How Trump is creating a "cult of violence" in the US and whether it could lead to civil war
The horrendous killing of the far-right activist Charlie Kirk has shaken the United States.
On the whole, liberal commentators have gone out of their way not just to condemn violence but to recognise Kirk as a good-faith debater with a "taste for disagreement."
On the right, by contrast, prominent voices have called for repression – invoking the illegal practices of FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover as a model – if not outright "war." Members of his administration had already declared the Democratic Party itself to be a "domestic terror organisation."
Read more about the potential consequences of such a policy by Donald Trump for America in the column by Princeton University political science professor Jan-Werner Müller: Violence as politics: where the killing of Charlie Kirk could lead the United States.
"Given that Trump has shown absolutely no restraint in unleashing the powers of the federal government on any individual or organisation, the implied threat of prosecuting the opposition should set off alarm bells for any democrat (not just Democrats)," Müller warns.
According to him, Trump has consistently encouraged, or at least clearly tolerated, political violence: from imagining himself shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, to encouraging his supporters to rough up people, to describing violent racists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, as "fine people," to his apparent willingness to see his first vice president, Mike Pence, be lynched on 6 January 2021, so that he could remain in power.
The American professor stresses that while Trump’s first term featured ostentatious displays of cruelty, his administration is now devoting significant resources to creating a cult of violence.
He cites, for example, the killing of 11 people at sea off the coast of Venezuela – without any apparent legal justification – is gleefully shared on social media.
Or the way the Department of Homeland Security routinely uses social media to celebrate the pain of families whose loved ones are brutally taken away. One post goes so far as to show masked ICE personnel with Nazi Wehrmacht helmets.
In Müller’s view, during his second presidential term Donald Trump feels absolutely unchecked.
"He probably believes his undemocratic conduct is justified because the other side supposedly weaponised the Justice Department to put him in prison," the columnist writes.
Thus, Müller argues, Trump presents himself not as a persecutor, but as a victim. And he has an entire grievance-industrial complex on his side.
Victimhood, the scholar warns, can be turned into a justification for violence.
Still, this does not mean that the US is sliding toward civil war, the Princeton professor reassures.
Surveys show that an overwhelming majority oppose political violence
More details can be found in Jan-Werner Müller’s column, originally published on the Project Syndicate website and reprinted with permission of the rights holder.
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18 of September 2025
