About an hour before Donald J. Trump took the oath of office, Charlie Kirk was sitting in the Capitol Rotunda when he glanced down at his iPhone. What the 31-year-old conservative activist and media personality saw caused him to swallow laughter. A reporter for The Daily Beast had posted on X: “‘Charlie Kirk has better seats than every member of Congress. Tells you how little Trump thinks of Congress,’ one GOP lawmaker tells me.” Twenty minutes later, Kirk saw that a Republican senator from Indiana, Jim Banks, had posted a rebuttal of sorts: “Charlie Kirk has done more than most members of congress combined to get us to this point today.”
Kirk found himself wondering how everyone would have reacted had he taken the much-closer seat he was originally offered. Instead, because the event had been moved inside, he and his wife were seated a couple of dozen rows from the stage. Kirk lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., but brought his wife and two young children with him to stay at the sleek Salamander hotel in Washington for 10 days in January as the Trump administration took power, just as he had uprooted his family three days after the election and installed them for a two-month stay in a condo in Palm Beach, Fla., near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Like so many others in the MAGA ecosystem, Kirk is acutely attuned to wherever the Trump-related action is. The difference is that Kirk always seems to find his way to the center of the action whenever he shows up to it. During Trump’s first presidency, Kirk told me, he visited the White House “a hundred-plus” times. And within days of Trump’s victory in November, Kirk had become one of an intimate group of advisers vetting prospective White House appointees to determine whether they had shown unflagging loyalty to Trump. On more than one occasion, according to two sources with knowledge of the events, Kirk was in the room with the president-elect to discuss potential cabinet nominees.
Kirk’s proximity to Trump is especially notable when you consider that he has never held office, worked in the White House or held a campaign staff position. He draws his value elsewhere. Kirk is the head of Turning Point USA, the nation’s pre-eminent conservative youth organization, which he started when he was 18. It has chapters at more than 850 colleges that register students to vote, bring conservative speakers to campus and organize a nationwide network of right-wing student-government leaders. Turning Point’s half dozen or so annual events, featuring the biggest names on the right from Trump on down, are slick productions that draw enormous crowds.
But perhaps most important is that Kirk’s dominant voice, via his podcast and his ubiquity on social media, has earned him credibility among conservatives as a die-hard Trump devotee. He has become a close friend of the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., with whom Kirk traveled to Greenland on Jan. 7 — wearing a “Charlie”-embroidered flight jacket for the occasion — to publicize Trump’s proclaimed intent to acquire the Arctic territory. And Kirk was an early champion of JD Vance as Trump was deciding whether the senator would be his running mate.
Kirk was among a select group at Trump’s private party two days before the inauguration at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia. The night before Trump was sworn in, Turning Point hosted a black-tie gala at which some 1,500 attendees paid from $5,000 to $15,000 (with some V.I.P.s paying more) to be in the company of Trump luminaries including Vance; Trump’s nominee for director of the F.B.I., Kash Patel; and Don Jr., who described Kirk onstage as “one of the true rock stars of this movement.” The following evening, an S.U.V. ferried Kirk from one inaugural ball to the next. Two days later, he was visiting the 47th president in the White House — and again the day after that.
During the Trump years, Kirk’s two nonprofit entities, Turning Point USA and the political-action organization Turning Point Action, have grown from a total revenue of $4.3 million in 2016 to $92.4 million in 2023, a vast majority of it from donations. Through his podcast, his many speaking appearances and the books he has written, such as the 2020 best seller “The MAGA Doctrine,” Kirk has become a millionaire.
Trump, in turn, has come to view Kirk as one of his closest allies. Kirk visited Mar-a-Lago in early February 2021, during the ex-president’s nadir, and was photographed smiling alongside him. Four years later, at the president-elect’s golf-club party, Trump singled out Kirk for praise. “Charlie Kirk, what he’s done with the young people,” he said in a video I obtained. He went on to boast about his campaign’s sharp uptick among such voters. “Actually, other than Hispanic, that was probably our biggest swing. So, Charlie, I appreciate what you did.”
I asked a major donor to both Trump and Turning Point, Doug Deason, the president of a family investment management firm, how Kirk had achieved such prominence at so young an age. “People see him,” Deason replied, “and they just want to help, because he has the best of intentions and the abilities that none of us have seen in one person.” Deason expressed awe for Kirk’s oratorical prowess, for his “genius-level intelligence,” for his expertise in history and the Bible and for his acute political instincts. “Trump won,” he said. “But would he have won it without Charlie? I don’t know.”
