Rolling Stone reports:

They didn’t waste a day.

In the aftermath of conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Donald Trump’s government immediately got to work crafting its road map for cracking down on liberal groups and the president’s domestic foes. According to sources with direct knowledge of the matter, within 24 hours of the Kirk shooting, top Trump officials and administration lawyers — at the White House, Justice Department, and so forth — had already put pen to pad, drafting legal memos, writing blueprints for any number of possible executive actions, and prioritizing which liberal organizations and strongholds of the left needed targeting.

At the top of these frantic intradepartmental efforts sat Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, who personally supplied several names for key targets, as he worked the phones with other government officials to stress to them that the administration was now “at war.”

Even for a government run by Trump, Miller, and all of the Project 2025 architects, the pace at which the administration got to work escalating its agenda for domestic political and legal warfare was intense. Two Trump administration officials describe pulling all-nighters following Kirk’s assassination, examining how to use existing anti-terrorism laws for the next fronts in Trump’s campaign of aggression on the American left. “For Charlie,” the officials would say to one another, as they worked after-hours, plotting the coming blitz, and gaming out scenarios, including likely court challenges to their actions.

Speaking with Vice President J.D. Vance on Kirk’s podcast on Sept. 15, days after his death, Miller intoned, “The last message that Charlie sent me … was that we needed to have an organized strategy to go after the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country.” He continued, “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks.”

The memos and legal justifications leaned heavily on the infrastructure and the statutes left behind from George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror. Trump administration aides and attorneys talked among themselves about how the Kirk slaying made it clear they needed a new “war on terror,” in their words, but one launched and branded by Donald J. Trump, and aimed straight at the homegrown domestic enemies of MAGA world. It came at a moment when the administration was already throwing around the “terrorism” label widely as it tried to accomplish its most extreme goals, from blowing up boats of alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean to revving up its militarized deportation operations. [Continue reading…]