The hideous scene of Charlie Kirk’s assassination on a college stage in Utah on Wednesday — the jerking motion of his body when the bullet struck, the gush of blood spilling from the wound in his neck — immediately brought to mind other indelible instances of violence captured on video, moments that, without parsing moral equivalences, horrified legions of viewers and carried consequences extending far beyond the killers and the killed. The beheading of Daniel Pearl. The slow ebbing of life from George Floyd. The victims who jumped to their deaths on Sept. 11, stealing one last breath from a world on fire.
Yet the main memory that Kirk’s killing elicited, at least for me, was of a death averted. When Donald Trump fortuitously turned his head to look at a chart of immigration statistics at a rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13, 2024, he bypassed the fate that befell Kirk, his friend and supporter.
I do not believe that one man was fated to live and another to die; the outcomes in these shootings could just as well have been reversed, or simply different. One bullet grazed a candidate’s ear; another pierced an activist’s neck. On such randomness are lives decided, martyrs created and histories upended.
Trump’s survival morphed into political iconography — the fist in the air, the flag overhead, the leader looming above his protectors, the admonition to “fight, fight, fight!” capturing both a personality and a movement. The moment may well have helped Trump wrest back the presidency. He was held up as the “incarnation of defiance,” one who believed his life was saved by God so that America, too, could live.
I never met Charlie Kirk, but I was aware of the appeal he held among young conservatives — The Times branded him “the youth whisperer of the American right” — and of the influence of Turning Point USA, the activist organization and get-out-the-vote juggernaut that he helped start at age 18. I knew Kirk had become something of a MAGA kingmaker, supporting the rise of JD Vance and the confirmation of Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense.
But my main sense of the man came through two forms: his 2020 book “The MAGA Doctrine,” and the proliferation of online videos of Kirk in action, as he “destroys” or “owns” some hapless collegiate progressive.
No doubt, lib-owning was essential to his public persona. A 2018 profile of Kirk in the late great Weekly Standard said that “political schadenfreude is a big part of the TPUSA playbook.” The author, Adam Rubenstein, called this style “the triumph of the put-down as political principle.”
In the same profile, however, Kirk pointed toward another aspect of his project. He wanted to write a book exploring essential political questions. “What does the future of the Republican Party look like? What are the ideas behind it? What are some of the philosophical, doctrinal defenses of the Trump agenda?”
Less than two years later, Kirk published “The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas that Will Win the Future.” The book is unapologetically Trumpy, starting with its campy cover image of a grinning president embracing the Stars and Stripes. In its pages, Kirk decried Republicans and Democrats as “a two-party cartel, entrenched and self-serving,” praised Americans as a “rebellious” people who reject intrusive governments and media elites, and hailed Trump as the “great disruptor” and “great agitator” that the age requires.
As political treatises go, it was not a groundbreaking work. Kirk name-checked intellectual luminaries of the past (such as Edmund Burke and Milton Friedman) and some slightly less luminous thinkers of the present (such as Victor Davis Hanson), and also showcased his close relationship to the Trump family (especially Don Jr.). In his summing up of the MAGA worldview, Kirk stressed small government, individual liberty and skepticism of authority — a somewhat conventional set of conservative priorities compared with the directions Trump would take. But Kirk built in some flexibility, describing the movement as a “new sensibility that is partly conservative, partly libertarian, partly populist, partly nationalist, and yet not just an old-fashioned, textbook case of any of these strains of thought.”
Like many political manifestoes, the book ticked multiple boxes: It was MAGA enough to reaffirm Kirk as a Trumpworld insider in good standing, but it was also close enough to standard conservatism that its author could survive should the movement, and its leader, fade away. In this sense, “The MAGA Doctrine” could be MAGA yet not entirely doctrinaire.
But more than wrestling with high principles, the book makes clear Kirk’s distinctive skill set. He was a master at making Trumpism go down smoothly, rendering it logical, obvious, even comforting. In his telling, Trump is no aspiring strongman, but simply a leader striving for “the restoration of citizen government.” On foreign policy, Kirk wrote, Trump is not isolationist; he is just “trusting more of the world to solve their own problems.” Trump is not trying to encroach on the free-speech rights of the news media or academia; he’s merely pointing out where the threats to open expression really come from. (And he defends the image of Trump hugging Old Glory. “It sure beats burning the flag,” Kirk wrote.)
Kirk was MAGA’s secretary of explaining stuff.
He accomplished this via books and podcasts but, most of all, in person, appearing in places such as Utah Valley University, where he was shot during the kickoff event of his fall “American Comeback Tour.” Kirk was committed to his mission as an itinerant proselytizer — scheduled stops included Colorado, Minnesota, Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, Indiana, Louisiana and Mississippi — and he excelled in that role, debating students in what he called “prove me wrong” sessions.
Watching videos of Kirk’s exchanges, I’m conflicted about their utility. At times they seem less about persuasion than about making an opponent look foolish, more intent on provocation than mutual comprehension. But at least Kirk was there, showing up, engaging directly and repeatedly with critics and ideological adversaries — a decreasingly common practice in an increasingly polarized country.
Rubenstein, the author of the 2018 profile, wrote this week that Kirk did not argue with liberals “to make himself feel smart,” but that he ventured into “hostile territory” because he liked to debate big ideas. Indeed, he spent his final hours doing what he genuinely seemed to enjoy: arguing, sparring and affirming his worldview. “Students on campuses all over America are being taught to be ashamed of America, but it makes sense to be proud,” Kirk wrote in “The MAGA Doctrine.”
Kirk’s sense of pride could veer into reckless, conspiratorial directions; he was outspoken in questioning the results of the 2020 election, for example, and he helped spread rumors about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, in 2024. But it is clear that Trump’s victory last year was enabled in part by a rightward swing among young voters, the kind of voters that Kirk inspired, fresh foot soldiers for a movement that shows few signs of slowing down.
“The slogan Make America Great Again may use the past as the benchmark for greatness, but we are not advocating a return to midcentury America,” Kirk wrote in his 2020 book. The movement is “forward-thinking,” he explained, and its future will transcend Trump himself: “The MAGA Doctrine is larger than one man, however large he lives.”
If MAGA is forward-looking, what does it imagine for its hereafter? I imagine that Kirk, only 31 years old at the time of his death, would have played a meaningful role in interpreting and shaping that future, and in building support for it, too. Where he might have tried to take the movement is now impossible to know. That personal influence is lost to us and to the movement itself.
On Wednesday evening, Trump posted a video statement from the Oval Office, expressing his “grief and anger” at Kirk’s slaying and calling him “a martyr for truth and freedom.” The president listed recent instances of political violence — omitting any that targeted Democratic politicians — and blamed the “radical left” for the mayhem. “Violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible,” he said, with no evidence of self-awareness.
Other politicians have responded to the tragedy by asserting, as well-meaning politicians often do, that there is no place for political violence in America. Alas, there has long been room for it here. The assassination of Charles James Kirk, father of two, threatens to expand the circle of potential targets, not just candidates and elected officials but activists, commentators and influencers — all the worlds that Kirk inhabited, from which he propelled a new generation of Americans into political action.
When Trump survived the shooting in Pennsylvania last year, he became living proof that MAGA still stands. Kirk’s death, by contrast, makes it harder to look ahead and glimpse what MAGA will stand for. It will not be up to him. Now, Kirk’s legacy is less about his commitment to specific principles than his commitment to a particular style, a practice of politics from which future activists, working in his image, may well emerge.
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Carlos Lozada is an Opinion columnist based in Washington, D.C. He is the author, most recently, of “The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians.” @CarlosNYT
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