Unmentioned by Deason was one more rare skill: Kirk’s mastery at promoting his indispensability while never appearing crassly boastful in the manner of, say, Trump himself. I saw a vivid illustration of this in December while attending Turning Point’s annual donor meeting, held at the Four Seasons Resort in Palm Beach. Kirk’s two-hour presentation that morning to several hundred moneyed conservatives in the ballroom was more like a Hollywood screenwriter’s movie pitch than the year-end financial summation it happened to be. Spoken without notes and accompanied by splashy videos (many of them juxtaposing Kirk with Trump), his message was unambiguous: Turning Point’s benefactors had gotten more than their money’s worth in the 2024 election cycle and might therefore see their way to one last donation later that evening, when they would all gather at Mar-a-Lago for a Turning Point gala.
Early in his presentation, Kirk gravely informed his donors, “I do not do hyperbole.” Coming from someone who labeled Kamala Harris “Kamala the Communist,” this remark seemed to be a tell, with other hyperbolizing likely to follow. “For the first time in my 12 years of doing this, the bad guys are finally on defense,” Kirk told his listeners, adding, “High school boys are the most conservative that they have been in the last 50 years.” He referred to exit polls showing that compared with 2020, Harris lost from 2 to 24 percentage points of support among voters under 30 in six of seven swing states, enough to steer each state to Trump. “The youth vote won Trump the White House,” Kirk declared flatly.
And who exactly had won the youth vote for Trump? Kirk’s statements at the presentation — “We registered tens of thousands of new voters and delivered the youth vote in record numbers” — encouraged only one plausible explanation. Kirk also recited a flurry of mostly inferential data to suggest that Turning Point Action was crucial to flipping Arizona and played a major role in Trump’s eight-point gain in support among Black men.
After he finished, an elderly man near the back of the room stood up and said: “You are the most extraordinary young person I have ever met. And what you’ve accomplished — you helped save us.”
At the front two tables sat several of Turning Point’s megadonors — among them the Houston software entrepreneur Mike Rydin; the Florida philanthropist Rebecca Dunn; and Stacey Feinberg, who inherited a fortune from her father, the sports agent Bob Woolf, who represented the basketball legends Julius Erving and Larry Bird. A couple of weeks after the donor presentation, while touring Turning Point’s five-building campus in Phoenix, I noticed that three of the buildings were named for those three donors.
I also realized I’d seen one of those names recently. It was in a statement from Trump emailed by his transition team. “I am pleased to announce Stacey Feinberg will be our next United States Ambassador to Luxembourg,” it read.
I texted Kirk to ask if he had played a hand in the selection of Feinberg, who was not a major player in Trump’s world but certainly was in Kirk’s. He wouldn’t say. He didn’t have to.
Over dinner in Palm Beach in December, Kirk confided the new mission he had assigned to himself: making an example out of some Republican senator who was not reflexively obedient to Trump — perhaps Joni Ernst of Iowa, Mike Rounds of South Dakota or Mike Crapo of Idaho — by backing a primary challenger.
“At least one successful primarying,” he said as he picked at his salmon. (Kirk does not drink, avoids gluten and lactose and carries a bottle of olive oil and his own branded hot sauce with him to impart flavor to otherwise austere meals.) Kirk explained that he was only talking about Republicans in safely red states who, in his view, “have taken advantage of Republican primary voters far too long. It’s an objective fact. They’re not in line with what those voters want. They’re sending money to Ukraine. They’re not strong on immigration. So this is not a veiled threat. I see no good reason not to go after Crapo or Rounds.” As Kirk saw it, “The behavioral and voting patterns of Senate Republicans would change with one successful primary.”
At the time, Trump’s first choice to be attorney general, Matt Gaetz, had already withdrawn his name from consideration when it became evident that he was unlikely to secure enough support from Senate Republicans to be confirmed. Now it was Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who seemed to be facing opposition from Ernst over his stance against women serving in combat and allegations that he had committed sexual assault.
Kirk had circulated a clip on social media of the Iowa senator, a veteran, offering supportive words to transgender individuals serving in the military, with the ominous warning: “People in Iowa have a well-funded primary challenger ready against her. Her political career is in serious jeopardy.” About six weeks later, Kirk gleefully announced on X, “BREAKING: Iowa Senator Joni Ernst has announced she is officially backing Pete Hegseth for SecDef.”
