Editor's note: This excerpt is from a Thomas B. Edsall Op-Ed in the New York Times.

The Trump administration and its MAGA allies have abandoned all pretense of supporting free speech in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, using the killing to justify an accelerating drive to criminalize criticism of the president, intimidate speakers on the left and forcibly shift public discourse to the right…

Trump’s favorability ratings fell from 50.5 percent during his first week in office this year to 46.1 percent on Sept. 22, but that has not deterred him. Just the opposite: He, his vice president, his aides and his cabinet members initiate daily attacks on the left — some illegal and some unfounded but all damaging and costly…

For Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., the crucial factor pushing the administration to take extreme steps is the belief on both left and right that political outcomes have life-or-death consequences:

"When people perceive politics as existential, they believe the country will never be the same, in a fundamental way, if the other side prevails. The other side is not merely the opposition but an existential threat and not just in the political realm but even at the personal level.

For parts of the right, the Charlie Kirk assassination is going to further fuel that belief. Politics becomes totalizing. All the different institutional domains of a liberal society are swept into the maws of the political: the entertainment sphere, the universities and even elementary education, the private sector (such as law firms), civil society and much else. There is no limit to the political."

Read the full piece by Thomas B. Edsall here.