Trump Has Cracked Down on Dissent Like Any non Elected Dictator

The White House has labeled critics terrorists, attributed violence to a left-wing conspiracy and investigated unions, nonprofits and other groups in a battle over free speech.

   

By Matthew Purdy and Alan Feuer

New York Times

 

The very public murder of Charlie Kirk on a Utah campus last September sent convulsions of grief through the political right. Within days, the Trump administration began transforming the slain prophet of young conservatives from a martyr to a cause.

“The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven was, he said, that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence,” Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, said three days after the killing. “And we are going to do that.”

The message Mr. Miller described quickly turned into policy. Now, a year later, it is clear how bright a line of demarcation the period after Mr. Kirk’s death has become in the efforts by President Trump and his allies to target Americans they see as “the enemy within.”

The administration’s nearly exclusive crackdown on left-leaning organizations and activities has ushered in a pitched battle over political dissent and free speech. 

Officials have taken a governmentwide approach to scrutinizing citizens and organizations opposed to Trump policies. Tax agents have examined nonprofit groups. Investigators have looked into the books of labor unions. Prosecutors have brought charges against anti-ICE protesters, asserting that a leftist conspiracy is provoking political violence on the streets.

These efforts came together this year in Minnesota, the scene of heated protests in response to the government’s aggressive immigration sweep. Federal investigators infiltrated neighborhood watch committees, church meetings and an environmental group in an operation that surveilled hundreds of ordinary people. Ultimately, 15 protesters were charged with conspiring to impede immigration enforcement as members of the far-left movement known as antifa, but prosecutors did not accuse them of any violent acts beyond kicking an ICE vehicle and sideswiping another.

A large American flag draped over a campus building.

The site where Mr. Kirk was killed last year at Utah Valley University, a few days after the shooting.Credit...Kim Raff for The New York Times

When Paul Kirk-Davidoff, a meat cutter and union organizer in Minneapolis, saw in court files that undercover agents attended a meeting he had set up last February about resisting ICE, he said: “First I laughed, then I thought this is scary.”

From the start of his second term, Mr. Trump has wielded power to punish those he views as opponents, including law firms, universities, pro-Palestinian activists and news outlets, three of which he banned last week from the White House. But after the Kirk killing and assassination attempts on the president, Mr. Trump and his allies have recast the effort in existential terms. 

“What we are finally coming to grips with on the right is that our opponents on the left, some of them, enough of them, want us dead,” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point USA, Mr. Kirk’s conservative organization, said in an interview. “You have to deal with this or you are a sitting duck.”

Mr. Trump issued two directives soon after Mr. Kirk’s death that have guided the administration. On Sept. 22 last year, he signed an executive order designating antifa a domestic terrorist organization. Days later, he signed a national security document ordering an attack on what he said were networks that fomented political violence.

The motivating ideologies of these networks, the memo said, included “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Even though there is no provision in American law defining domestic terrorism and the F.B.I. has previously said that antifa is more of an antifascist ideology than an organization, the administration has attached both labels to protesters and some left-leaning groups.

The White House has defended the moves. “There is no safe harbor for those who illegally attack and obstruct law enforcement or wage campaigns of political violence against the American people,” said Lauren Bis, a White House spokeswoman. 

But the administration’s campaign against violence is filtered through a political lens — alarming myriad organizations whose causes, from the environment to civil liberties to voting rights, are at odds with the president’s agenda.

Vanita Gupta, a New York University law professor and a former Biden-era Justice Department official, has organized nonprofit groups to counter what she said was the White House’s effort “to quell dissent, rewrite the past and suppress organizations that are challenging its narrative and policies.”

It is not just Democrats. An amicus brief filed last month in the Minnesota case by legal groups that included the libertarian Cato Institute and the right-leaning Society for the Rule of Law said Mr. Trump’s political violence directive, known as National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, “effectively uses the domestic-terrorism label to justify criminal investigations into disfavored groups that would not otherwise be targeted.”

President Trump at a lectern with the presidential seal.

President Trump spoke last year during the memorial service for Mr. Kirk in Glendale, Ariz.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

American politics has been reshaped by belligerent, sometimes threatening, language on all sides and by heightened security concerns, underscored by the murders of Mr. Kirk and a Democratic lawmaker and her husband in Minnesota. While Mr. Trump’s allies say the left’s accusatory language encourages violence, demonizing on the right filters down from the Oval Office. In July, Mr. Miller described participants in “antifa protests” as “deformed in some way — in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.” 