But Kirk’s goal of MAGA-fying the Senate came with an ulterior motive, which he alluded to during our dinner by bringing up Ronna McDaniel, the former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, whom Kirk played a key role in ousting. In the wake of the disappointing 2022 midterm elections, Kirk sent an email to every committee member of the R.N.C., asserting that McDaniel’s organization had underperformed while pointedly adding, “In my position, I interact with more large donors than almost anyone in the movement.”
McDaniel then committed a fatal error. She not only defended herself on Fox News Radio but also insinuated that Turning Point had failed in its mission of turning out young voters. Kirk informed his staff that they were at war. His relentless yearlong campaign against McDaniel — from attacks branding her a “loser” to encouraging Republican county chairs to withdraw their support for her — finally paid off last February, when Trump said he wanted McDaniel out; his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, became co-chair until she stepped down in January. (McDaniel did not respond to a request for comment.)
“We got Ronna, and now we want a senator,” Kirk said with a satisfied smile, all but spelling out what he also wanted: to be feared.
“I started listening to Rush when I was a junior in high school,” Kirk recalled with a nostalgic glint in his eyes, referring to Rush Limbaugh, the godfather of conservative talk radio who died of cancer in 2021. “Listening, I was like, This guy is unbelievable! Because you’re looking for someone in high school to affirm your beliefs. I would never forget: on my lunch break, from like 12:17 to 12:55, I’d listen. Just me. I went all in on Rush.”
The adolescent Charlie Kirk — a lanky high school basketball player in the affluent Chicago suburb Prospect Heights — could not possibly foresee Limbaugh befriending his future self, headlining the young man’s events and, in 2019, sending his organization a check for $1 million. Still, before Kirk had fully developed a worldview of his own, he possessed a gift for stirring the affection of older people, many of them inordinately wealthy.
In 2010, the year Kirk discovered Limbaugh, the reactionary Republican wave calling itself the Tea Party took back the House from the Democrats. Young Charlie, then a high school junior, caught the fever. In 2011, he and a classmate formed Wheeling High School Against Cookie Inflation to protest escalating prices in the school cafeteria. By early 2012, Kirk was smitten with the astringent libertarian worldview of Ron Paul and speaking at local Tea Party rallies. “Some of my best friends are liberals,” he declared at one event, adding: “They’re liberals that voted for Obama and said: ‘You know what? I’m tired of trillion-dollar deficits. I’m going to step up. I’m going to say I was wrong and join your cause.’” That year, he wrote an op-ed for Breitbart lamenting the influence of the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in Kirk’s A.P. Economics textbook.
The Breitbart screed led to an appearance on Fox News to discuss the national debt, which in turn led to a speaking gig at Benedictine University. Standing in the audience was a 71-year-old local restaurateur and Tea Party activist named Bill Montgomery. After the speech, Montgomery approached Kirk and urged him to spread his message to college campuses rather than attending college himself.
Kirk had been rejected by West Point and then accepted by Baylor University, but he was coming to wonder whether college life was for him. Kirk says his parents were not happy to hear this. His mother was a counselor at a mental-health clinic, and his father was an architect whose firm designed Trump Tower in New York. They did not envision a career in campus politicking for their son. He requested 90 days to prove them wrong.
“He was 18 going on 46,” recalled Joe Walsh, an Illinois Tea Party congressman at the time who was an early political mentor until the two became estranged over Kirk’s embrace of Trump. “And his mission, to go on college campuses and introduce the idea of free markets, was a slam dunk for getting money from old Republican farts.”
Kirk’s father came up with the name Turning Point USA, which Montgomery, the Tea Party activist, then registered in July 2012. (Montgomery remained affiliated with Turning Point until his death in 2020.) The next month, Kirk managed to score an appearance on Neil Cavuto’s Fox News show, broadcast from the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla. Kirk used the temporary convention-hall pass given to him by Fox to wander the corridors. In a stairwell, he spotted a man in a cowboy hat and recognized him as the conservative investment manager Foster Friess, whom Kirk had just read about in a Politico article about megadonors. The 18-year-old introduced himself, laughed at Friess’s folksy jokes and explained the mission of Turning Point — to be to young conservatives what the progressive organization MoveOn.org was for the left. A few days later, a $10,000 check from Friess arrived in his parents’ mailbox.
