October 2, 2026
Charlie Kirk, who rose from a teenage conservative campus activist to a top podcaster, culture warrior, and ally of President Donald Trump, was shot and killed on Wednesday during one of his trademark public appearances at a college in Utah. He was 31.
Kirk died doing what made him a potent political force — rallying the right on a college campus, this time at Utah Valley University. His shooting is one of an escalating number of attacks on political figures, from the assassination of a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband in Minnesota to last summer's assassination attempts of Trump, that have roiled the nation.
Trump announced Kirk's death on his social media site, Truth Social: “No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie,” Trump wrote.
Kirk launched his organization, Turning Point USA, in 2012, targeting younger people and venturing onto liberal-leaning college campuses where many GOP activists were nervous to tread.
A backer of Trump during the president's initial 2016 run, Kirk took Turning Point from one of a constellation of well-funded conservative groups to the center of the right-of-center universe.
Turning Point's political wing helped run get-out-the-vote for Trump's 2024 campaign, trying to energize disaffected conservatives who rarely vote. Trump won Arizona, Turning Point's home state, by five percentage points after narrowly losing it in 2020.
Trump on Wednesday praised Kirk, who started as an unofficial adviser during Trump's 2016 campaign and more recently became a confidant. “He was a very, very good friend of mine, and he was a tremendous person,” Trump told the New York Post.
During an appearance with Trump in Georgia last fall, he said that Democrats “stand for everything God hates.” Kirk called the Trump vs. Kamala Harris choice “a spiritual battle.”
“This is a Christian state. I’d like to see it stay that way,” Kirk told the 10,000 or so Georgians, who at one point joined Kirk in a deafening chant of “Christ is King! Christ is King!”
Kirk had also remained a regular presence on college campuses. Last year, for the social media program “Surrounded,” he faced off against 20 liberal college students to defend his viewpoints, including that abortion is murder and should be illegal.
Kirk was married to podcaster Erika Frantzve. They have two young children.
Share with others