Within days of the Kirk murder, Vice President JD Vance called for the punishment of anyone “celebrating” the shooting. Hundreds of people who criticized Mr. Kirk’s politics online lost or were threatened with losing their jobs.

The First Amendment protects nonviolent protests, but Mr. Trump has excused violent actions carried out on his behalf. Before pardoning nearly 1,600 participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, he said, “All they were doing was protesting a rigged election.”

For some, protesting has entailed more risk. Laurie and Richard Eckman, both in their 80s, found that out when they joined a demonstration in Portland, Ore. after Mr. Trump declared the city “war-ravaged” by “domestic terrorists” and ordered a stepped-up response.

Ms. Eckman, who first protested during the Vietnam era, said that as the matriarch of a multicultural family she objected to Mr. Trump’s treatment of immigrants. One day last fall, Mr. Eckman, a Vietnam veteran, grabbed his walker and the couple joined a march to the local ICE building.

When officers confronted the protesters, “I heard a loud bang and felt an extremely hard and direct impact” on her head, Ms. Eckman recalled. Bloodied by a pepper ball, she was treated in an emergency room for a concussion and breathing problems, she said. 

“Unlike our more generalized protests against the Vietnam War,” she wrote later in her diary, “the threats to our democracy by this administration seem immediate and real and very personal.”

‘Domestic Terrorists’

Within weeks of Mr. Trump issuing his security directives, prosecutors relied on them in a case that emerged from a July 4 “noise protest” at the Prairieland immigration detention center outside Dallas.

A group of leftist activists set off fireworks and scrawled anti-ICE graffiti on the facility. But one protester, a former Marine, shot and injured a police officer who had pointed a pistol at them.

Prosecutors had charged the 11 activists with attempted murder, but after Mr. Kirk’s killing, they filed different charges. They identified the defendants as “operatives” with the “North Texas Antifa Cell” and charged most of them with offering material support to terrorists — the first time terrorism statutes had been used against purported members of antifa. Those charges carried more severe penalties. 

“As @POTUS has made clear,” Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, wrote on X at the time, “Antifa is a left-wing terrorist organization. They will be prosecuted as such.”

Flags outside a green-and-beige building.

The Prairieland immigration detention center outside Dallas, where protesters were charged in a terrorism case.Credit...Tony Gutierrez/Associated Press

Almost immediately, critics — including some former terrorism prosecutors — expressed concern that the administration was using a vague definition of antifa to target people who had no clear connection beyond a shared ideology. They also said that even though the Prairieland protest had ended in gunfire, most of those facing charges had not committed violence.

One defendant, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, an elementary school aide who is married to another defendant, had not even been at the detention center when the shooting took place. The sole allegation against him was that he had concealed a box of anarchist zines, which the government presented as evidence of the defendants’ political beliefs.

He was sentenced to 30 years in prison. His eight co-defendants who went to trial were handed penalties totaling more than 400 years.

By late last year, the F.B.I. was moving forward with nearly 30 other investigations linked to the president’s directives, according to an internal memo. Agents from the bureau, the Department of Homeland Security and the Internal Revenue Service were working them through a “joint mission center” in Washington. 

“Political violence is a scourge on our democracy, and it is increasingly organized, radical and dangerous,” a Justice Department spokesman said.

The success of the Prairieland prosecution influenced the investigation in Minnesota

People holding up signs against immigration enforcement.

Demonstrators in January outside the Whipple Building in Minneapolis.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Last winter, masked ICE agents roamed the streets, pursuing undocumented immigrants, sometimes smashing car windows. Demonstrators massed outside the Whipple Building, the agency’s hub in Minneapolis. Local residents signed up to monitor ICE agents.

After two people, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed by federal agents, Mr. Miller and other administration officials labeled them domestic terrorists. The Justice Department declined to investigate Ms. Good’s killing and announced an inquiry into Mr. Pretti’s death only after public outcry.

But the department began scrutinizing demonstrators, homing in on left-leaning political groups that officials believed were funding protests. 

Image

Ice sculptures inscribed with names and portraits in a snowy backyard. 

A memorial for Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were killed by federal agents in Minneapolis.Credit...David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

Homeland Security investigators ramped up a surveillance operation that used undercover agents to infiltrate meetings where people were often recorded doing little more than expressing opinions, court records show.