Kirk’s knack for making an indelible first impression served him well a year later, when he spoke at a local event hosted by the Job Creators Alliance, founded by the Home Depot chief executive, Bernard Marcus. In the audience was Allie Hanley, a resident of Palm Beach and the wife of the brick magnate Lee Hanley. She implored the 19-year-old speaker to come to Palm Beach and meet her circle of friends, even offering to pay for his flight and put him up in their guest bedroom. Kirk ended up staying in Palm Beach for several months. Walsh, who served on Turning Point USA’s advisory board, recalled visiting Kirk in Palm Beach during this period, at dinner with several new donors. “They treated him like an adorable puppy,” he said.
Just after the November 2014 midterms, in which the Republicans retook the Senate, Kirk spoke at one of Palm Beach’s most prestigious conservative events, the Restoration Weekend hosted by the nativist David Horowitz Freedom Center in the palatial Breakers hotel complex. Senator Jeff Sessions and his top aide, Stephen Miller — both men two years away from becoming top Trump administration appointees — were among those in attendance. So were several prominent Florida Republican donors, including Rebecca Dunn. Within a month, Turning Point would receive a profusion of six-figure donations from Dunn and others.
Kirk was, at 23, the youngest speaker at the Republican National Convention in July 2016. A California donor, Carla Sands, then put him in touch with Doug Deason, the president of a family investment management firm in Dallas with over $1 billion in assets. Just before Kirk was to fly to Dallas, Deason informed him that he had a fund-raising luncheon to attend that same day in Fort Worth and that Kirk could be his plus-one. The honoree at the event was the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump.
Kirk had yet to meet Trump. A late convert like many other Republicans, he had initially supported Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and then Senator Ted Cruz. At lunch, Kirk sat at a table with Trump but did not get a chance to have a conversation with him. The highlight of the day instead turned out to be when Deason introduced him to two other well-heeled Dallasites, Gentry Beach Jr. and Tommy Hicks Jr., both of whom happened to be close friends with another Junior, the nominee’s eldest son. The two men asked Kirk’s thoughts on how the Trump campaign could better attract young voters. Most of Kirk’s suggestions — more campus events, a more aggressive presence on social media — were standard-issue. But he added a novel thought. “The kids need to go out there and advocate,” Kirk said of Trump’s own children. “You’d have this Avengers squad of Trumps everywhere.”
Shortly after the Fort Worth event, Hicks and Beach took Kirk to Trump Tower to meet Don Jr., who told me: “I was pretty reluctant to bring on another so-called campaign expert, especially when I learned how young he was. I said, ‘We don’t need another person who doesn’t know anything — we’ve already got plenty of those.’ But within five minutes of listening to him, I said, ‘Congratulations, you’re on my team.’” Don Jr. confessed that his campaign schedule was slapdash and that he hadn’t given much thought to how to use Twitter. By the end of their meeting, the 22-year-old Kirk decided to take a three-month hiatus from Turning Point to become Don Jr.’s scheduler, social media coordinator and steady provider of diet Red Bulls.
Following Trump’s astonishing victory over Hillary Clinton, Kirk returned to duty as the MAGA movement’s campus organizer. He drew a modest $49,000 salary from Turning Point USA, still stayed in the homes of donors and still wore a shabby wardrobe, until Don Jr., Deason, Deason’s father, Beach and Hicks chipped in to buy Kirk a $10,000 gift certificate at a men’s clothing store in Trump Tower as a Christmas gift. But things were about to change.
In 2017, he experienced the frisson of a sitting president’s retweeting his 140-character outbursts. He eagerly signed on to every available Fox News slot, cognizant of the channel’s faithful viewer in the White House. At the end of the year, Kirk attended Don Jr.’s birthday party at Mar-a-Lago. There, for the first time, he felt the stare of the president, then saw his hand motion for Kirk to come sit beside him. The two spoke for 40 minutes. At the end of their conversation, the president’s son-in-law and top adviser, Jared Kushner, walked up to their table.
After Trump made the introduction, Kushner and Kirk discussed how the administration had been getting hammered by right-wing media ever since the former Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon was pushed out of his job as White House senior adviser. Kirk assured Kushner that he was well acquainted with the journalists in question and could help broker peace. Kushner told me recently that Kirk would prove himself useful in many ways. “The thing about Charlie is that he always delivers,” he said. “When I first met him, he started out with this ambitious goal of trying to explain Trumpism to the younger generation — which, back then, popular culture and the media were against. But he was willing to take that on. And the ideas he always came to us with were good ones. He was professional, easy to deal with. Nothing ever leaked to the press. He just got stuff done.”
