This Trump official being set up to 'take the fall' for bungled Kirk investigation

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One on his way to a state visit in Britain, September 16, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to crack down on "hate speech" following the fatal shooting of MAGA activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, and her comments drew scathing criticism from both the left and the right.

Many liberals and progressives stressed that one could criticize Kirk's politics and still be absolutely horrified by his murder. And on the right, quite a few conservatives and libertarians pointed out that Kirk vehemently disagreed with the idea of "hate speech" as a legal concept.

Kirk, on May 2, 2024, tweeted, "Hate speech does not legally exist in America. There's ugly speech. There's gross speech. There's evil speech. And ALL of is protected by the First Amendment."

Salon's Sofia Tesfaye, in an article published on September 17, argues that the Trump Administration is "moving full tilt" to use Kirk's murder to justify a "coming crackdown on civil liberties" — only they're doing it so sloppily that they need a scapegoat to pin the blame on. And that scapegoat, according to Tesfaye, is Bondi.

"It took less than a week for President Donald Trump's administration to roll out the worst kind of fanatical overreach following the killing of Charlie Kirk," Tesfaye explains. "On September 10, the right-wing culture warrior was gunned down while speaking on the campus of Utah Valley University. And every day since, we have witnessed how quickly a crisis can be transformed into an instrument of repression…. But the White House's rush job is so sloppy that even Trump's most ardent supporters are crying foul — and it looks as though Attorney General Pam Bondi might take the fall…. As with her claim to have the Epstein files on her desk, Bondi’s rush to feed the Fox News clip mill without facts or evidence as backup has again exploded in her face."

Tesfaye adds, "Almost immediately, nearly all of MAGA media, from Megyn Kelly to Tucker Carlson, slammed the attorney general’s comments as an affront to free speech."

The Salon reporter, however, emphasizes that although "many on the right are patting themselves on the back for rejecting Bondi's hate speech comments," the U.S. attorney general "is simply saying out loud what others" in the (Trump) Administration are saying.

"By using a national tragedy as a pretext to flip the script and set out to limit protected speech," Tesfaye warns, "the Trump Administration is echoing patterns seen in darker chapters of world history. MAGA media is trying to throw Pam Bondi under the bus, but it's clear the plan is much bigger than her."

Sofia Tesfaye's full article for Salon is available at this link.

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