It’s hard to overstate just how much the conservative activist Charlie Kirk felt like family to many in Donald Trump’s inner circle, and to the president himself.
Kirk was close friends with Vice President J. D. Vance and with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., regularly texting on small-group threads with them and a coterie of young male aides and allies. He was a frequent and welcome presence at the White House and at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club. And his conservative youth organization, Turning Point USA, helped elect Trump in 2024.
By early this evening—after the visceral, gutting visuals of Kirk, 31, being shot in the neck during an event on a Utah college campus, followed by the sudden, jarring news that he had died—the mood at the White House was, unsurprisingly, funereal. In the West Wing, young aides, some red-eyed, others grim-faced, watched the TVs, all of which were sharing images of their friend and news of his death.
Just after 5 p.m. EDT, the press corps quietly filed out of the briefing room and onto Pebble Beach, the area just off the North Lawn. A short time later, a groundskeeper emerged and, using a metal key, hand-cranked the flag in front of the White House to half-staff; five minutes later, he and another man appeared on the roof of the building, performing the same ritual there.
Throughout the day, Trump weighed in several times as he watched the coverage of the shooting on television and spoke with aides. “He’s not doing well,” he told a New York Post reporter, who’d gotten him on the phone. “It looks very bad.” When the reporter asked how Trump himself was feeling, the president showed a measure of vulnerability. “Not good,” he replied. “He was a very, very good friend of mine, and he was a tremendous person.” Later, in a series of social-media posts, Trump called on the nation to “pray” for Kirk, and then announced his death. “He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me,” he wrote, “and now, he is no longer with us.”
Trump Jr. weighed in too: “I love you brother.” In a second, longer social-media post, he described Kirk as not “just a friend—he was like a little brother to me.” A person close to Trump Jr. told us that he was “shattered” by the death. (MAGA world and Trump’s inner circle were hardly the only ones to express their sadness over Kirk’s assassination; throughout the day, prominent Democrats—all three living former presidents, members of Congress, podcast hosts, influencers—weighed in with expressions of grief and calls against political violence.)
Earlier in the day, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had flown to Chicago on a government Boeing 737 for a press conference in the suburbs. The trip was a celebratory one, the mood upbeat, until the news started circulating right after takeoff on their return flight to Washington, D.C., as chicken quesadillas were being handed around. The flight had good Wi-Fi, so everyone aboard could watch the video of the shooting as it emerged on social media during the flight back. Kennedy dictated his statement—“We love you, Charlie Kirk; praying for you”—mid-flight to an aide. After the plane landed, Bondi exited quickly, out of sight of reporters.
By the evening, there was still no reliable information on the perpetrator. Two initial suspects were released, and the shooter is believed to remain at large. Still, Trump blamed “radical-left political violence” in a late-night address from behind the Resolute desk.
Kirk was one of the most influential unelected people in America. He was not just a friend of the president’s family and a confidant to multiple Cabinet officials, but also an authority for millions of young people who flocked to his events and tuned in to his podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show. For Trump supporters, he was a crucial interpreter not just of politics but also of faith and family, a William F. Buckley Jr. updated for MAGA world.
Tapped as a teenager by Republican megadonors eager to create a unified conservative youth movement, Kirk delivered spectacularly on their investment. Turning Point USA remade MAGA for a younger generation, piercing the party’s stuffy image and taking over online turf once claimed by Democrats. Kirk was a tireless Trump evangelist, credited in MAGA circles for helping steer young voters—particularly white men—to the president. Trump regularly appeared at Kirk’s conferences, including one in Arizona just after his 2024 victory.
The president loved Kirk’s at-times-confrontational appearances at college campuses, all dutifully recorded on social media. Persistently, Kirk raised the alarm about right-wing bugbears such as critical race theory and transgender rights. In a booklet distributed to donors in 2022, to mark Turning Point’s 10-year anniversary, Kirk wrote, “Turning Point USA’s commitment to playing offense with a sense of urgency over the past decade has allowed us to FIGHT and WIN the American Culture War.” The booklet, titled Warrior Report, describes the victories that Kirk notched—dominating social media, dictating the terms of political debate, and deploying a 500,000-strong corps of campus activists to advocate for conservative causes.
Over time, Turning Point’s influence came to eclipse that of the GOP establishment. The MAGA movement that twice elected Trump is inconceivable without Turning Point, a vital instrument for conservatives seeking office at every level, from the school board to the state house to the White House. Matt Gaetz, the former Florida congressman and Trump’s first pick for attorney general, told us in 2022 that he wanted to see Kirk take the helm of the Republican National Committee. “He’s the most energetic organizer in our movement,” Gaetz said. In recent years, others speculated about Kirk possibly running for governor of Arizona, where he resided with his wife and two children. But he stayed put. He had more influence where he was.
Kirk was raised in the Chicago suburbs—his father was an architect whose firm planned Trump Tower, in Manhattan, and his mother was a mental-health counselor. He was 18 in the spring of 2012 when he warned in a speech at Benedictine University, in Illinois, that young people were destined to drown in government debt. With a confident, clean-cut mien, he advocated for a youth movement that could counter the cries of Occupy Wall Street.