After that evening at Mar-a-Lago, Kirk had no difficulty gaining access to the Oval Office, and his calls to Trump were regularly patched in by the White House switchboard operator. Now and again, the president called him on his cellphone. “He came to gain the trust through consistency, loyalty, intelligent commentary and building a spectacular network,” Don Jr. told me. “He earned that seat at the table.”
Still, amid the Darwinian maneuvering in the Trump orbit, Kirk’s growing influence seemed to escape notice. “I was known as the youth guy,” he told me with evident amusement. “I was seen as harmless. So no one attacked me.”
By this time, Turning Point was well on its way to muscling aside the pre-existing conservative youth groups, Young America’s Foundation (started by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1960) and Young Americans for Liberty (founded by Students for Ron Paul in 2008). The memberships of the older organizations were once proudly curated — bow-tied intellectuals for Y.A.F., libertarians for Y.A.L. — but they were seeking relevancy in the new zeitgeist of the right. Y.A.F. sponsored provocative speeches on campuses by conservative personalities like Ann Coulter and Ben Shapiro, while a member of a Y.A.L. chapter at Iowa State University invited the white supremacist Nick Fuentes to speak on campus in 2018. Kirk was one step ahead of them: Turning Point had become an advocacy arm for Trump.
Kirk’s competition did not recede quietly. In 2017, the Y.A.L. chairman, Jeff Frazee, circulated an email in which he accused Turning Point of stealing a Y.A.L. chapter’s email list. The following year, Y.A.F.’s general counsel, Kimberly Begg, wrote a 12-page memo detailing instances where Turning Point had exaggerated its reach on college campuses. (Kirk denied these claims. Frazee did not respond to an email seeking comment. Begg, in an email, would not address her earlier assertions but instead praised “the great work of TPUSA.”)
Turning Point, meanwhile, was playing an entirely different game on college campuses. While other conservative youth groups had contented themselves with offering up celebrity speakers, Kirk’s group was training and even funding student-government candidates, as a kind of PAC for youngsters. While its predecessors merely scolded liberalism in academia, Turning Point established Professor Watchlist, a project to expose “radical” academics, including those who were critical of Turning Point. And where Y.A.L. and Y.A.F. might host happy hours, Turning Point threw high-production national gatherings raucous enough to draw a police response.
Kirk had arrived at a time when #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter were met with Trump’s own denial of sexual assault and porn-star-payoff allegations and his revanchist defense of Confederate statues. A post-truth era of performative hyperbole was unfolding. At the end of 2017, with the help of Deason and a few other donors, Kirk hired Turning Point’s first breakout star, Candace Owens, a controversial Black conservative who had gained notoriety for her YouTube comments playing down the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., that year. (Owens left Turning Point in 2019, amid an uproar over her comments seeming to defend Hitler, for a more lucrative deal with Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire. She left The Daily Wire last year following a string of antisemitic comments. Both Owens and Shapiro continue to be featured speakers at Turning Point events; The Daily Wire is distributing a documentary produced by Turning Point USA called “Identity Crisis,” about what it refers to as gender ideology.)
But Kirk was fast becoming a celebrity in his own right — an heir to Limbaugh, his staccato monologues casting liberal views as evil and savaging sacred icons like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (“a bad guy”) and the Civil Rights Act (“a mistake”). “I think Charlie made his transition when he became more of a media figure rather than just a college-campus guy,” said the Republican political consultant and Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz, who first came to know Kirk in 2014. “He developed a connection with his audience that very few people in the media have. It’s given him tremendous power.”
“When Foster Friess first started going on about this kid Charlie Kirk who hadn’t gone to college and was so incredibly brilliant, I remember thinking, Well, Foster got scammed by some smart-talking kid,” Tucker Carlson told me during a recent phone conversation. “The reason I’m such a fan of Charlie’s is that I was proven wrong. It’s almost a paradox how young people tend to be more ossified than older people in their thinking, less willing to be disabused of their illusions. But I’ve seen Charlie’s willingness to reassess his assumptions, and that’s, like, amazing to me.”
