MAGA Reacts to the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

Late last summer, I spent the early hours of a weekend morning walking through suburban Phoenix with volunteers for Turning Point Action, Charlie Kirk’s political-advocacy organization. Donald Trump had just been in town for a huge rally, during which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—a surprise guest—endorsed him. Gold streamers made to look like they were on fire exploded from the stage. Many in the crowd were there to see Kirk, who spoke first. “You know you are part of something bigger than yourself,” he said. “You are part of the most exciting, diverse, powerful movement in the history of this country.” He went on, “This movement is about all of us against them.” The next time I saw Kirk, in January, Trump had won the election, and Kirk was hosting an Inauguration Eve party in the basement of a hotel in Washington. Giddy supporters danced under a disco ball. But, even at the height of the exuberance, there were a lot of discussions about the battlefield ahead, and references to how narrowly Trump had escaped death on the campaign trail. On Wednesday, after Kirk was assassinated onstage in Utah, it felt, to many, like the war was here. “People warned him, ‘Hey, Charlie, you’re the most exposed person than anybody in this movement,’ ” Steve Bannon said on his streaming show. “Charlie Kirk’s a casualty of war. We’re at war in this country.” On the House floor, Speaker Mike Johnson interrupted votes to hold a moment of silence for Kirk. Lauren Boebert shouted that they should be praying out loud: “Silent prayers get silent results.” Anna Paulina Luna yelled, at Democrats, “Y’all caused this!”

I decided to go out. There was a vigil for Kirk at St. Joseph’s, a Catholic church near the Capitol. The service lasted twelve minutes. By the time I arrived, the pews were empty; in the dark hallway outside the nave, I ran into a Senate staffer, who had heard about the vigil in an e-mail blast. “He represented a lot of people, whether you agreed with him or not,” he said, of Kirk.

Outside, two men were talking under a street lamp, holding printed programs. “The vigil used the Sermon on the Mount as a direct comparison between Kirk and Jesus,” one of them, whose name was Ethan, told me. “You could think about him going around the country as a controversial truthteller, spreading the Gospel. Some people will call him a provocateur, and others will call him a prophet.”

“He was one of the nicer people on the right,” the other man, who wouldn’t give his name, said. “I’m concerned about what may follow.”

Ethan responded, “Some people are straight up celebrating this guy’s death right now.”

“It validates the idea that the right is under attack,” the other man said. “Maybe the quiet majority will grow bigger. I could see people saying, ‘I’m not going to put my face out there, because that guy did and he got killed for doing it.’ ”

“I think the real question is whether or not things start online or in real life,” Ethan said.

The other man asked Ethan if he had seen the video of the assassination. Ethan hadn’t. “Fuck that,” the man said. “You should watch it. Do you want to watch it right now?”

Joe Allen, a correspondent for Bannon’s show, happened to be crossing the street alone in the dark. I walked with him toward Pennsylvania Avenue. I thought people might gather at Butterworth’s, a sort of informal MAGA clubhouse, to mourn Kirk. One of the restaurant’s owners told me that he planned to hire armed security the next day. The jubilance of the Inauguration felt like a long time ago. “Be safe out there,” one of the vigilgoers had told me. “I hope this doesn’t turn into a hot civil war.” Allen said, “I feel a dark foreboding. The swelling negative energy . . . and then this, and the constant replay online. Yeah, we’re going to be watching these people die for days, weeks, I don’t know, over and over again. There’s so much callousness and cruelty, and I can already see it building momentum for bloodlust—for revenge, too. If you feel like your tribe is under attack, you draw blood.” He added, “I’m concerned about a strengthening of state power, from Trump all the way down. But, more immediately, potential copycats.”

We paused in front of a storefront where a TV was playing CNN. Trump was onscreen, speaking from the Oval Office. “My Administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after—” The video faded out. “Certainly the President is not sort of calling for calm on all sides,” Anderson Cooper said. Kara Swisher was his guest. “There’s never an opportunity not to have an opportunity to hate,” she replied. “It’s a real weaponization of words.”

Outside Butterworth’s, a man in a suit paced the sidewalk. I overheard snippets of his call: “We’re gonna put a text out. . . . The Democrats . . . ” A group was smoking near the door. “Charlie did everything fucking right,” a person close to the Administration told me. “The entire point was, I’m going to sit down and talk to people and try to change their minds. If you don’t like my ideas, come sit down with me. To quote Charlie, ‘When the discourse stops, the violence starts.’ When someone believes in the system as much as he does, if you’re going to kill him . . .” He went on, “There are malignant parts of the right begging for an excuse. Charlie was the bulwark against that. You have an absolutely fucking handicapped political structure in the U.S.”