Charlie Kirk’s pastor was speaking as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was looking for his seat. Days earlier, the Health and Human Services Secretary had described Kirk at a vigil as his soulmate and spiritual brother, noting that the 31-year old conservative heavyweight brokered his key unification with Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. In a 73,000-capacity Arizona football stadium, Godspeak Calvary Church’s Rob McCoy assessed Kirk’s rise, imagining himself speaking to his late congregant.
“Since the president has gotten elected,” McCoy said, with the audience of Kirk faithfuls silently listening in, “your stock has gone through the stratosphere.”
Such appraisals of Charlie Kirk’s legacy, typically suffused with a nod to the activist’s intense Christian faith, have flourished at the highest rungs of American power in the weeks since his assassination while speaking on a college campus in Utah. By dawn on Sunday, thousands had gathered outside State Farm Stadium for a memorial service with attendees from inside the White House—Trump, J.D. Vance, and several cabinet members—and the most visible portions of its external orbit, with Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson on hand. Part state funeral, part evangelical worship ceremony, the proceedings began with a Scottish bagpipe group performing “Amazing Grace” beside a large framed portrait of Kirk.
Kirk’s death, in its crystallization of his impact and sway, quickly unified broad swathes of the right. Attempts to tamp down liberal criticism of Kirk’s legacy culminated in ABC indefinitely pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show on Wednesday, hours after FCC commissioner Brendan Carr had suggested to the YouTube personality Benny Johnson that Kimmel should be suspended and said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Both Barack Obama and Steve Bannon have described Kirk’s death as an “inflection point.”
“Who can feel the revival right now?” Johnson said as he took the stage in Arizona. At most every turn, the service made an explicitly religious appeal, positioning Kirk as more potent a Christian advocate in death than in life.
“That is the power of martyrdom,” Johnson proclaimed as the crowd started booming louder. “You cut down a martyr, his power grows.”
At about noon, Air Force One landed in Arizona, and Trump began making his way to the stadium to greet the movement Kirk had built in his image. “There would be no Congresswoman Luna without Charlie Kirk,” Florida representative Anna Paulina Luna recalled on stage, with television cameras now turned towards the suite where Trump stood with UFC CEO Dana White. In Luna’s view, Kirk now stood alongside John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in historical weight.
“Charlie’s vision is ablaze in every single one of you,” she told the crowd. “His legacy has just begun.”
The speeches veered freely between celebrations of Kirk’s character and harsh rebukes of the forces he was loudly fighting. Former Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson took the stage and decried what he perceived as a communist goal of “gaining control of the media and Hollywood, making sexual perversion normal, natural, and healthy.” When Donald Trump Jr., a friend of Kirk’s and eager participant in the young conservative social media ecosystem in which Kirk thrived, arrived at the podium, he balanced a lighthearted impersonation of his father against a return to the fire-and-brimstone tenor that ran throughout the day.
“If you reject the propaganda of the fake news media, welcome,” Trump Jr. said. “If you want to eradicate the criminal cartels and get drugs out of our communities, welcome.”
As the procession of speakers made its way up the chain of conservative command, the service turned further towards setting a political agenda for the aftermath of Kirk’s murder. The goal now is “achieving victory in his name,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said.
Miller also made appeals to faith, reflecting in his speech on how the angels wept for Kirk. But the tears had turned into fire, he said, and “that fire burns with a righteous fury that our enemies cannot comprehend or understand.”
In this stew of rage and spirituality, the speakers built a cumulative testimony to Kirk’s own rhetorical style, as displayed on college campuses throughout the country during his advocacy career. It was, for all its provocations, a tactic that reached its way to the political approach of the White House’s senior most figures and had some apparent unifying effect on them. Shortly before the president spoke, Musk and Trump had what appeared to be a friendly reunion as they overlooked the service.
Addressing his and Kirk’s followers, Trump took down the temperature for just a moment, reflecting in sweeping terms on Kirk’s legacy and his love for country. “This is not an arena, it’s a stadium,” he said, admiring Kirk’s reach. But as he switched tacks, touting his plans to crack down on crime in Chicago and other punitive measures he had in mind for perceived adversaries, he claimed, smiling proudly, that there was a key difference between him and the college debate enthusiast.
“I can’t stand my opponent,” Trump told the audience.
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