Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk was a political prodigy who never held elective office.

• He was 18 when he founded Turning Point USA, a conservative counterpoint to liberal advocacy groups such as MoveOn.org. Turning Point became a juggernaut for mobilizing young conservatives across the United States.

• He was 22 when he became the youngest speaker at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Although not initially a supporter of Donald Trump, Kirk would come to be a close confidante of the president and a not-so-secret weapon for changing the face of the Republican Party.

• He was 28 when he supported the long-shot Republican Senate bid of J.D. Vance in 2022; two years later he would be a key voice that led to Trump picking Vance as his vice-presidential running mate.

• He was 31 when he was assassinated at Utah Valley University while speaking to a group of students at the kind of event he had built his career around. His killing prompted statements from both conservatives and liberals against an onslaught of political violence.

Early years

Charlie Kirk grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, the son of Robert and Kimberly Kirk, who were prominent in Republican circles. His father was an architect and his mother a mental health counselor. Robert Kirk was a major contributor to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. As a child Charlie Kirk was active in the Boy Scouts, earning the rank of Eagle Scout. He also became involved in politics, volunteering in 2010 for the Senate campaign of Republican Mark Kirk (no relation) and organizing a school protest against a price increase for cookies sold in the lunchroom.

He was 17 when he wrote an op-ed for the conservative outlet Breitbart News, decrying what he said was the prominence of liberal economists, including Paul Krugman, in his high school textbooks. The piece landed him on Fox News. A movement was about to be born.

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The beginnings of Turning Point

One of the people who saw Kirk on Fox was Bill Montgomery, an ultra-conservative supporter of the populist social and political Tea Party movement. Montgomery and Kirk met, and Kirk outlined his vision for energizing young people to join conservative causes. Montgomery encouraged Kirk to skip college and instead launch a political movement. Kirk briefly attended college in Illinois but dropped out.

Kirk was supported by his father, who reportedly came up with the name Turning Point, and Montgomery. Kirk admitted that at the start he had “no money, no connections and no idea what I was doing,” but his political charisma won him early support. When he attended the 2012 GOP convention, he left with support from a key Republican donor. He also drew the attention of the Trump family, especially Donald Trump, Jr., who hired him to work on social media.

Rising political power

With Trump’s win in the 2016 election, Kirk’s star rose further. He became a regular on political talk shows and garnered praise for his ability, at times, to better explain Trump’s policies than the president himself. In turn, the president and Trump, Jr., were regular speakers at Turning Point conferences.

There wasn’t a platform Kirk didn’t want to appear on or a debate he wouldn’t engage in. He wrote books, hosted a radio show, had an enormous social media presence, organized conferences, and appeared on college campuses, where he engaged in political debate with students who opposed his ultra-conservative views.

He was also a regular visitor to the Trump White House—by his own account, visiting more than 100 times during Trump’s first term. When Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, Kirk arranged a “Stop the Steal” rally in Arizona and sent buses of protesters to the January 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. But Trump’s defeat did little to tamp down Kirk’s enthusiasm for Trumpism, and that enthusiasm translated into votes, something that was never lost on the president. Turning Point mobilized voters—especially young ones—in numbers that surprised political pundits, and the group was credited with Trump’s better-than-expected performance in that demographic in the 2024 presidential election, which he won.

Controversies

Kirk’s positions were unabashedly far right, and to many he trafficked in misinformation and disinformation and expressed racist and homophobic beliefs. He shared those beliefs to millions of followers on social media, through his radio show, and at campus events. Some of Kirk’s most controversial positions were:

• The false claim during the COVID-19 pandemic that hydroxychloroquine was “100 percent effective” in curing the virus

• Turning Point’s creation of a “Professor Watchlist,” which encouraged college students to report professors espousing positions deemed to be liberal or “woke”

• Calling George Floyd, who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, a “scumbag”

• Saying in 2023 that “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them”

But the importance of Kirk’s role in setting the American political agenda was undeniable. When Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a frequent foe of Trump’s, launched a podcast in 2025, Kirk was his first guest.

Assassination and aftermath

On September 10, 2025, Kirk was speaking at an event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. It was the kind of event he had built his career around. He had just finished answering a question about gun violence when a single shot rang out. Kirk was hit in the neck and died shortly after.

Trump announced Kirk’s death on social media, writing:

The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie.

On September 12, state and federal law enforcement announced the apprehension of a 22-year-old Utah man named Tyler Robinson in Kirk’s death. Family members reportedly said Robinson had expressed contempt for Kirk’s political views.

On Sept. 16, Utah prosecutors charged Robinson with aggravated murder and said they would seek the death penalty. Robinson was also charged with felony discharge of a firearm and several counts of witness tampering and obstruction of justice.

On October 14, 2025, which would have been Kirk’s 32nd birthday, Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. At the ceremony, Erika Kirk said that her husband probably would have run for president at some point.

(Read more about political violence in the United States in the 21st century.)

In December 2025, Kirk’s final book, Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life, was published posthumously. In the week after publication it was “temporarily out of stock” on Amazon.