Republican messaging in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination is tearing the party apart.

Conservatives across the country seemingly interpreted Kirk’s death as an opportunity for more violence, intimating online that the brutal attack against the 31-year-old firebrand was a sign of “war” with their political opposition. But not every Republican was willing to hop on the dogpile.

Senator Thom Tillis was disturbed by his party’s language, telling National Journal’s Nancy Vu Thursday that he was disgusted by the way that Republicans had co-opted Kirk’s death to rack up digital attention.

“What I was really disgusted by yesterday is a couple of talking heads that sees this as an opportunity to say we’re at war so that they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this,” Tillis said. “It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend like you’re a leader of a conservative movement. And there were two in particular that I found particularly disgusting.”

Tillis did not clarify which two comments he was referring to, though plenty of conservatives have shared their own twisted takes on Kirk’s murder.

Figureheads leading the charge included Laura Loomer, who decried the political left as a “national security threat”; Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik, who blatantly stated, “THIS IS WAR”; former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who claimed that Kirk was a “casualty of war”; and podcast bro Joey Mannarino, who demanded that the Democratic Party be “classified as a domestic terror organization.”

Donald Trump, for his own part, issued a four-minute video message in which he condemned American liberals for the political climate that led to Kirk’s assassination, admonishing them for drawing historical parallels between his administration and authoritarian regimes throughout history.

“This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now,” Trump said, promising to hunt and root out left-leaning political ideologies that oppose his agenda.

Nebraska Representative Don Bacon, however, joined Tillis in pushing back. Bacon told NBC News that he wished Trump would focus on bringing the country back together in the aftermath of Kirk’s murder, rather than continue to tear it apart.

“But he’s a populist, and populists dwell on anger,” Bacon said.

In their fury, Republicans have leveraged Kirk’s murder as evidence that they are political victims—despite the fact that they currently hold the majority of power in every branch of government—all while ignoring the reality that political violence is a bipartisan issue that has also taken the lives of several prominent Democrats recently.

“I have to remind people, we had Democrats killed in Minnesota too, right?” Bacon added, referring to Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, both of whom were fatally shot in June by a Trump supporter.

President Donald Trump inexplicably claimed that Missouri’s 2024 general election had been rigged, using that falsehood as an excuse to try to convince state Republicans to redistrict.

Writing on X Thursday, Missouri Times editor Jake Kroesen said that during a meeting of Missouri state Senate Republicans the day before, Governor Mike Kehoe had called in with a surprising guest: the president of the United States.

And Trump had a mission: convince the lawmakers to pass the state’s newly gerrymandered congressional map that would erase the Democratic seat in Kansas City.

Trump ranted to lawmakers about how popular he was for about 20 minutes, reciting inflated poll numbers and claiming he could even win a third term in office.

“Trump reportedly told Senators that polling data he has seen shows he is more popular than Reagan,” Kroesen wrote. “He added that his Missouri numbers in 2024 were lower than he had anticipated and claimed the numbers were possibly rigged.”

Trump then told lawmakers he “needed their help securing another seat to maintain control of the House.”

When Trump left the call, Kehoe reportedly said, “See how hard it is to say no to him?”

In 2024, Trump won nearly 59 percent of the vote in Missouri with 1,751,027 votes, beating out Democratic challenger Kamala Harris by more than 550,000 votes. Still, he suggested that the election had been rigged in a state he’d handily won.

Trump’s efforts to personally bully state lawmakers into gerrymandering district maps betray his desperation for Republicans to keep control of the House and Senate in the upcoming midterm elections.

President Donald Trump told the country that his federal crackdown on Washington, D.C. would focus on ridding the streets of violent crime, theft, and gang violence.

In reality, that effort has been an extension of his deportation campaign, as a whopping 40 percent of arrests made since the occupation have to do with immigration, according to recent data collected by The Associated Press.

The Trump administration says that it’s arrested more than 2,300 people: around 12 for homicide suspicion, 20 for alleged gang membership, and a few hundred for drug-related crimes. But more than 940 people have been arrested by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, more than any of the aforementioned categories.

While the Trump administration claims that deportation and violent crime go hand in hand, it’s hard to see how snatching UberEats drivers off their scooters midroute, harassing anyone who looks Latino at checkpoints, and forcing street vendors to stay inside out of fear helps curtail violent crime.

The president said he was going to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor, and worse,” after the

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