The MAGA Movement Is Splintering Without Charlie Kirk

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When Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September, many of his allies on the right memorialized him as a hero of free speech and the founder of an enduring political movement. Critics on the left tended to emphasize his long history of offensive remarks and dismiss him as little more than a troll.

With a year of distance, neither view appears complete. Since his death, the MAGA movement has stumbled: Its factions are bickering, and Republicans are facing potentially disastrous midterm elections. President Trump seems disconnected from his base and reality. The current plight points to Kirk’s rare ability as a political node, someone who united otherwise disparate forces under one umbrella—and also to how much the movement depended on Kirk personally.

Just how fragile a peace Kirk had managed to keep became clear three months after his killing, at an annual conference of Turning Point USA, the organization he’d co-founded. At the summit, feuding parties each tried to claim Kirk’s endorsement of their views. Ben Shapiro, the Daily Wire impresario, used the occasion to blast the broadcaster Tucker Carlson for conducting softball interviews with anti-Semites and other white supremacists. Citing Kirk’s stiff-arming of the Hitler-admiring influencer Nick Fuentes, whose followers were sometimes ejected from Turning Point events, Shapiro assailed Carlson for giving Fuentes a platform. Carlson mounted a counterattack in that evening’s keynote speech, arguing that it was Shapiro who was betraying Kirk’s commitment to open debate.

These conflicts among leading right-wing figures have continued ever since. Kirk’s widow, Erika, now leads Turning Point and is well-regarded, but she does not seem to have the muscle that her husband did to quell conflicts. Carlson has become a furious critic of Trump and has vowed to create a rival political movement (although his ability to follow through is in question). Candace Owens, another prominent media personality, has become a proponent of conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death and has baselessly suggested at various times that the Israeli or French governments or “Egyptians” were involved. Fuentes has become a more influential commentator, but overall, MAGA media figures are seeing splintering audiences.

No movement leader is as important as Trump, but the president has also had a tumultuous year. He is obsessed with building a ballroom at the White House—in part as a legacy project, but also perhaps because Kirk’s assassination and the attempts on his own life have instilled an understandable sense of paranoia that makes having a secure space at his residence feel imperative. As Trump has become more cloistered and withdrawn from public appearances, he has lost touch with his base, and he is pursuing an unpopular long-term war in Iran that betrays his campaign platform and writing off voters’ concerns about the economy and inflation.

These dynamics, along with the natural pendulum swing against the sitting president’s party in midterm elections, mean that Republicans have bleak expectations for November. Not only are Democrats leading in polls of the generic House ballot and gaining in several Senate forecasts, but GOP voters are less enthusiastic than their Democratic counterparts. The problems are particularly acute among young voters. Although that group is typically heavily Democratic, Trump nearly matched Kamala Harris’s showing with the demographic in 2024, for which Turning Point received a great deal of credit. Today, however, young voters disapprove of Trump by wide margins—even greater than the general population. Young people who voted for Trump are also more likely to regret their vote than older ones, a recent Navigator poll found. Young men have turned against the president more than almost any other group has.

What’s notable is that this drop in support and enthusiasm for Trump and Republicans comes at the same time that Turning Point is growing. As Reuters reported today, the organization has expanded since Kirk’s death, especially on campuses, but the people flocking to these chapters aren’t uniformly loyal to Trump. Turning Point could yet be an important presence in the midterms. The group was central to the Trump campaign’s plan for voter turnout in the 2024 election, helping deliver the president his first popular-vote victory among his three tries. Wired reports that Turning Point once again plans to spend large sums on field operations from now until the midterms.

Kirk’s legacy on free speech and debate also remains up for grabs. As I wrote shortly after the assassination, an ironic phenomenon was emerging in which Kirk was being praised for his commitment to open discourse at the same time that right-wing figures were attempting to stifle any criticism of him. Some professors who were fired or punished in that period have since been reinstated or paid damages, but Trump and his allies have abandoned even a perfunctory commitment to free speech.

Many of the tensions on display today have always been present in the MAGA movement. Trumpism is a big tent; it includes populists and plutocrats, isolationists and interventionists, and a dozen more dyads. The seams would inevitably have become visible at some point, but in retrospect, Kirk appears to have helped stave that off by maintaining connections across many factions and the sway to keep figures such as Fuentes outside. In his absence, the conflicts have come into the open.

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The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ruling that blocked Missouri from using a Republican-backed congressional map for the November midterm elections, leaving the state’s 2022 map in place. The Missouri Supreme Court had ruled that the new map could not take effect until voters approved it in a statewide referendum.
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The Trump administration plans to send $500 checks to about 1 million Affordable Care Act enrollees in 30 states. The payments are expected to begin next month, and whether they require congressional approval remains unclear.

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Evening Read

Lonnie Bunch, in 2014, standing on the site of the future National Museum of African American History and Culture — Lonnie Bunch gives a tour of the future National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2014. J.M. Eddins Jr. / Tribune News Service / Getty

What Lonnie Bunch Told Me

By Clint Smith

Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, was already slipping into the past tense when we walked together through the National Museum of American History in February.

Occasionally, as we stood before an exhibit, he’d discuss his role leading the largest museum system in the world as though he had already stepped away. Even then, there wasn’t a question of if he would retire soon, but how soon. He spoke longingly of a future life in which he took fewer flights, slept in fewer hotels, spent more time with his grandchildren. He desperately wanted more time to write. He told me he still has more books in him. Now he will get the time.

Read the full article.