“A heavy-set female approximately twenty-five (25) spoke about operational security,” one agent wrote about a February meeting at a library, the papers show. “The female warned attendees not to say anything in the meeting that you would not say to an ICE agent. The same female stated she had recently started a ‘Coffee Club’ where people can get to know each other on a more personal level.”

The investigators monitored protester group chats on Signal and took down license plate numbers of people who had voiced disdain for ICE agents, court records say.

In the funding inquiry, investigators obtained three years of financial records from two large mainstream labor unions and a climate action group, according to court documents. 

In June, prosecutors charged 15 people, some with ties to those organizations, with impeding immigration enforcement as members of antifa. No allegations of wrongdoing by the unions or the climate group were made.

 

In announcing the case, Daniel Rosen, the U.S. attorney in Minnesota, said it was based on Mr. Trump’s security directives. “These defendants have been charged not for what they said but what they did,” he added.

The indictment said that on Jan. 23, some defendants threw ice at law enforcement vehicles at the Whipple Building and also tried to block agents from the building. Prosecutors did not allege that any of those charged had injured agents, and some had only joined meetings or online discussions.

One defendant, Erik Davis, a Macalester College religion professor, said in an interview that Minneapolis residents reacted to an “extreme and deadly” immigration sweep, but that “organizing protests, including very large ones, is not a crime.” 

He said that he and his co-defendants were targets because of their activism, rooted in anarchism and radical labor politics.

“The government wants to use us to send a message to Americans that they shouldn’t dare to protest or oppose the regime or else you’ll be put on trial,” he said.

Hate Maps and ‘Incitement’

When a leader of the Southern Poverty Law Center, known for investigating extremist groups beginning with the Ku Klux Klan, appeared at a congressional hearing last spring, Representative Bob Onder, a Missouri Republican, confronted him. “Are you willing to take any responsibility for the assassination of Charlie Kirk?” he asked.

It was a made-for-viral moment, but it also reflected how the murder endures for many of Mr. Kirk’s MAGA admirers — both as a painful touchstone and a blunt instrument for attacking the left.

The basis for Mr. Onder’s question was the law center’s monthly “Trends and incidents of the hard right” report, published the day before Mr. Kirk’s death. It highlighted Turning Point’s association with Vince Everett Ellison, a virulent critic of diversity, equity and inclusion. 

The law center had grown into a fund-raising juggernaut as the nation’s politics had become more divisive, adding groups to its “Hate Map” that Republicans considered mainstream. Even some on the left criticized its now retired founder, Morris Dees, of fund-raising off fear. “They were fast and loose in who they called a hate group,” Stephen B. Bright, a Yale law professor, said of the previous leadership.

In a May 2025 report, the law center accused Turning Point of “sowing and exploiting fear that white Christian supremacy is under attack” by immigrants, the L.G.B.T. community and civil rights activists. The report quoted Mr. Kirk: “You cannot have liberty if you don’t have a Christian population.”

In early September of last year, Mr. Kirk and others wrote to Mr. Miller, calling for action. They said the law center had become “biased, politicized and unmoored from its original mission,” as evidenced by its placing “traditional value and faith-based organizations” on its Hate Map.

After Mr. Kirk’s death, Elon Musk wrote on X, using the group’s initials: “SPLC is guilty of incitement to murder Charlie Kirk.” The next day, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, cut ties between his agency and the nonprofit group, which had worked together for decades to combat extremists. 

In April, the Justice Department indicted the law center, alleging that by paying informants inside white supremacist organizations, it had defrauded its donors by promoting hate groups it said it was fighting.

The S.P.L.C. has defended itself by pointing out that the government has for years used information from the informants in criminal prosecutions. It tried to have the case dismissed, arguing that the prosecution was vindictive, aimed at silencing the group. A judge denied the request.

Like Mr. Kirk, the president has declared himself a defender of free speech, signing an executive order on Inauguration Day 2025 reaffirming “the right of the American People to speak freely” after the Biden administration “trampled speech rights.”

Jenin Younes, a lawyer who represented clients — including current Trump administration officials — censored on social media for posting what the Biden administration considered misinformation on Covid, said those free-speech violations were consequential.

“But you can’t compare that to bringing criminal charges, expelling people from universities, putting them behind bars and trying to deport them, ” said Ms. Younes, who now heads the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “The chilling effect of what the current administration has done is so much more severe.”