Carlson was mainly referring to Kirk’s harsh reappraisal of the Iraq war and the national-security state. But the same tendency applies to Kirk’s assessment of religion’s role in American politics. For years, he was reticent on the subject. That changed, he told me, during the pandemic lockdowns — “the stupidest thing ever,” in his view. He was equally appalled by the refusal by most church leaders to lead the charge against lockdowns. “That really got me asking the question: What is the church? What is its role? And it brought me on a journey, a very serious period of studying our first principles, our beliefs.”
Kirk spent the lockdowns and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Phoenix as a guest of the parents of his future wife, Erika Frantzve, a former Miss Arizona who now hosts a podcast and has a line of faith-themed streetwear. “I did a lot of reading on postmodernism,” he recalled. “And I started realizing that what was happening was a slow-motion cultural revolution fulfilling the hopes and ambitions of Angela Davis, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. This was their contention, that in order to usher in something new, this culture must be incinerated. That, I think, is a very objective reading of it. What they were saying was actually the same thing a religious person would say, that everyone lives by some agreed-upon code of conduct. The question is: What code? And by what inheritance do we acknowledge what is good and evil, what is right and wrong?”
The preferred code, Kirk decided, was the canon of Western values that — as he learned from reading the British historian Tom Holland — had their roots in Christianity. Kirk told me he then turned to the writings of Dr. Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, where Kirk had been taking online courses. From Arnn’s 2012 book, “The Founders’ Key,” Kirk concluded “that Western Christian morality gave us these two documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” While expressing great admiration for Kirk as “a serious-minded person” who “built a great thing,” Arnn told me that this was a slight misrepresentation of his view. Thomas Jefferson, he pointed out, “was probably not an orthodox Christian” and was more influenced in his writing by the laws of nature than by the notion of a Christian God.
A third intellectual, the conservative author Christopher Caldwell, supplied Kirk’s final eye-opener. “I take the Caldwellian view, from his book ‘The Age of Entitlement,’” Kirk told me, “that we went through a new founding in the ’60s and that the Civil Rights Act has actually superseded the U.S. Constitution as its reference point. In fact, I bet if you polled Americans, most of them would have more reverence for the Civil Rights Act than the Constitution. I could be wrong,” he added, “but I think I’m right.”
He went on. “Covid for me was a lot of thinking and reading time, while the whole civilization was collapsing. And I saw the wokies appealing to a moral order that they said was true and good. And I said, Well, we think ours is.”
Kirk emerged from the lockdowns a Christian nationalist culture warrior determined to fuse his new ideology with MAGA populism. In 2021, he founded Turning Point USA Faith, whose stated mission was “empowering Christians to put their faith into action,” in part by encouraging pastors “to join in civic, social and cultural discussions.”
That February, he became one of the first conservative leaders to see the political potential in JD Vance. The extent of Kirk’s role in Vance’s ascent, which has not been previously reported, was especially significant because of the Ohio Senate candidate’s earlier view of Trump as an “idiot” and an American version of Hitler. Kirk texted Don Jr.’s political adviser, Andy Surabian, “Andy, I’m telling you, he’s had a conversion, he’s one of us.”
Kirk lent his imprimatur by hosting Vance on his podcast, where Vance suggested that people without children should pay higher taxes than parents. (“I totally agree,” Kirk replied.) That September, Kirk’s political arm, Turning Point Action, officially endorsed Vance. Surabian, meanwhile, took Kirk’s recommendation to Don Jr., who was a fan of Vance’s best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” Don Jr. befriended Vance, while Surabian became a senior campaign adviser. Two weeks before the Ohio primary in April 2022, Trump himself endorsed Vance, ensuring his victory.
“There were few louder voices constantly advocating for JD down in Mar-a-Lago than Charlie,” Surabian said. “His support was particularly important because he’s very much viewed by Team Trump as an avatar for where the MAGA base is.”
Two years later, Kirk was again in Trump’s ear talking up Vance — this time as his optimal running mate. As Kirk recalled to me: “I saw JD as someone who would crush it with high-propensity suburban Republicans. People in Scottsdale, Ariz., or Highland Park in Dallas, or Buckhead in Atlanta. They read The Journal. They hate the left. They don’t like Trump, but they like his policies. We’re talking about a couple hundred thousand voters that could determine the future of the election.”
