In the decade before the Civil War, slave-owning men known as “Fire Eaters” started ratcheting up public discourse in stark, divisive, all or nothing terms. They cast their interests not as political differences, but as an existential crisis facing the nation. They used public speeches to vilify people who disagreed with them, spreading hatred in the hearts of men until it grew hot, and war became inevitable.
It’s impossible to read the words of those men without hearing the voices of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller speaking at Charlie Kirk’s memorial.
Using that solemn occasion to deliver a message of hatred and division, two weeks after Kirk’s murder, Trump and Miller are still exploiting it. Despite the lack of clarity about both the killer’s motive and his shifting political ideologies, they continue to spread false rhetoric blaming the “radical left,” projecting their own wish for political violence just as the Fire Eaters of the nineteenth century did.
Trump, Miller and their words of war
Anyone who expected a respite, or dared to hope for a ‘presidential’ message during Kirk’s memorial service, was sorely disappointed. After a MAGA speaker lineup, Trump walked onto the stage while Lee Greenwood sang ‘Proud to be an American.’ In his heavily choreographed entrance, raucous applause erupted as live fireworks exploded across a stage more reminiscent of a used car clearance event than somber memorial.
After Kirk’s grieving widow spoke of forgiveness and grace, Trump batted her words away. Trump relayed to the audience how Kirk said he didn’t hate people who disagreed with him. “But,” Trump said, “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them, I’m sorry.”
Stephen Miller, the presumed architect behind Trump’s attacks on immigrants and minorities, delivered his own ghoulish invective, eulogizing Kirk with dark images of us vs. them:
The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us. Because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble.
And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity.
Miller didn’t define who he meant by ‘we’ and ‘they.’ He didn’t need to.
Comparing Right vs. Left political violence
Trump and Miller are getting their wish: Political violence in the US is on the rise. Violent attacksagainst US government personnel and facilities more than doubled between 2024 and 2025. Contrary to what Trump and Miller keep claiming, however, it’s coming from the right, not the left.
Analyzing political violence according to the views of the perpetrator is complicated in part because interpreting motive can itself be subjective. It’s also complicated because different organizations use different terminology. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security define domestic violent extremism as violence “intended to influence government policy or intimidate civilians for political or ideological purposes,” while researchers, including universities, use more operational definitions.
Despite these challenges, data clearly show that right-wing political violence has been far, far deadlier than left-wing political violence.
Based on government and independent analyses, PBS reports that right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of fatalities in the US, listing recent examples such as the 2015 Charleston church shooting, the Pittsburgh 2018 Tree of Life synagogue attack, and the anti-immigrant 2019 El Paso Walmart massacre. The report also lists deaths by left-wing extremist incidents, including anarchist and environmental movements like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, arson and vandalism campaigns that often targeted property rather than people.
When compared side by side, violence from right wing extremism amounted to approximately 75% to 80% of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths between 2001 and the present, while violence from the left comprised about 10% to 15% of such incidents and less than 5% of fatalities overall from political violence.
Trump and Miller use violent words to elicit violent responses
Mark Hertling writes in his excellent essay, “Beware today’s fire eaters” that the 1861 onset of Civil war can be attributed to political arsonists who portrayed compromise and coexistence as dishonor, promoting national violence as the only resort. Hertling, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, writes that the Civil War agitators “moved beyond grievance into agitation and violence. They … treated any dissent as an existential threat to their way of life. They cultivated a rhetoric that was designed not to persuade opponents but to radicalize their many followers,” ultimately celebrating political violence as necessary.
The tactics of the fire-eaters, Herling notes, reveal the same playbook we are witnessing today as Trump radicalizes his base by demonizing and dehumanizing his political opponents. Fire Eaters of the Civil War, like Trump and Miller, painted their political adversaries as mortal enemies. As Trump has demonstrated repeatedly with Executive Orders that have no basis in law, the Fire Eaters also normalized extralegal responses. They claimed political violence was a patriotic duty, just as Trump exalted J6 rioters to fight like hell or they wouldn’t have a country left, then rewarded even the worst among them with a pardon.
As Trump, Miller, Hegseth and Bondi build the world’s largest and most lethal police state, they are equipping Trump with his own personal militia. Teasing a third presidential run, it’s not hard to see that, for Trump, J6 was but a rehearsal.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
What a disgraceful display of misdirection and callous gamesmanship from Tramp and Co. at a man's funeral memorial. Many thanks to Sabrina for this excellent piece.
“That’s where I disagreed with Charlie,” Trump said at the memorial fo Kirk. “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry.”
This was after Erika Kirk said she forgave the man who killed her husband and that “the answer to hate is not hate.”
PBS titled their article about this "Trump ‘authentically himself’ for saying he hates opponents at Kirk funeral, White House says" referring to Karoline Leavitt (the article has a video https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-trump-authentically-himself-for-saying-he-hates-opponents-at-kirk-funeral-white-house-says )
She said:
“Look, the president is authentically himself. I think that’s why millions of Americans across the country love him and support him, including Erika Kirk, who you saw so beautifully was on stage with the president in an unthinkable moment, in the midst of an unthinkable tragedy and was leaning on the president.”
This is actually one of the few times Leavitt has told the truth. Trump AUTHENTICALLY is a psychopathic sadistic malignant narcissist who is drunk on power and gets a visceral rush out of trolling liberals by saying outrageously nasty things. The more he feels he is untouchable and ensconced in his dictatorship the more unfiltered be becomes when he speaks or tweets. Far worse that just what comes out of his mouth or in his online posts is when he expressed this by ordering actions, like blowing up boats, which will kill people, siccing his gestapo on people he wants to deport, or his lowlife lawyers from DOJ on his enemies.
The mooforker monarch thinks saying outrageous insulting things is the height of humor when in fact he's a gaping garbage mouth spewing noxious and dangerous hate.