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In today’s newsletter, how Donald Trump reacted to Charlie Kirk’s death, then:
• America’s political-violence crisis
• The MAGA movement mourns Charlie Kirk
• The worst parts of Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book
Letter from Trump’s Washington
Did Trump Just Declare War on the American Left?
After Charlie Kirk’s tragic killing, the President speaks not of ending political violence but of seeking political vengeance.
By Susan B. Glasser
Photograph by Samuel Corum / Bloomberg / Getty
In the hours immediately after the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in front of a large crowd of students at a Utah university on Wednesday, there was no word on who had actually done it and no explanation for why it had happened. But in Washington, those who profess certainty no longer need much in the way of facts: partisans come equipped with preëxisting truths, and events are slotted into narratives that existed long before the events occurred. Even before Kirk’s death had been confirmed, Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina, spoke to reporters outside the Capitol. “Democrats own what happened today,” she told them. When Ryan Nobles, the chief Capitol Hill correspondent for NBC News, asked her if, by that logic, Republicans would own the shooting this summer of two Minnesota Democratic lawmakers, she replied, “Are you kidding me? . . . Some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through his neck and you want to talk about Republicans right now? No. . . . Democrats own this a hundred per cent
Law, Power, and Justice 
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