Full Episode: Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 9/12/25

Jeffrey Goldberg: It has been a bleak and dangerous week for America. The assassination of the young conservative leader, Charlie Kirk, has many Americans fearing an intensifying cycle of political violence.

Gov. Spencer Cox (R-UT): The problem with political violence is it metastasizes.

Jeffrey Goldberg: All five living presidents condemned the murder, but President Trump also condemned the political left, which he blamed for this terrible act.

As we sort through the meaning and consequences of the Kirk assassination, we know one thing, citizens are stunned and scared, but political leaders have no ready solutions to lift the country out of this downward spiral, next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

Officials in Utah announced earlier today that a suspect in the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a 22-year-old named Tyler Robinson, has been arrested. There's a great deal of speculation about his motives. We will try to be responsible here about not overspeculating, given the paucity of details so far. But what I can say with certainty is that America has a serious problem with political violence. The list of its victims or would-be victims is distressingly long and features figures from both the right and left, from Donald Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and, of course, the Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, both assassinated in June.

Joining me tonight to discuss the Kirk assassination and its fallout, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Laura Barron-Lopez is a White House correspondent for MSNBC, Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and Tom Nichols is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Thank you all for joining me. Pretty bleak week, like I said.

Let's start at the beginning. Peter, and I want everybody to jump in this, let's talk a little bit about Charlie Kirk, who he was and what role he played in the broader Republican ecosystem and the broader political ecosystem.

Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Yes. So, Charlie Kirk was a 31-year-old we call influencer, I guess, these days, provocateur would be another word, he -- out there galvanizing young voters, particularly on the right, to support Trump. He actually was not originally a Trump supporter, but became one of his most --

Jeffrey Goldberg: That's not unusual.

Peter Baker: That's not unusual in modern conservative politics. But at age 31, he had become, you know, a pretty significant force in young people's politics. And he became a friend not only of Trump, but Donald Trump Jr., J.D. Vance, in particular. J.D. Vance was so moved by this event that he ripped up his schedule, flew out to Utah to personally have the casket brought home on Air Force Two to Arizona.

So, even though Charlie Kirk held no office, never ran for office, had no position of power or authority in the traditional sense, he had obviously a network of people who he influenced.

Now, he said a lot of things that got a lot of people riled up, right? And that was part of his style about race, about gender, about affirmative action and Islam and things like that. But he also enjoyed going to college campuses like the one he was at. Even though he knew an audience there might include people who didn't agree with him, and he liked to mix it up. And he's, you know, become in this last few days, I think, a symbol of the of the toxic culture that we're in right now, politics.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Laura, how important was he to the MAGA movement?

Laura Barrón-López, White House Correspondent, MSNBC: Oh, he was incredibly important. I mean, as Peter laid out, the president, the vice president, and a number of people across the White House credit Charlie Kirk, for the increase that Donald Trump got in the 2024 election when it came to young voters, and more specifically young men, because he was out there engaging them online and in spaces where they felt like they needed to be engaged.

The reason that he is seen as a divisive figure, and why the left has had a reaction as well in this is because he has been known to make racist statements, to say that, you know, if he were to see a black pilot, he wouldn't necessarily trust their ability to fly a plane. He has also said that it was a mistake to pass the Civil Rights Act, and has definitely lobbed a number of attacks on transgender individuals. And so there's a lot across the LGBTQ advocacy space who are opposed to him.

And I think you're seeing right now in the aftermath of his horrific and tragic killing that there are two things that are happening, which is the rightful condemnation that political violence across the board is wrong, should never happen, but then the administration and the White House and the Republican movement, essentially trying to revise a bit of the history of his legacy. And that is something that is also being talked about right now.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Tom, Charlie Kirk, to jump onto what Laura is saying, a bit provocateur, organizer, activist, troll, how do you understand his role and the actual things that he said, not the sort of the version we're getting, which is understandable given that he was just assassinated? But as Laura says, it's a complicated picture with some things that offended a lot of people and some things made a lot of people very happy. But how do you think about him in the social media landscape?

Tom Nichols, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: even when he was alive, he was unusual in that he said as you know, Peter and Laura are pointing out, some really awful things, but he did it with a certain amount of charm. He was kind of a happy warrior, which was different, I think, from a lot of the other MAGA leaders who came even now, you know, come across as sort of angry and sour and combative.

And what Charlie Kirk, I think, kind of patented almost was the ability to do this and seem likable, friendly, open. You know, the people that met him, even people that didn't agree with him said he, you know, he was always polite and so on. You know, he modeled himself early on after Rush Limbaugh, but without Limbaugh's hard edges. I mean, Limbaugh was, you know, caustic constantly.

