Charlie Kirk was doing what he so often did—working a college crowd, prodding and provoking students in debate. The 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA was at Utah Valley University near Salt Lake City on Sept. 10, surrounded by thousands of students gathered in an outdoor courtyard. It was the first stop of Kirk’s fall campus tour, and he was seated beneath a tent emblazoned with the words “The American Comeback.” Kirk became a star in these settings. Since founding his right-wing advocacy organization at 18, he proved peerless at channeling youthful discontent into political energy, shaping a movement with national reach.
As Kirk fielded questions from the audience, a shot rang out, striking him in the neck. Panicked students scattered. Kirk was rushed to the hospital. Grisly footage of the shooting rocketed across social media. Inside the West Wing, staff sat in shocked silence, scrolling to see the latest updates of news on their phones and messages on their computer screens. At 4:40 p.m., Trump announced Kirk’s death on Truth Social. “No one,” the President wrote, “understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie.” He leaves behind a wife and two young children.
In recent years, the prospect of a political assassination such as this, carried out before a stunned crowd in broad daylight, has hung over a nation riven by factional fury. Elected officials whispered about it in green rooms and on campaign buses. When the moment arrived, it unfolded with chilling precision: a campus stage, a microphone, a single burst of gunfire. Where it will lead now is an ominous question with no obvious answers.
Kirk was one of the most powerful and incendiary figures on the American right, the tireless tribune of Trump’s young army. To admirers, he was a defender of free expression in hostile territory; to critics, a provocateur who thrived on the rancor of the age. The size and fervor of his audiences spoke to his place in the conservative firmament. “The most influential voice of my generation,” as Trump adviser and family friend Alex Bruesewitz puts it.
America is a nation shaped by political violence and steeped in its aftershocks. The 1960s were scarred by political assassinations, from Kennedy to King. But in recent years, acts of brazen violence have been the grim drumbeat of a debased national politics. In 2021, the year Trump supporters attaacked the U.S. Capitol, there were more than 9,600 recorded threats against members of Congress, according to the Capitol Police. The following year saw a hammer-wielding assailant attack Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul in their San Francisco home and the attempted stabbing of New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin at a campaign rally. In 2024, Trump himself faced two attempts on his life, including the history-bending afternoon in Butler, Pa., when he turned his head at the instant an assassin fired, the bullet grazing his ear instead of piercing his skull.
This year the threat grew more insistent. The residence of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, was set on fire by an arsonist; a gunman shot two Democratic Minnesota legislators and their spouses; two Israeli embassy staffers were shot and killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.; a man shouting “free Palestine” tossed Molotov cocktails at a pro-Israeli demonstration in Boulder, Co., injuring multiple people and killing one; and a gunman who allegedly held anti-vaccine views opened fire at CDC headquarters in Atlanta.
“I think the evidence is clear that we’re at a dangerous point of potential escalation,” says Shannon Hiller, executive director of Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative, which tracks political violence in the United States. A range of forces, she argues—the widespread use of dehumanizing rhetoric, the availability of firearms, the spread of disinformation, vanishing trust in institutions—have converged to create an intractable problem. “It’s the confluence of all of these things that we’re living in,” she says. “And it’s why it’s so hard to put a finger on a single solution to get us out of it.”
Kirk’s path to national prominence was unlike that of other MAGA icons. Born in a Chicago suburb, he gravitated toward conservative politics in a predominantly liberal enclave. At 17, he volunteered for a Republican U.S. Senate campaign. He drew notice by writing an essay for the right-wing site Breitbart News, alleging his school textbooks were freighted with liberal bias. Kirk’s zeal caught the attention of Bill Montgomery, a businessman and Tea Party activist, who urged him to forgo college and dedicate himself fully to political organizing.
With Montgomery’s seed money, Kirk founded Turning Point USA while still a teenager. He had a knack for finding wealthy patrons drawn to his entrepreneurial panache. GOP megadonor Foster Friess was one of them, writing a check for $10,000 to help get the fledgling organization off the ground. Republican strategist Michael Biundo was among many to observe how confident Kirk was from the jump, how undaunted by being new to the scene and often the youngest person in the mix. “I have known Charlie since he started in politics. He always loved the challenge of changing the hearts and minds of the youth. He saw them as the future, the turning point to move the needle of conservative policies and principles,” Biundo says. “He took the battle right to the campuses with both his words and his debating style. His impact in this realm cannot be overstated.”
