Conservative youth organizer Charlie Kirk laid the groundwork for President Donald Trump’s historic presidential victories, supporters recalled in the wake of his tragic assassination on Wednesday.
“There is no question that Charlie’s work and his voice helped my father win the presidency,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote on the social media platform X of the 31-year-old husband and father of two.
“Donald Trump wouldn’t be in the White House without Charlie Kirk,” Brilyn Hollyhand, chairman of the Republican National Committee’s Youth Advisory Council, told Fox News.
At just 18 years old at the time, Kirk launched Turning Point USA in 2012 to mobilize conservative students on college campuses. By 2016, it had grown into a national youth organization equipped to organize support for Trump among young voters.
At age 23, Kirk, the youngest speaker at the Republican National Convention, said in an interview he “was not the world’s biggest Donald Trump fan,” though he said he would vote for him.
But Vice President JD Vance explained Kirk’s move toward becoming a powerful Trump ally.
“Like me, he was skeptical of Donald Trump in 2016,” Vance wrote on X after Kirk’s death. “Like me, he came to see President Trump as the only figure capable of moving American politics away from the globalism that had dominated for our entire lives. When others were right, he learned from them. When he was right—as he usually was—he was generous. With Charlie, the attitude was never, ‘I told you so.’ But: ‘welcome.’”
Kirk grew close with Donald Trump Jr., who went on to headline TPUSA’s December 2016 summit. Kirk spent much of 2016 after the convention advocating for Trump, and he reportedly helped with the younger Trump’s travel and media during the campaign.
Kirk appeared at a pro-Trump Fox News event for millennials in October 2016 alongside Donald Trump Jr.; his brother, Eric Trump; and Lara Trump, Eric Trump’s wife.
Trump won the election in 2016, but Kirk’s work rallying young people didn’t stop there.
In 2019, he launched a podcast and founded Turning Point Action, TPUSA’s political arm, created to “embolden the conservative base through grassroots activism and provide voters with the necessary resources to elect true conservative leaders.” Turning Point Action held numerous rallies and bus tours for Trump in swing states, such as Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
Kirk remained close to Trump after former President Joe Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election in 2020.
In the 2024 election, Kirk’s “You’re Being Brainwashed” tour reached 25 colleges. Videos of Kirk debating Generation Z leftists acquired millions of views on social media.
Kirk told Fox News that transforming “supporters into voters” marked Turning Point’s most “decisive” impact on the 2024 presidential election.
“You need to do the hard work to turn the low-propensity voters and actually get their ballots into boxes, and that requires bodies,” Kirk said. “So, we quietly hired well over 1,000 full-time people across all the battleground states, in Arizona, Wisconsin, partially in Michigan and Pennsylvania.”
Kirk privately and publicly advocated for Vance to be chosen as Trump’s vice president and supported the former Ohio senator when he was chosen, Vance wrote on X.
“Some of our most successful events were organized not by the campaign, but by TPUSA,” Vance wrote. “He wasn’t just a thinker, he was a doer, turning big ideas into bigger events with thousands of activists. And after every event, he would give me a big hug, tell me he was praying for me, and ask me what he could do. ‘You focus on Wisconsin,’ he’d tell me. ‘Arizona is in the bag.’ And it was.”
Turning Point’s headquarters are in Arizona, and Kirk made a specifically significant impact there. CNN reported that Turning Point secured more than 125,000 irregular voters for Trump in Arizona.
Polls show Kirk’s hard work paid off. A remarkable 46% of young people voted for Trump in 2024, up from 36% in 2020, according to Tufts Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. Trump received about 37% of the youth vote in 2016.
The president won the youth vote in 17 states in 2024, compared with seven states in 2020.
“And Charlie Kirk will tell you, TikTok helped, but Charlie Kirk helped also,” Trump said after returning to the Oval Office for his second term.
In a video reacting to Kirk’s death, Trump said, “There’s never been anyone who was so respected by youth.”
Trump thanked Kirk for bringing “young people into the political process.”
“He did better than anybody ever to share his love of country and to spread the simple words of common sense on campuses nationwide,” the president said.
