Charlie Kirk’s memorial was apparently just another opportunity for the president to espouse his typical talking points.
The Sunday service intended to honor Kirk’s legacy featured his family, friends, and crucial members of the Trump administration, from Vice President JD Vance to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Speaking before an arena of mourners, some of the country’s most high-profile Republicans painted Kirk as a martyr for the conservative movement, who they credited with transforming contemporary American youth politics.
But Donald Trump’s turn behind the lectern was a remarkable divergence from the lineup. While the president used some of his time allotment to heap praise onto Kirk, he also leveraged the name and memory of one of the GOP’s biggest firebrands to bolster his typical diatribe.
For more than 40 minutes, Trump lamented over late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel, aired the supposed success of his economic tariff plan, damned the rate of autism in America, and even negated the message of Kirk’s widow by promising to enact more political violence and retribution against his administration’s perceived enemies.
“Just like Charlie and Erika made Turning Point hot, we are looking at a country that has a chance to attain a level like never before—tariffs are making us rich again, richer than anybody ever thought was possible,” Trump said. “And the only ones challenging them are people that hate our country, or foreign countries that are paying a price.”
“The election was big, but the tariffs—because of the election—came in.”
Trump also used some of his air time to talk about his planned deployment of the National Guard to Chicago, promising the stadium that he would bring the hard fist of the White House to several of the country’s biggest cities.
“I’m so proud of Washington, D.C., and now we’re going to Memphis, and we’ll get that one straightened out fast, and then we’re going into some others, but we’re going to go do Chicago, and we’re going to have Charlie very much in mind when we go into Chicago,” Trump told the roaring crowd.
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