And I think what makes this such an unusual case, again, even before his assassination, is that Kirk kind of pioneered this smiling version of MAGA that, you know, you don't really see very often among a lot of MAGA supporters.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Susan, it's fair to say that he was truly committed to free speech and he wanted to be out there and mix it up verbally, but only verbally mix it up with liberals, other people who may oppose him. I mean, he did play a positive role in modeling a kind of open inquiry, or is that an unfair --

Susan Glasser, Staff Writer, The New Yorker: Yes. I mean, I think, and that's the way he's being remembered. That was, in fact, you know, key part of the very, I thought moving obit for him that the vice president, J.D. Vance, posted on X the other day, that's what he said is that he exemplified this essentially constitutional virtue of free expression.

He was on his way to a college tour around the country, not just at this university in Utah, where this horrific killing took place, but he was headed to other universities where he was going to debate liberal social media influencers. And I think he's being remembered in that way by a portion of both the left and the right.

But what's striking to me right now is that, you know, we're moving very quickly from the phase of, who was Charlie Kirk, the man, the political activists, into the phase of canonizing him. He's going to be sort of the MAGA martyr and he may mean very different things a year from now, six months from now, five years from now than he does right now.

And it's very interesting in that context that while many in the left and the right are calling for this as a sort of a wakeup call, let's talk about the toxicity of our political culture, where have you not heard that from, and that is from the White House, which has a very different interpretation.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to come to the White House in a second and President Trump's partisan response to this. But Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, who's spoken very earnestly and movingly throughout this period calls it a watershed moment in American history. Too early to call it a watershed moment?

Susan Glasser: Yes, absolutely. You know, what's interesting about Spencer Cox is that he is the definition of a non-MAGA Republican at a time when the party has, broadly speaking, been taken over by Trump and his acolytes, including Charlie Kirk.

Spencer Cox is out there modeling a very different kind of Republican Party, almost a throwback vision of America. He has worked with Democratic governors on a sort of de-polluting our public space. He gave an almost ten-minute speech when they announced the arrest of the suspect in this case, in which he pleaded, palpably pleaded with Americans, especially young Americans. He said, get off your phones, get off social media. It's a cancer on our society.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Susan Glasser: And a lot of people are going to agree with that message, but it's not the Republican Party's message.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I want you to watch that message from Spencer Cox, if possible. It was very -- I haven't seen many politicians sort of name it so clearly as Spencer Cox did about social media.

Gov. Spencer Cox: Social media is a cancer on our society right now, and I would encourage -- again, I would encourage people to log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member, go out and do good in your community.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Is it a watershed moment in terms of people's understanding of what social media can do to the brains of young people? Again, it's early in our understanding of what motivated the alleged killer, but this conversation is moving toward this understanding of nihilism that social media can seem to cause.

Peter Baker: If it's a watershed, it may be a watershed proving the point. I mean, because within minutes, certainly within hours of the reports of Charlie Kirk's death, his assassination, in a public setting, people were instantaneously going at it on social media, instantaneously raising the temperature rather than trying to calm it down.

And I think that what we see and have seen so many times before, after acts of political violence this sense of regret, this sense of, you know, we need to pull it back, this is going too far. You heard a lot of people say that this week on Democratic and Republican, you know, messaging from -- but not in the way that necessarily is going to change things, in an enduring way.

We had two assassination attempts against Donald Trump last year. We've had the assassination of the of Melissa Hortman. You mentioned the Minnesota lawmaker just this year, a Democrat, and it didn't change things. It, in fact, only seemed to be one more step down a path toward dark place we're going right now in America.

Laura Barrón-López: And also the same day, there was a shooting at a Colorado high school and the shooter, officials said, was motivated and drew inspiration and was radicalized online in these spaces that Spencer Cox is talking about. So, thankfully, two of the students that were wounded did not die, but that is something that when I talk to people who've worked in the domestic terrorism space say that they feel as though the country hasn't fully grasped yet, which is that Charlie Kirk's assassination is not an isolated incident.

Over the past few years, you could probably date it back to even before 2022, there has been an increase in political, culturally motivated, economically motivated violence in this country, and that it may now just be an enduring period that the country has experiencing.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, let me ask Tom this. We just marked the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and we spent years focused necessarily on online radicalization of Muslim young people. Are we now experiencing this same phenomenon domestically?

