You believe correctly. The only stakeholder that benefits from Kirk’s death is the GOP. They picked a guy with a huge and blindly devout following, made up of mostly young men might I add, to turn into a martyr. The Trump admin has been sowing the seeds for months, painting the left as “the enemy within”. Now they’ve lit the fuse for further political violence by making right-wingers feel justified by attacking the “violent enemy”
They’ve also been testing to see how much they can get away with using the National Guard as law enforcement in blue cities. And testing to see how many people they can yank off the side of the street before anyone will do anything. This is all straight out of the authoritarian playbook.