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Trump was shot a year and a half ago, Kirk was shot a few months ago. Those high profile cases of leftist violence are just the tip of the iceberg. Antifa is a real impediment for right wing politics in the US. The professional activists are not going to stop. These are the same people who rioted in 2020. Getting rid of them is a strategic victory and the price is a news story that will live for a new cycle.
The most strategic thing Trump could do would be to get the ring leaders locked up. There are plenty of narcotics related charges that could be used on antifa types. Rioting creates opportunities to arrest people, to search their houses and find things.
I will grant you the Kirk shooter being a leftist (a trans activist, though raised as a Mormon (and gun enthusiast), IIRC).
Calling the Trump shooter a leftist is a bit of a stretch. As he had made bomb threats before I would rather categorize him as "crazy" than "central leftist".
My feeling was that the rioting was mostly done by various opportunistic criminals, while the SJ activists mostly stood on the sidelines and celebrated their empowerment or something. I would be extremely surprised if either of two people recently killed by ICE was credibly implicated in committing felonies during the BLM riots.
I think you are confused. There is no Antifa version of Bin Laden who decided that agent Crooks should go forward with trying to shoot Trump, or who assigned Goods to "hampering ICE" duty on the day she was shot.
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IMO it'd be to push Congress for a bill to mandate a minimal level of local/state cooperation with federal immigration authorities in exchange for federal funding eligibility, and in return offering a stand down of current operations. I don't see another real offramp available to the right, here: they can't practically expect to focus so exclusively on Minnesota indefinitely.
What other practical political goal are they trying to achieve while they're there burning political capital like The Joker burns piles of cash?
Interesting but how does that survive anti commandeering? You would need to tie things like federal spending grants but that becomes tricky where the official policy is “help ICE” but you allow deviation from policy.
Would a straight quid pro quo tying state/local law enforcement cooperation with federal funding to those agencies run afoul of that? We manage to tie highway funding to highway drunk driving laws.
Alternatively, mandatory E-Verify, but the lack of interest there hints in a deep unseriousness about the issue overall.
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