What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to make political hay out of a murder.

At a press availability today, Trump insisted that the murder of conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk was the work of "radical left lunatics" and hinted at a shadowy network of organizations linked to it that he promised to unearth and "beat the hell out of." 

Kirk was shot yesterday while appearing at Utah Valley University in Provo. Undeniably influential, Kirk was indeed unpopular with centrist and left-of-center Americans who were aware of him. Kirk's stated beliefs included the following:

• 10-year-old rape victims should be forced to bear children under all circumstances. 

• Doctors who care for transgender people should be put on trial like Nazi war criminals were.  

• Successful Black women like Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson or Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, among others, "stole a white person's slot" and "don't have the brain processing power to be taken seriously." 

• "America was at its peak" when the foreign-born population was at its lowest. (That was in the early 1970s, but Kirk appeared to mean the mid-1920s.) 

• The racist and Islamophobic "great replacement theory" is true.  

• Retirement—at any age—was against the Bible.   

• President Biden should be "given the death penalty for his [unspecified] crimes against America"

• "Prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people" and that it's "happening more and more."  

• The government should create a volunteer "citizen force" to protect "white demographics"

• The Civil Rights Movement—all of it—was a "mistake" 

• 45% of American voters are "maggots, vermin and swine" (referring to registered Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents)

• Islam, as a religion, is a threat to the United States and "not compatible with civilization."  

• Getting vaccinated is an attack on the freedom of others.

• Blacks—as a race—are "in decline" since the end of the Jim Crow era of state-sanctioned segregation.

• The United States can and should mandate (his) specific religious beliefs. 

• Black people were presumptively unqualified for jobs like airline pilot. 

• Some number of gun deaths were an acceptable trade-off for the Second Amendment.

Many of those are versions of ideas that Trump has embraced, too. But Kirk was also the subject of furious attacks from the extreme right wing. Laura Loomer, a professional competitor of Kirk's who has a great deal of influence over Trump, just last week accused Kirk of being a "charlatan" who "stabs Trump in the back." Kirk had also weathered years of attacks from another white nationalist podcaster, Nick Fuentes, who encouraged his listeners to harass Kirk for not being anti-immigrant enough. 

Kirk was on the outs with the Trump White House at the time of his death, in part because he had joined the conservative mini-revolt over Trump's ongoing cover-up of the Epstein investigation results. 

Of course, Trump doesn't know anything about the ideology (if any) of the shooter yet, because that person—about whom virtually nothing is known other than that he appears to be a relatively young, light-skinned man—has yet to be found. The early response from the FBI, now led by Trump's flatly unqualified political loyalists Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, is not encouraging: the agency arrested and then released not one but two mistakenly identified suspects, and then delayed making public announcements including updated photos of the shooter until Patel and Bongino could be present in Utah for the cameras.

Trump himself fomented a mob attack on a session of Congress in a desperate attempt to hold on to power in 2021, and then rewarded the people involved with pardons and cash settlements. He also said on the campaign trail in 2016 that Hillary Clinton should be assassinated if she won the election, routinely encouraged supporters to beat up protestors at his rallies, and tried to cozy up to white nationalist gangs as a last-ditch ploy in the 2020 election.

Why does this matter?

• Jumping in front of a funeral procession for attention is pretty bad even for Trump. 

• "Waving the bloody shirt" works better if the person doing it knew or cared about the victim before they died.