What began as a youth-oriented effort to rally college students against liberal orthodoxy morphed into something bigger. Kirk made headlines with his “Professor Watchlist,” which targeted academics accused of suppressing conservative speech or promoting left-wing propaganda. He reveled in provocations that delighted the right and incensed the left. Kirk argued that some gun-violence deaths were a reasonable price to pay for preserving the Second Amendment, called for a “patriot” to bail out Paul Pelosi’s attacker, helped to spread baseless rumors that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets, and once called the Civil Rights Act a “huge mistake.” The list of people he offended—often intentionally—was as long as his roster of supporters.
Over time, Turning Point grew into a well-funded, multipronged organization: a media outlet, a voter-turnout machine, and a hub for student chapters on thousands of high school and college campuses. “They’re all symbiotic,” Kirk told me a few weeks ago. “They all feed one another.”
Kirk was not initially a Trump backer. During the 2016 Republican presidential primary, he supported Scott Walker and Ted Cruz before endorsing Trump. During the thick of the campaign, an associate arranged a meeting with Donald Trump Jr., who hired Kirk on the spot. For the rest of the campaign, he worked as Trump Jr.’s assistant, a role that vaulted him deeper into Trump World and secured his place within its inner orbit.
After Trump’s victory in 2016, Kirk returned his focus to Turning Point and quickly fashioned himself into one of the President’s most zealous defenders. He shed the vestiges of Reaganite libertarianism and embraced the national-populist framework that undergirded Trump’s political project: restricting immigration, imposing tariffs, rejecting foreign entanglements. “It’s not a metamorphosis,” he once told me. “It’s a journey.”
In 2019, Kirk launched Turning Point Action, a political group dedicated to defeating Democrats and boosting Trump-aligned Republicans. The COVID-19 pandemic propelled him to a new level of prominence. Kirk began recording multiple podcasts a day, railing against mask mandates and school closures. He became a fixture on Fox News, where his tirades caught Trump’s attention. One evening, Kirk delivered a phrase that crystallized conservative anger: “The cure cannot be worse than the disease.” Trump heard it, liked it, and began repeating it himself.
In the years that followed, Kirk became one of Trump’s most unshakable allies. He amplified Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen and pressed the case for J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate. By 2024, Turning Point was running the voter-mobilization drive in Arizona that the campaign relied upon, an effort that helped return the pivotal swing state to Trump’s column. By then Kirk had amassed millions of followers across social media, and The Charlie Kirk Show became one of the most popular political podcasts in the country. He was a one-man persuasion campaign on Trump’s behalf, helping the Republican notch a surprisingly strong performance with young voters last November.
After Trump’s return to the White House was assured, Kirk decamped to a donor’s condo in West Palm Beach to help manage the transition, vetting prospective appointees for loyalty. When Trump took the oath of office, Kirk stood only steps away.
Three weeks ago, I joined Kirk in Phoenix, where we spent hours talking as he showed me around Turning Point’s headquarters, a sprawling six-building complex tucked into the manicured grounds of the Arizona Grand Resort. Each building was devoted to another wing of the labyrinthine organization he had conjured from scratch. When I walked in, he was dressed in a T-shirt and sweatpants, padding around in his socks and anxiously checking the score of the Chicago Cubs game. He and his aides were deep in planning a fall speaking tour, anticipating ever-larger crowds.
Kirk mused about writing a book on the core tenets of MAGA. But his focus, as ever, was on building a movement that could endure for years to come. He was thinking about who might carry Trump’s torch forward. “If J.D. wants to run, he has my full support,” Kirk told me. “I will do everything in my power to make him President. Row one, day one.”
For Kirk’s friends and allies, the assassination is shattering—both for the personal loss and for what they fear it portends. “Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to be the last, which is why it’s so scary,” says Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, the first Turning Point alumna elected to Congress. Her words carried the tremor of recognition: in American life, acts of political violence have rarely been isolated. The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. fueled riots across the country; the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords deepened the atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust; the Jan. 6 attack, with its scenes of armed men roaming the Capitol, enraged the left and illustrated the extreme grievances gripping the right.
Kirk’s sudden, public death risks joining that chain. His killing could become not just a tragedy but a catalyst—an event that radicalizes ever more Americans, less an aberration than a feature of our increasingly perilous national politics.
With reporting by Charlotte Alter, Brian Bennett, Philip Elliott, Connor Greene, and Chantelle Lee
The post The Killing of Charlie Kirk and the Political Violence Haunting America appeared first on TIME.
