'Let's crush our enemies': Conservative analysis exposes Trump's contradictions

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 19, 2025. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno

After MAGA activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was fatally shot, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox praised him for welcoming debates with those he disagreed with. And Cox wasn't the only one to argue that Kirk had the right idea by pushing vigorous debates as an alternative to violence.

But when President Donald Trump spoke at a memorial for Kirk in Glendale, Arizona, he called for revenge and told the crowd, "I hate my opponents, and I don't want the best for them."

During a conversation for The Bulwark's vodcast posted on September 27, host Sarah Longwell (a Never Trump conservative and political strategist) and journalist Will Sommer noted the blatant contradictions between praising Kirk as a champion of debate on one hand and calling for retribution on the other.

"At the Charlie Kirk memorial," Sommer told Longwell, "there's this message of forgiveness and having an open heart and welcoming people and then having Donald Trump say: And now, let's crush our enemies."

The message of Trump and his ally Stephen Miller, Sommer added, is "We're going to crush liberals."

Sommer noted that when he was growing up in Texas, he was around a lot of Mitt Romney-type "business Republicans." But with the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement, he lamented, the GOP went "nuts" and took a decidedly mean-spirited turn.

Longwell noted that Kirk was much younger than her and that the media she consumed in the past included the Weekly Standard, the National Review and conservative journalist Jonah Goldberg as well as "heterodox thinkers" like feminist Camille Paglia and the late Christopher Hitchins.

Longwell told Sommer, "Those tended to be sort of my formative people. And I've been thinking, since Kirk's murder, what it would have been like had I grown up with not this sort of intellectual, heady conservatism, but with Charlie Kirk."

Sommer explained, "(Charlie Kirk) was not really this universally loved figure, but he was obviously a very big deal on the right. I think there's a lot of polls suggesting that it was not like he turned all young people into Republicans, but he became very ubiquitous on social media in a way that made being a young Republican seem more reasonable than it once had…. Charlie Kirk was everywhere on social media."

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