Kirk pitched the 39-year-old Ohio senator to Trump as a fresh-faced MAGA torchbearer who would serve as “a convert on the ticket,” uniquely positioned to sway Trump skeptics since Vance had been one himself. “My father’s always going to come to his conclusions,” Don Jr. said, “but Charlie and Tucker and I and a few others went all in for JD.”
Trump’s decision to select Vance is one for which Kirk has been careful not to claim credit. To maximize his influence on the 2024 election, Kirk sought territory all his own. For some time, his digital team had been advising him to make full use of TikTok, the social platform owned by the Chinese government and known for its punchy video snippets. Kirk was hesitant. A TikTok account run by Turning Point staff members had been taken down more than once for violating community standards, and he refused to engage in self-censorship. But in early 2024, as legislators on both sides of the aisle contemplated a ban on TikTok, Kirk sensed that he had leverage.
Last March, he posted on X: “TikTok says it’s not a Chinese propaganda arm and shouldn’t be banned by the U.S. Congress. Well, let’s put it to a test. I am going to make another attempt at starting an official Charlie Kirk TikTok account. We’ve been kicked off the platform several times even while maintaining and growing successful channels across all other social media. If the account thrives without garbage bans, strikes, and throttling I will consider changing my position on the platform.”
What happened next has not been previously reported. Within days of posting his offer, Kirk received a call from Tony Sayegh, a former Trump administration Treasury official who was now lobbying for a group that represented the major TikTok investor ByteDance. “We want to prove to you that we’re for free speech,” Sayegh recalled telling him. After their conversation, Kirk’s digital team began to meet over Zoom with TikTok officials, who described how to avoid A.I.-generated content moderation.
Kirk’s TikTok account, @RealCharlieKirk, went up in April. Almost immediately, he realized that the engagement numbers eclipsed those on Instagram. Kirk began to record videos on campuses for a series titled “You’ve Been Brainwashed,” flying from one to the next on a private plane leased by his donors. He engaged in rapid-fire debates with liberal students 10 years younger than him, demanding that they answer questions like “Do you think men can give birth?” and, regarding Harris, “What’s her greatest accomplishment as vice president?”
The debate snippets went viral, some garnering as many as 50 million views, according to TikTok data. Kirk’s account would end up drawing more followers than the accounts of Fox News, Carlson, Vance and the Harris campaign. According to a national survey done by TikTok, the platform’s users under 30 who voted for Trump trusted Kirk more than any other individual. Still, the viewers were not just young voters. Kirk began to realize this in June, when, he says, Black concession workers at Turning Point’s three-day event in Detroit, the People’s Convention, approached him and asked to take selfies, saying they had seen him on TikTok. It was a revelation of which Washington consultants and even Kirk’s own digital team was unaware: The platform made famous by Taylor Swift fans was also a favorite of the working class.
But Kirk’s most audacious move of the 2024 cycle was one that was well out of his traditional youth lane. That summer, he announced that Turning Point Action would invest $108 million in a Chase the Vote program aimed at turning out low-propensity Republican-leaning voters — those who liked Trump but hadn’t always gotten around to voting for him, or voting at all — in the battleground states Arizona and Wisconsin. Central to the effort would be encouraging early voting.
This amounted to an about-face for Kirk. When I first heard him speak in person at a Republican fund-raiser in Goodyear, Ariz., before the 2022 midterms, he equated the practice with fraud. “And look, I’m going to go out on a limb,” he told his audience. “If we don’t get declared as the winner this November, I will go back and I’ll say it’s because the moderates in the state did not ban mass mail-in voting and they did not ban the drop boxes.”
Kirk learned the hard way from that election, in which his entire slate of far-right statewide candidates was defeated, not to discourage any legal method of voting. Many other conservative leaders remained skeptical of voting by mail and early voting in general.
In the end, according to data published by The Times, Kirk was onto something: Roughly 30,000 Arizona Republicans who hadn’t voted since at least 2018 did so in 2024, about 10,000 more than the same type of voters who cast their ballots for Harris. This margin by itself all but closed Trump’s shortfall in 2020 of 10,457 votes.
At the donor presentation, Kirk claimed that Turning Point Action had identified, contacted and ultimately persuaded 220,000 Arizona voters to cast their ballots. “Look at the numbers,” he told his donors by way of comparing Trump’s totals in 2020 with those of 2024. “You fall 10,000 votes short. You win by 187,000. And we chase 220,000. It just about fits, right?”
