 -year -old who tried to assassinate Trump in Pennsylvania. Is it really the radical left that attacks the radical right-or is it the strange and chaotic subculture of online niches that spreads in the real world? The slogans engraved on the sockets of Utah are less read as an ideological manifesto than a raw DIY of childish memes and play references.

But it is difficult not to fear that the repression of academics, lawyers, journalists, civil servants, military officers and judges of the United States, lawyers, journalists, civil servants, military officers and judges. Already, reactions on social networks have led to a wave of The links and officials of the US State Department have warned foreign nationals not to rent or shed light on the assassination of Kirk, asking the consulates to take “appropriate measures” against any stranger who does.

Trump has long prospered on chaos and disorder. Where real crises do not exist, he makes them – including the pandemics of imaginary crime in Los Angeles, Washington DC and Chicago. False chaos feeds its power. Now he has received chaos on a silver set. No wonder he doesn’t care if the nation gathers.

The shooting offers the perfect pretext to tighten its grip, silence the dissent and the power of concentration – so that its successors can inherit the complete control of the State, whatever the charism, the merit or the mandate. After all, any autocratic system must be built first; Once rooted, it becomes much easier to maintain.

Liberal democracy and the world order based on rules are far from perfect, but they have delivered peace, progress and prosperity – the opposite of authoritarianism. To suggest that the United States, the post-war architect, could soon slip into the autocracy in its own right, its leaders thinking like the Nazis in 1933, may seem eccentric.

But from another point of view, it is not at all eccentric. Totalitarianism was still in living memory when many of us, even in the heart of modern democratic Europe, grew. From Belgium to Bulgaria, most families have a history of death, destruction, hatred and destitution that authoritarianism leaves behind. If the Americans want to save their close future, they may want to consult our recent past.