WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President JD Vance on Monday hosted the radio program of Charlie Kirk, the influential conservative activist who was assassinated last week, telling listeners that the best way he knows how to honor his friend is to be a better husband and father.
Vance hosted “The Charlie Kirk Show” from his ceremonial office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. The livestream of the two-hour program was broadcast in the White House press briefing room and featured a series of appearances by White House and administration officials who knew the 31-year-old Kirk.
Vance, who transported Kirk’s body home to Arizona aboard Air Force Two last week, opened by saying he was “filling in for somebody who cannot be filled in for, but I’ll do my best.”
The Republican vice president, 41, was especially close to Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, one of the nation’s largest political organizations with chapters on high school and college campuses. The two began a friendship nearly a decade ago, and Kirk advocated for Vance to be Republican Donald Trump’s choice for vice president last year.
Vance spoke Monday about sitting with Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, and being at a loss for words. But he said she told him something he’ll never forget, which was that her husband had never raised his voice to her and was never “cross or mean-spirited to her.”
Vance allowed that he could not say the same about himself.
“I took from that moment that I needed to be a better husband and I needed to be a better father,” the vice president said on the program, which was streamed on Rumble. “That is the way I’m going to honor my friend.”
After Kirk was fatally shot last Wednesday at Utah Valley University, Vance tore up his schedule for the next day — he was scheduled Thursday to attend the 24th annual observance in New York of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — to fly instead to Orem, Utah, with his wife, second lady Usha Vance.
The two accompanied Erika Kirk and Charlie Kirk’s casket to Arizona aboard Air Force Two.
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