On the conservative morning show “Fox and Friends,” President Trump recounts the moment he heard about Charlie Kirk’s assassination: “Oh when I heard it? I was in the midst of building a great — for 150 years they’ve wanted a ballroom at the White House, right? They don’t have a ballroom. They have to use tents on the lawn for President Xi when he comes over. If it rains, it’s a wipeout. And so I was with the architects that were designing. It is going to be incredible.”

At a July 2nd press conference, Trump responds to a softball question about what his administration plans to do next: “You buy a house, they have a faucet and the faucet, and the water doesn’t come out… You have a shower head, you think the shower isn’t working, the water’s dripping out and that’s no good for me. I like that hair nice and wet. You have to stand in the shower for 20 minutes before you get the soap out of your hair, and it sounds funny, but it’s horrible… This was done by crazy people. And I wrote it all off and got it approved in Congress so that they can’t just change it.”

At a cabinet meeting later that month, during a discussion about the war in Ukraine, Trump shares his thoughts: “Look at those frames, you know, I’m a frame person, sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures… The only question is, will I gold-leaf the corners? They’ve never found a paint that looks like gold. Painting is easy but it won’t look right.”

***

Nearly eight months into Trump’s second term, if I had to describe my feelings toward American politics right now, the vibe is somewhere between sort of sh*tty and generally disempowered.

Credit where it’s due, the Right has been ruthlessly effective. The Trump administration has advanced its goals with startling success, perhaps more effectively than any presidency in recent memory. Illegal immigration is down more than 90% compared to this time last year. Oil and gas drilling permits are up 40% over the previous administration. DEI initiatives have been wiped from the federal government entirely.

From the Right’s perspective, that is what winning looks like.

But for me, the disempowerment I feel goes deeper than ideological opposition. Sure, it’s demoralizing to see the Right ascend. That explains my feeling of sh*tiness. But the sense of helplessness — the core political numbness — comes from somewhere more elemental, almost primordially patriotic. It’s the feeling that my speech no longer matters. That my words, or anyone else’s, don’t really count for anything.

We’re supposed to believe in the power of “freedom of speech,” right? That dissent is noble, that dialogue is essential, and that democracy is built through conversation. But how are we supposed to engage in “dialogue” when the most effective President in recent United States memory speaks in incoherent fever dreams — when the President of the United States processes an assassination with a monologue about White House ballrooms? What are you supposed to say to that?

In my earlier essay, “3 Psychoanalytic Thoughts on the Contemporary Political Discourse,” I unpacked a theory that became popular among Leftist circles in the early 2010s — the rejection of the sanctity of “freedom of speech” as a moral absolute. This rejection of the sanctity of “freedom of speech” went something like this: “Individual expressions of racism are merely projections of a larger structural racism. This structural racism is fundamentally inequitable, making any attempts at ‘civil, equal’ discourse almost impossible. Moreover, individual expressions of racism are violent, causing real human harm, so we should be cautious about engaging with racists. Instead of debating them, we should really consider shutting them down and focus instead on dismantling the fundamental structures that enable racism.”

What I’d like to add is that, perhaps, Trump understands that analysis better than anyone. Not philosophically, but intuitively. He knows what the Left was trying to teach: if you have power, you don’t need to convince anyone. You don’t have to win the argument. You don’t have to make sense. Because you have the power, you can just do what you want.

***

I became radicalized in the early 2010s. As the promises of the Obama era collapsed — no universal healthcare, no serious Wall Street reform, no true union solidarity (and the complete failure of the Employee Free Choice Act), an escalation of deportations, an escalation of drone strikes overseas — I joined the Democratic Socialists of America. I joined the Democratic Socialists of America because I believed then (as I do now) that the political coordinates of the moment were fundamentally insufficient to deliver the material victories people needed. We needed healthcare. We needed to break Wall Street’s grip on our politics. We needed to protect immigrants, empower unions, and stop bombing brown countries into oblivion.

What strikes me in the present moment is that the conditions that radicalized me on the Left in the 2010s are similar to the conditions radicalizing the Right today — but in reverse. Not because the Right is losing. But because the Right is winning.

I know it might feel distasteful, but try, for a moment, to imagine you’re a young white conservative man in your early 20s. You believe — truly, fervently — that more than a million babies are being murdered via abortion every year, that illegal immigrants are fueling a crime wave, and that America should be a Christian nation with laws that honor God. And now, your side is in power. Trump is back in office. The Left is on the defensive. You’ve given thousands of hours and so much of your spirit to help make that happen.

But even in this moment of conservative ascendancy, the world still doesn’t reflect your beliefs. Abortion clinics still exist. Drag queens still read to children. America still feels hostile to your faith.