The speech captivated Bill Montgomery, a retired restaurateur and local Tea Party activist. Montgomery persuaded Kirk, who had been rejected from the United States Military Academy, to put off college and enlist instead in the conservative movement. “It sounded like the craziest idea anyone had ever had, so I said what anyone would obviously say: OK. Let’s do it,” Kirk wrote in his 2016 memoir, Time for a Turning Point: Setting a Course Toward Free Markets and Limited Government.
Kirk formed Turning Point USA in June 2012, two days after graduating from high school. The teenager and his father came up with the name, according to people who know the family. Montgomery made arrangements for the group’s first office and introduced Kirk to deep-pocketed conservative donors, while Kirk tracked down other donors on his own. In a stairwell at the 2012 Republican National Convention, he buttonholed Foster Friess, the late investment manager and GOP megadonor.
Kirk’s pitch was simple and age appropriate: His new nonprofit would rally conservative students and create a rival to the grassroots progressive group MoveOn, known for its viral media campaigns. “Big Government Sucks” was the mantra of an early Turning Point social-media campaign. A “Professor Watchlist” aimed to expose liberal instructors.
Outside of Illinois, many of Kirk’s early benefactors had roots in Texas and gravitated to Ted Cruz, the state’s firebrand senator, in the 2016 presidential primary. Kirk did the same. Turning Point was preparing to form a pro-Cruz youth PAC in 2016 but scrapped those plans when the senator’s path to the nomination narrowed, a former Turning Point employee told us. Kirk switched his allegiances to Trump but canceled plans for the youth PAC, this person said, because “Charlie wasn’t really a Trump person.”
He soon changed his mind. Kirk first met the business mogul at a small event in Chicago courtesy of a donor, according to Joe Walsh, a former congressman from the Chicago suburbs who was an early Kirk ally but split with him over his support for Trump. Kirk’s ties to Trump deepened as he got to know the candidate’s eldest son, whom he met through Texas donors, including Tommy Hicks Jr., who would later become a co-chair of the Republican National Committee.
Kirk, then 22, took a leave from Turning Point and spent the final few months of the 2016 presidential campaign traveling the country with Trump Jr.
His association with Trump turned Kirk into a household name. Turning Point USA opened an office in Mesa, Arizona, in 2016 and a new national headquarters in Phoenix in 2018. The growth of the organization can be seen above all in its fundraising. Turning Point brought in $85 million last year, according to tax filings. Millions flowed in via bidding wars among donors at winter galas that Kirk hosted at Mar-a-Lago.
Kirk spoke at all of Trump’s presidential nominating conventions, and in 2020, Turning Point and affiliated groups promised to turn out voters in Arizona and across the country. Kirk was stunned when Trump lost and, on January 5, 2021, said that Turning Point affiliates were sending 80 “buses of patriots to D.C. to fight for this president.” Kirk later pleaded the Fifth Amendment when he testified before the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
With Trump out of office, the Republican grassroots groups looked to Kirk to help carry the MAGA flame. Kirk was so closely associated with Trump by 2022 that a local Republican group in Illinois disinvited Kristi Noem, then the sitting governor of South Dakota and now Trump’s secretary of homeland security, from a dinner because Kirk was available instead. “By the time of your amazingly and highly desired acceptance to our invitation, we had already contractually committed ourselves to Charlie Kirk at a price of $30,000 plus expenses,” the chairperson of the group wrote to Noem in a letter that we obtained.
In 2024, Kirk’s groups again turned their attention to voter turnout, this time with better results. Kirk’s associates organized the rally in the Phoenix suburbs that brought Kennedy, who would later become the HHS secretary, onstage to endorse Trump, complete with pyrotechnics displays. When some of Trump’s Cabinet picks seemed in doubt, Kirk mobilized his online supporters to rally around them.
Trump is often spurred to action by events that affect people he knows. The assault against a young Department of Government Efficiency staffer (known by the nickname “Big Balls”) early last month, for instance, helped trigger the president’s deployment of the National Guard to Washington, D.C. It remains unclear just what sort of national reckoning Kirk’s murder will prompt, or how Trump will decide to respond in the coming days. “The focus is on Charlie and his family right now,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told us, staring straight ahead, when we stopped by his office to ask how everyone in the West Wing was handling the loss. “That’s the only thing that matters.”
Kirk was a frequent guest at the White House, weighing in on personnel, visiting Trump in the Oval Office, picking up talking points to take back to his audience. He had his own ideas about the MAGA agenda, opposing, for instance, U.S. involvement in Israel’s recent war with Iran. But he subordinated those views to Trump’s. After the president ordered strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, Kirk fell quiet, saying in a private message that we viewed, “It is what it is.”
Kirk was so unfailingly devoted to Trump that it sent shock waves through the White House when he briefly broke with the president over the Jeffrey Epstein files earlier this summer. But after a call from Trump, Kirk said that he would defer to the administration’s handling of the matter. That approach, even more than his incendiary statements about American culture, represents the brand of politics that Kirk practiced, and that Trump most appreciated: loyalty to the leader.
Michael Scherer, Jonathan Lemire, and Vivian Salama contributed to this report.
The post Charlie Kirk Was Trump’s Envoy to a New Generation appeared first on The Atlantic.