Tom Nichols: Yes. So, we're doing it to ourselves as opposed to foreign agents. I mean, you know, the Russians have been actively trying to get involved in these crises every time they happen. But mostly, it's young people doing this to young people, you know, as opposed to foreign terrorist organizations trying to radicalize young people.

And that's the paradox in Governor Cox's admonition. Because what he's really saying, I think people, you know, in middle age get it, right, say, go outside, touch grass. At the very top of the political spectrum, the president and people around him, they're not going to do that. But at the very bottom --

Jeffrey Goldberg: He doesn't touch a lot of grass, to be fair.

Tom Nichols: At the very bottom of it, young people, the young influencers, what he's really saying to them, what they're going to interpret that is, abandon who you are, abandon your identity, abandon the only thing that gives meaning to your life. They're not going to stop doing that because being online and generating this kind of engagement is basically what they do with them.

Jeffrey Goldberg: But I have to say though is, this conversation is so interesting to me because we're talking about social media as if it's the weather, which is not -- which is we all complain about, but we can't do anything about. But the social media algorithms are controlled by a small number of people who live in the United States, and who makes sure that anger is the product that they're pushing out. And so we're talking -- you know, it's just interesting to me, there's a kind of learned helplessness almost.

Susan Glasser: Yes. No, Jeff, I think it's a really important point. But remember, it's not just in isolation from our politics or from any other aspect in our life. So, it's not as simple as some sort of a technology problem where we can flip a switch. Because who's running the country right now, people who have succeeded in a political environment in which hatred and division is a much more successful way to go.

And it's not a -- you know, I think one of the things that's frustrating, it's very painful, is that we know what is going to happen in a moment like this. Politicians instinctively know, in a way, what they're going to say even before the facts are out. They understand, well, you know, we've got to put out a statement, we've got to say it's time to dial down the temperature. I went back and looked at what did President Biden say in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump's brush with an assassin's bullet in the summer of 2024. He said, it's time to dial down the temperature in American politics. He said, just because we disagree with each other, we're not enemies. Those, you know, could have been used exactly in many of the statements this week.

However, you have Trump and a MAGA movement that, you know, some portion of which, and certainly the president himself believe that division is part of what people are responding to. They want him to talk about an us and a them, and that's not going to go away.

Jeffrey Goldberg: President Trump understands the power of anger, obviously, as a coalescing force.

Laura Barrón-López: If I could just add one thing that I think is key here, is that also in the first six or seven months of this administration, the teams and the task forces across the government, including inside the Department of Homeland Security that were designed and built up to prevent acts of domestic violent extremism have been gutted. They are gone. The main entity for that at DHS is totally gone.

And the former people that work there that I talked to said that the reason that they're so important is because those are the teams that would work with states across the country to try to find off-ramps for young people as they were being radicalized online, and that they can catch them before they commit acts of violence.

Jeffrey Goldberg: And presumably would work against left wing variants of this as well as right wing variants.

Laura Barrón-López: We're talking about all acts of political extremists.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, let me stay on this. I want you to listen to President Trump talk about talk about who he sees as the blame here, who he's laying blame on. Let's listen to this.

Donald Trump, U.S. President: For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, there's no doubt that many people on the left have called Charlie Kirk and other people in on the right terrible names, exaggerations. There's also a level of obliviousness to what Donald Trump said. Because people in his own movement, including and especially him, have also used what we would think of in older periods of American politics as outrageous language to talk about adversaries on the left that --

Peter Baker: He used the word evil even more this time than he did in his first term. I did a search of this in his public speech. He calls Joe Biden evil. He refers to his enemies as communists, as traitors, as treasonous. These are words that are, of course, you know, inflammatory, just as the rhetoric on the left can be inflammatory about conservatives. But in Trump's mind, it's all on one side.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Peter Baker: He wants everybody to think this is just about the left wing, have no conversation about his own rhetoric or the rhetoric of the people who support him.

Tom Nichols: Right into the memory hole, the president's statement, as he gave that statement, as if he has never called his opponents vermin, human scum, really, you know, violent imagery and language, even right after this thing, you know, we have to find these people and, you know, do them harm basically. And it is remarkable the degree to which the president kind of just waves a hand and says all of those things, that's just political rhetoric. What the left does is extremely dangerous and evil and so on. And --

Peter Baker: And if you press stop him from saying it or his people, then you are canceling it, right? That's censorship. But the other side, obviously --

Susan Glasser: And that's where I think we have to wonder whether this marks not just rhetoric from Donald Trump, and those were some striking words he used the other night, but I was really struck by his vow to go after organizations and groups that were supporting this.