If that’s your worldview — if you’ve won, and yet the world still feels wrong — what’s left but deeper radicalization?

***

It’s notable that Charlie Kirk’s assassin, Tyler Robinson, emerged from far-right Internet spaces — the kind defined by irony-poisoned memes and self-referential in-jokes. The messages engraved on his bullets included “Notices, bulges, OwO what’s this?” and “If you read this, you are gay LMAO.”

I know it’s repellent to dwell on, but if we practice a disciplined empathy — not to excuse, but to understand — it’s possible that Tyler Robinson was acting rationally, at least from within his own worldview. If he wanted to manifest the world he’d come to believe in — the world of black-pilled meme prophecy, of trad masculinity and biblical vengeance, of final redemptive violence — then the current political system cannot deliver that world. Not fully. Certainly not fast enough.

And the truth is, that’s not unique to the far-right.

Anyone looking to achieve transformational politics in this country — Left or Right — will sooner or later collide with the structural limits of “acceptable discourse.” On the Left, I know in my bones that building power will require mass field operations, astonishingly effective media, and unimaginable stamina. But even then, I don’t know exactly how we get there. And I don’t know if we will.

If you’re on the Right and your goal is a full Christian nationalist state, the pathway is equally murky. Again, Trump is president, yet porn still exists. Abortions still happen. People of color still commit crimes. Your side has won, yet the world still feels fundamentally wrong.

So what do you do when you’ve won and it’s still not enough?

You go beyond the coordinates. You leave the map entirely.

And that’s the heart of it. Maybe Trump isn’t powerful despite being incoherent. Maybe he’s powerful precisely because of his incoherency. Maybe that’s a lesson Tyler Robinson absorbed. That if you want to really win — not just win elections, but actually alter structural reality — then you need to abandon “civil discourse” altogether. You need to manifest action, not talk.

And in that sense, didn’t we already know how the discourse would unfold the moment Charlie Kirk was killed? Even before the details emerged, we already knew the outlines: the Right would claim martyrdom, pin the blame on leftist rhetoric, and agitate its base. The Left would denounce the assassination, yes, but also point to state and structural violence — the genocide in Gaza, poverty, lack of healthcare — as the deeper injustice. Then the backlash to the backlash. And the backlash to the backlash to the backlash. The entire sequence pre-scripted, like a bad play we’ve already seen too many times.

In the contemporary United States, speech doesn’t build meaning — it just loops. It folds into itself. It churns out ritual performances of freedom while reality remains untouched. We already know the arguments. We already know the counters. “Free speech” still exists, technically. I mean, sort of. But it means less and less.

So maybe that’s why something like “If you read this, you are gay LMAO” hits harder than any op-ed or thinkpiece. Because it’s not trying to mean anything. It’s trying to detonate meaning. And maybe, in the ruins of speech, that’s what power looks like now.

Maybe Tyler Robinson understood that.

***

It’s striking that Tyler Robinson chose to assassinate a conservative figure like Charlie Kirk, rather than, say, socialist commentator Hasan Piker. That choice invites a question: Why? Admittedly, I can’t answer with certainty, but let me speculate.

In online spaces, it’s a well-known phenomenon: Leftists argue more with other Leftists than with conservatives. Why? I think the answer is simple, even human. People who are chronically online are often deeply lonely. Self-identified Leftists, in particular, tend to be more alienated than most — and those who are both online and on the Left are often the most alienated of all. For the online Left, the Right feels too foreign and too morally distant to even engage. So when online Leftists need social connection — when they need to feel something — they turn inward, to one another.

Of course, online Leftists are still alienated. They still feel like sh*t. So they lash out at the only people close enough to hit. And in that lashing out, there’s a perverse kind of intimacy: if I can’t feel good about myself, at least I can drag you down here with me. At least then we’re in the same place. At least then we’re connected.

Maybe for Tyler Robinson, the Left is likewise non-legible. Maybe he couldn’t see himself engaging with the Left at all. Maybe his only possible site of social connection — his only real object of parasocial intimacy — was the Right itself. And maybe that intimacy became unbearable.

Because what if you’re an extremely online right-wing guy, and the only people you feel anything about are the people on your side — the only ones who speak your language, who reflect your values, who share your memes. But they’re also the ones reminding you, daily, of just how far the world still is from the vision you’ve been promised. They’re the ones delivering the bad news: despite everything, we still haven’t won the culture war. Ultimate victory is questionable. What if the only people you care about are also the ones who keep confirming your deepest fear — that even in victory, you’re still powerless?

And what if that unbearable dissonance — that intimacy with your own irrelevance — is what finally breaks you?

Then Charlie Kirk isn’t an enemy. He’s something more painful: a mirror.