Donald Trump targets progressive non-profits after Charlie Kirk’s killing

Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer may have been a left-winger. He appears to have acted alone. After the assassination of the MAGA activist, some on the left celebrated and suggested Kirk had it coming. This was callous and loony. Not to be outdone, MAGA-world has announced a campaign to take down a supposed leftist plot responsible for the murder.

Stephen Miller, a White House adviser, blamed an “organised campaign” for the shooting and promised to “dismantle the organisations and the entities” behind it. J.D. Vance, the vice-president, said it was time to “go after the NGO network” that he said foments violence. He named the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation, behemoths of progressive giving and bogeymen of the political right. “They are literally subsidised by you and me…And how do they reward us?”

Retaliation started with a television host. After the assassination Jimmy Kimmel, a comedian on ABC, suggested erroneously that Kirk had been killed by a MAGA fan. Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadcasters, threatened consequences: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Within hours ABC took Mr Kimmel off the air indefinitely. Mr Carr then said all broadcasters should ease up on the “progressive foie gras”.

Donald Trump’s retribution tour was well under way before Kirk’s murder. He has revoked law firms’ security clearances and universities’ research grants. He has sued media outlets whose coverage he dislikes, including ABC and, most recently, the New York Times. In April Mr Trump ordered an investigation into ActBlue, an influential Democratic fundraising platform that he accuses of accepting illicit foreign donations. The Federal Trade Commission is probing whether Media Matters, a left-leaning watchdog, colluded with advertisers to boycott X, owned by Mr Trump’s pal. Criminal probes have been launched into some of the president’s perceived enemies.

Now progressive non-profits look set for more trouble. Mr Vance alluded to the government’s leverage. Charities do not pay income tax; donors get to deduct their gifts from their taxes. But weaponising the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for political purposes is illegal. A president and his cabinet members cannot order audits. A non-profit whose tax exemption is at risk enjoys many procedural protections and can sue on free-speech grounds.

The first real warning sign came instead from a different corner of government. The Department of Education has proposed a rule denying federal-student-loan forgiveness to graduates who work for non-profits with a “substantial illegal purpose”. Its definition of illegal would cover a range of lefty activism: services for undocumented immigrants, transgender health care, pipeline protests. Getting booted from the student-debt-relief scheme is headache enough for non-profits, since the programme incentivises bright young graduates to work for them, often at below-market salaries. Now some wonder whether the IRS itself will try to apply that same definition to non-profits, with an eye to yanking tax exemptions.

That would be legally dubious. But a threat need not be actionable to be chilling, notes Roger Colinvaux of the Catholic University of America. After a string of executive orders targeting “diversity, equity and inclusion”, non-profits started deleting DEI language. Many are conducting mock audits in anticipation of IRS scrutiny. Foundations such as Ford or Gates once amplified their grantees, whose affiliation with the heavyweights raised their profile. Now this is a liability. “We see a lot of website scrubbing,” says an adviser.

Even if threats to weaponise the IRS go nowhere, they can be distracting. That may be the point. Two dozen Republican congressmen want the House speaker to empanel a committee to probe NGOs and donors promoting “anti-American ideology”, which apparently means immigrant services and criminal-justice reform. They ought to pick up their Alexis de Tocqueville. You could tell an American, the 19th-century thinker said, by his love for civil society. ■