First of all, he talked about this being the radical left. That's the term he uses for the Democratic Party, which, in essence, is saying that the Democratic --

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, this before we know anything about the suspect.

Susan Glasser: Right. So, he's blaming, in effect, the Democratic Party for this killing without even having a suspect. But more importantly, it strikes me that Trump and a number of very influential MAGA figures have been out there calling for activities to investigate and defund the left, to go after their organizations, to use the government against basically the political opposition in a much more concerted, full-throated way.

And are they going to take the moment of this tragedy and turn that into a government campaign against the political opposition? That's the implication of what Trump was saying. We don't know if he'll follow through.

Jeffrey Goldberg: It seems like what we're seeing is the beginning of two streams of thought, a Spencer Cox kind of idea, which everybody needs to calm down, and Donald Trump saying, the problem is on the left. And, obviously, the weight in the Republican Party right now is more on the Trump side.

I want to -- we could talk about this all night. There are a couple of quick subjects I want to get to. One relates to this directly an intense criticism of Kash Patel, FBI Director, coming from some unexpected sources. Prominent conservative activist Christopher Rufo said, it is time for Republicans to assess whether Kash Patel is the right man to run the FBI. He performed terribly in the last few days, and it's not clear whether he has the operation expertise to investigate, infiltrate, and disrupt the violent movements of whatever ideology that threatened the peace in the United States.

Is the clock ticking on Kash Patel here? Rufo is a serious figure in the conservative movement, and he is not the only one.

Tom Nichols: He wasn't the only one. Erick Erickson, a few others have come out and said Patel has to go.

Now, whether that amounts to anything, you know, if being incompetent and bad at your job mattered that much, Pete Hegseth would not be the secretary of whatever we're calling him these days.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Defense.

Tom Nichols: War, defense, lethality.

Jeffrey Goldberg: (INAUDIBLE) Congress, I'm going with defense.

Tom Nichols: But, you know, that it is interesting that the first calls on this, and I think in part because this was one of their own. They didn't expect a conservative, you know, their guy to screw up the investigation into the assassination one of their people.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Tom Nichols: And I think that actually mattered a lot. But there is, again, that kind of odd feeling eight months in of who could have possibly put this guy in charge. Well --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes. There's -- you're not going to believe what I'm about to do here, but I'm going to pivot to the subject of World War III and tell you that we have two minutes to talk about it, but the other news of the week or another bit of quite dramatic news was that Russian drones essentially invaded Polish airspace. The Poles don't think it was a Russian accident.

Peter, quickly, how bad was this? What do we have to worry about?

Peter Baker: The Kirk thing obviously has sucked all the oxygen out of the room, but this is a huge thing, right, because this is the first time in a very serious way that we have seen the war in Ukraine extend into NATO territory because some of these drones were shot down by NATO planes.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Peter Baker: That's a very serious step down that escalatory ladder people have been afraid about for a long time. And what does it tell us about Putin? What is he willing to do? He's certainly not willing to make peace the way we, you know, were told just a few weeks ago.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Tom, you're a Russia expert, a lot of years at the Naval War College studying Russian tactics. Mistake, not a mistake?

Tom Nichols: No. He's testing.

Jeffrey Goldberg: He's pushing?

Tom Nichols: He's definitely pushing.

And, you know, the Russian reaction when the Poles said this was no accident, they said, well, they're not ours. And if they were ours, well, we're willing to talk about it with the Poles. Well, if they're not yours, why are you willing to talk about it?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, whose were they?

Tom Nichols: Then whose were they? And Belarus, by the way, at least one senior Polish military official thinks this was a joint Russia-Belarus operation because some of those drones came from Belarus. So, if it was a mistake or if they were lost, they went the long way around to get lost.

This is Putin saying, I am willing to risk escalation. I don't care. And you -- more importantly, he's saying NATO and President Trump, you don't really have the guts to deal with this.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Susan, do you think Trump is up to the task of confronting Russia on this incursion?

Susan Glasser: I think that's already been asked and answered, Jeff. Donald Trump said -- just today, he said, well, this is primarily Europe's problem. So, if this was a test that Vladimir Putin had to see what the response of the United States was, he got his answer. The answer was essentially close to nothing.

And that is very worrisome if you are Europe right now and you understand that you actually need an enormous military buildup in order to compensate for an America that has gone missing. And I think that's what we're looking at right now is an America that guaranteed Europe's security and has gone missing when the security is called upon to be there.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, we have a lot to talk about and we'll be talking next week about these subjects, but we're going to have to leave it there for now. I want to thank our guests for joining me, and I want to thank you at home for watching us.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg. Goodnight from Washington.