Inside Trumpworld’s Reality Distortion Field

Before a suspect was even in custody, Trumpworld was on a wartime footing.

Charlie Kirk had been fatally shot. Graphic video of the assassination hit terminal velocity online. Several sources of mine were close friends of Kirk, and when I spoke to them last week, it was clear this incident had changed the level of aggression with which they were willing to pursue a crackdown on their boss's perceived enemies.

“I think we want to confront violent left wing rhetoric. We want PEACE, and unity,” one adviser to President Donald Trump told me in a text message.

But, they continued, “If this is an organized group—which it seems?—then this is going to be a wake up call like people have never seen.” This person then speculated about an antifa cell in, of all places, central Utah. Other sources suggested that a band of transgender militants plotted the attack. (There is no indication that any organized group or cell planned the attack, with charging documents filed Tuesday indicating it was a lone shooter.)

It turned out that the nihilistic and highly online references inscribed on bullets investigators found near the crime scene weren't, despite garbled early reporting, so cut-and-dried as to spell out a clear motive for Kirk's murder.

Republicans kept running with one anyway.

In the week since Kirk's death, mourning over his shocking loss has metastasized into an unprecedented mobilization effort among the MAGA base, focused on a few main fronts. There is the successful push for firings of regular civilians over the tone and content of their social media posts about Kirk's death. There is a pendulum swing toward something approaching cancel culture and actual, government-backed censorship on big social media platforms. And then there are the preexisting priorities of the Trump administration.

“They killed Charlie Kirk—the least that we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine-to-zero map,” representative Jim Banks of Indiana told Politico at a Republican confab over the weekend, pushing for more partisan gerrymandering.