I spoke with several Arizona Republican election officials and consultants who found Kirk’s deductive leap to be self-aggrandizing in the extreme. Low-propensity voter chasing wasn’t a new concept. It was used to successful effect in 2020, well before Turning Point Action began playing a role in Arizona turnout. The officials listed several organizations — the R.N.C., the National Republican Congressional Committee, Elon Musk’s America PAC and American Majority — that were all engaged in Arizona ballot-chasing in 2024.
For that matter, said Shelby Busch, the vice chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party, “the counties and state party played a critical role in turning out the vote. In my county, we had the state’s voting data, and we built our own operation to turn out voters who hadn’t voted in 2022. I can’t speak to what Turning Point did or didn’t do, because they wouldn’t coordinate with us. But to suggest they were solely responsible discredits thousands of precinct committee persons who worked very hard on this election.”
Moreover, in deep-red Yavapai County, the election recorder, Michelle Burchill, told me that after the election, her office received hundreds of calls from voters who had been erroneously told by Turning Point Action door-knockers that their mail-in ballot hadn’t been counted and that they needed to have their ballot cured. When a Turning Point Action worker handed Burchill a list of 39 such voters, the election recorder quickly determined that 38 of their ballots had been legitimately invalidated because they had already been cast early and in person.
“It was a waste of our time, the voters’ time and really of Turning Point’s time,” Burchill told me. “Turning Point is very popular here in Arizona. I think their resources could have been better used in other areas.”
The day after the inauguration, Kirk met me in the lobby of the Salamander hotel for a late lunch. A few aides hovered around him while Monica Crowley, a former Fox News contributor now awaiting confirmation as a senior State Department official, chatted on her cellphone at a nearby table. Kirk was palpably wired. He apologized for descending into clichés like “surreal” and “incredibly satisfying” in an effort to describe his hours in the Capitol Rotunda for the inauguration. Things would only get more discombobulating in the days to come: a return to the Oval Office, Turning Point’s obtaining White House press credentials, Kirk’s riding aboard Air Force Two with his friend the vice president. For the first time since I met him, Kirk seemed to be about what one expects of a 31-year-old who has suddenly found himself ringside to the unfolding of his imagined “American renaissance.”
In our previous conversations, Kirk hinted that Turning Point’s success owed at least as much to its aesthetic appeal as it did its ideological aims. Its events were fun. Its participants were attractive. The Democrats’ royalty — the Kennedys, Obama — were cool. Kirk wanted that for the conservative movement. I thought about this at his preinaugural gala as he introduced the event’s two main acts: Kid Rock, the 54-year-old metal rapper and Trump enthusiast, and a remodeled version of the ’70s-era disco group the Village People, “President Trump’s favorite band,” as Kirk described them onstage.
In the end, Taylor Swift and Cardi B’s candidate had lost. But, I asked Kirk in the Salamander dining room, was Kirk really content just to create a parallel universe in which conservatives subsisted off whatever cool they could muster? Or was it his aim to seize the entire culture and bend it to conservatism’s will?
“We want to transform the culture,” Kirk immediately replied.
“How?” I asked. “Beyond just electing new leaders, I mean.”
“I mean,” he said, with a vague but expansive gesture, “more high school chapters, more college chapters. Obviously digital social media. The podcast plays a big role in that. The influencer kind of army.”
Sitting up straighter, he went on. “And beyond that, I think a lot of it’s going to be happening organically. Like, to have every major tech C.E.O. standing up behind President Trump. Yes, President Trump wanted them there. But they also wanted to be there, too. And that is a signal! I mean, you had Apple, TikTok, Amazon, Google, Meta, Elon, all the major communication companies. And they were giving tacit approval of this new administration. Giving standing ovations. It’s politics now influencing culture.”
Weren’t these guys really just currying favor so that Trump didn’t punish everyone but Musk for being late to the party?
“Of course that’s right,” he said. “Do I think they’re, like, adherents to MAGA? No, that’s not the thing. Though I think actually some of those tech C.E.O.s are more right-wing than they would let on.”
Regardless, there they were — just like the Republican senators would soon be there to confirm Trump’s nominees, under threat of being primaried by Turning Point Action. And, Kirk said, “one of the biggest complaints we’ve always had as conservatives — and it was warranted — is: Give us a fair shot on your platforms, and we’ll win the culture.”
He leaned back in his chair with a faint smile. “Well,” he said, “we were right.”
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