Charlie Kirk understood — perhaps more so than anyone except Donald Trump himself — how power really operates within the MAGA movement.
As the myriad tributes to Kirk in the day since his death have captured, he served a dizzying array of functions within the broader Trumpian universe: a firebrand activist and debater; a media mega-personality overseeing a vast digital empire; the head of a multi-million-dollar political machine at Turning Points USA; a popularizer of the ideological fashions of the young and online right; an occasional adviser to Trump and his inner circle; and a bosom buddy with many of the most powerful denizens of the White House and Mar-a-Lago.
Kirk has no real equivalent on the left. A rough approximation of a left-leaning Kirk would begin with some amalgamation of gun control activist-turned-erstwhile-DNC official David Hogg with the party consensus voice of the Pod Save America crew, supplemented by the online edginess of lefty streamer Hasan Piker and the institution-building power of a George Soros.
Yet such a figure on the left is probably impossible. Kirk’s preternatural charisma and otherworldly fundraising abilities no doubt played a major role in his rise: During his early days of building TPUSA, stories circulated of skeptical megadonors writing five-figure checks after even the briefest of encounters with the 18-year-old Kirk.
But a figure like Kirk is probably only possible within the unique circumstances of Trump’s GOP. Throughout his career, Kirk’s real superpower was intuiting — and deftly exploiting — the institutional hollowness of the Republican Party under Trump. Beginning in 2016, he systematically built political organizations to fulfill the functions once served by the party infrastructure that Trump destroyed. In the place of anemic campus groups like College Republicans, Kirk built Turning Point USA into a grassroots powerhouse with chapters on over 800 campuses. In the place of party-run turnout operations, he expanded the organization’s activist arm, Turning Points Action, into a multi-million dollar get-out-the-vote machine. He inserted his podcasts and his social media presences into the space left by traditional party messaging and media initiatives. As the GOP became an increasingly hollow shell with Trump — and Trump alone — at its core, Kirk created new institutional scaffolds to keep the rickety structure together around its leader.
He was clear about his ambition to turn TPUSA into a kind of substitute for all the old official actors of the right. “We want to be an institution in this country that is as well-known and as powerful as The New York Times, Harvard and tech companies,” Kirk recently told Deseret News. “And we believe we’re creating that.”
He didn’t quite succeed, but the success he did achieve gave him real political power within the GOP. In 2021, he identified then-candidate JD Vance as a rising figure in the MAGA movement and introduced Vance to the powers-that-be in Trump world. By some accounts, TPUSA’s get-out-the-vote efforts in swing states like Arizona and Wisconsin helped tip the 2024 election in Trump’s favor, earning Kirk a quietly powerful role in Trump’s transition effort and a direct line to the Oval Office.
MAGA was a somewhat surprising ideological space for Kirk to have landed. Growing up in a wealthy Chicago suburb, Kirk began his career as a high-school student with a pronounced libertarian bent, a passion for Rush Limbaugh and a budding interest in Tea Party politics. After founding TPUSA in 2012 to challenge what he saw as progressive orthodoxy on college campuses (despite not attending college himself), he was somewhat slow to embrace Trump: In 2016, he supported Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and then Sen. Ted Cruz, before joining the Trump campaign as a scheduler and social media coordination for Donald Trump Jr.
Over the next eight years, Kirk built TPUSA and its activist wing, Turning Points Action, into two of the most powerful conservative youth groups in the nation — and essential vehicles of the MAGA movement. During the same period, he underwent a subtle ideological transformation of his own: He gradually left behind his Tea Party-era libertarianism in favor of a Trump-inflected populist nationalism, premised on the idea that conservatives were locked in a war to “save Western civilization,” as he recently put it to Deseret News, from the destructive forces of progressivism. During the pandemic, he embraced conservative Christianity and began hosting conferences that mixed Trumpian populism with more explicitly Christian nationalist ideas. All the while, he perfected his more potent method of political evangelism: the live, in-person debate on college campuses, where he would spar with students about wokeness, race, immigration politics, faith, family and any other culture war skirmish of the day.
Even in the realm of ideas, Kirk exploited the ideological landscape that Trump’s hollowing out of the Republican Party had left in its wake. A party without strong institutional structures is also devoid of any meaningful ideological checks, one where the boundaries between its intellectual mainstream and its ideological fringe — to the extent that those boundaries exist at all — are extremely porous. Kirk expertly navigated this porousness to build his brand, vacillating between an apparently good-natured “just asking questions” earnestness and a real tolerance — and even appetite — for extreme ideas. Kirk sat for hours-long debates with liberal college kids, then turned around to seek out right-leaning figures that even many within the MAGA movement considered beyond the pale — people like the openly theocratic pastor Doug Wilson, whom Kirk invited to a TPUSA faith summit in 2024, or the monarchist writer Curtis Yarvin, a one-time guest on Kirk’s podcast. In one breath, he professed — and often lived out — a commitment to small-L liberal debate in the old-school market of ideas; in the next, he flirted with implicitly anti-liberal and anti-democratic ideas, including the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen.
Yet Kirk’s real power was never as an intellectual or a theorist — he tended to reflect ideological trends on the right rather than set them — but as an institutional builder in a landscape where all the institutions had been dynamited. And that, in part, helps explain why he still has no real counterpart on the left. Kirk arrived on the Republican scene at a moment when conservative institutions had been leveled by Trump and his allies. Starting from these decimated foundations, he was able to build his way into every corner of Trump’s GOP. The Democratic Party today suffers from a hollowness of its own, but its existing structures still stand — for better and for worse. As Kirk well understood, you can’t become the New York Times, Harvard and Meta all rolled into one if those institutions still hold sway.
