President Trump is seemingly endorsing Attorney General Pam Bondi’s assertion on Monday that the Department of Justice can prosecute individuals for “hate speech” in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. He said on Tuesday that there’s a chance she could even go after an ABC News journalist. 

The conservative commentariat was enraged Monday after Ms. Bondi claimed that the justice department “will absolutely target” and “go after” anyone who is espousing “hate speech.” Despite his supporters’ outrage, Mr. Trump seemed fine with his attorney general’s claims. 

Mr. Trump was asked by a reporter about Ms. Bondi’s comments on Tuesday morning. 

“She’ll probably go after people like you,” Mr. Trump said to ABC News’s Jonathan Karl as he was leaving the White House for his trip to the United Kingdom. “Because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart.”

“Maybe they’ll come after ABC,” Mr. Trump said. “ABC paid me $16 million recently for a form of hate speech. Your company paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech, so maybe they’ll have to go after you.”

After Ms. Bondi received a substantial amount of blowback for her remarks, she attempted to walk them back. She now claims that the DOJ would only go after those whose speech “crosses the line into threats of violence.” 

“It’s a crime,” she wrote on X of those who make threats. “For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over.”

First Amendment advocates, lawmakers, and conservative commentators have had their knives out for Ms. Bondi ever since she claimed in a July memorandum that there were no Epstein files left to be released. Her remarks about “hate speech” are just the latest fodder for some corners of the MAGA world to deride her. 

“‘Hate speech’ is a term used by those in power to describe thoughts they don’t want spoken. It’s antithetical to the First Amendment,” Congressman Thomas Massie, a libertarian-leaning conservative, said on Tuesday morning. 

“‘Hate’ speech — as even a concept — is a tool of leftists and tyrants … certainly not conservatives,” Congressman Chip Roy said on Tuesday without naming Ms. Bondi. 

Mr. Trump’s online base of supporters have spent much of the last week going after those who have celebrated or refused to condemn the Kirk assassination. Mr. Trump’s homeland security advisor, Stephen Miller, says White House staff are looking at ways to “uproot and dismantle” non-governmental networks that he believes are responsible for “organized riots, the organized street violence, [and] the organized campaigns of dehumanization,” among other things. 

In Congress, conservatives are trying to find ways to give the president the statutory authority to defund any institution that employs individuals who are celebrating Kirk’s death. Congressman Derrick Van Order has introduced a bill to prohibit “federal funding for entities that employ individuals who condone and celebrate political violence and domestic terrorism,” as currently defined by federal law. 

Congresswoman Nancy Mace is asking the education secretary, Linda McMahon, to strip federal funding from “any elementary, secondary, and post-secondary educational institution, which fails to take administrative action or discipline, to the maximum extent allowable by law, against any personnel who choose to justify political violence or celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk.”