President Donald Trump and the GOP are going all out to honor right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, after he was shot and killed during a Utah college event on Wednesday.
It’s a marked difference from how the right behaved in June, when Trump supporter Vance Boelter assassinated former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and wounded Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife.
On Thursday, Trump announced that he is going to posthumously award Kirk with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and ordered flags to be flown half-staff in Kirk’s memory. Notably, Trump did not do the same when Hortman was killed.
Trump also called former GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, who was at the event where Kirk was killed, to see how he was doing. Of course, Trump did not extend the same courtesy to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz after the attack on Hortman and Hoffman, saying that calling him would be a “waste of time” because Walz “is so whacked out.”
And other Republicans are treating Kirk’s murder significantly differently than they have other shootings.
House Speaker Mike Johnson requested a prayer on the House floor for Kirk—but not for the victims of a school shooting in Colorado that happened that same day. The prayer erupted into a shouting match, with GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida blaming Democrats for Kirk’s murder.
That’s distinctly different from Luna’s reaction to the Minnesota assassination, when she offered no condolences and instead blamed Walz for the murders.
“I told you this was irresponsible Gov. Tim Walz. Rhetoric has consequences. You should have listened,” she said, referring to Walz’s plan to speak at a “No Kings” rally protesting Trump’s shredding of the Constitution.
Luna is also circulating a letter seeking support from her GOP colleagues to get a statue of Kirk placed in the U.S. Capitol. The letter baselessly blames “the Left” for the shooting, even though the shooter has still not been found nor identified. She said that the statue would be “a reminder that political disagreement must never be answered with violence.”
And she seems to have some support, with Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia—who’s infamous for his fetish for semiautomatic rifles—telling political reporter Reese Gorman that a Kirk statue makes sense because “we have a statue of MLK in the Capitol, don’t we?”
Of course, comparing Kirk—who spent his life spreading hate and racism—to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. is beyond offensive.
It’s unclear whether Luna will be successful in getting her Kirk statue in the Capitol. But if she is, it’s certainly more than Republicans did for the officers who were killed or injured protecting the Capitol from the hordes of Trump-supporting insurrectionists on Jan, 6, 2021.
Congress passed a law mandating that a plaque be placed in the Capitol to honor those officers, but Johnson has refused to hang it up.
