Charlie Kirk stepped out on to the stage at the Turning Point Action convention in Detroit, Michigan, this month as though it were him – and not his hero Donald Trump – who was running for president. Red, white and blue strobe lights buzzed over the 2,000-strong crowd, pyrotechnics blazed around him and bass speakers boomed out so loudly that it made your bone marrow quake.
“Welcome, everybody, to the people’s convention,” Kirk exclaimed, prompting chants of “USA! USA!” Then he launched into his trademark stew of far-right populism, do-or-die patriotism and Christian nationalism.
“The future of the greatest nation that ever existed hangs in the balance,” he said, beseeching his followers to do all they could to save the American republic by saving Trump. “We do our part, and we trust in God to do the rest.”
Kirk has come a long way since he founded Turning Point USA in 2012 as a conservative student organization. He was 18, and by his own account had “no money, no connections and no idea what I was doing”.
In little over a decade, he has transformed the group from a campus-based network of “anti-woke” teenagers into a far-right powerhouse and fundraising behemoth – able to entice Trump to headline two Turning Point events this month alone, including the Detroit “people’s convention”.
Offstage, Kirk has had a seismic impact on the Republican party at both the state and national level. Now, in the thick of a historically critical presidential election, Kirk is aspiring to go one bigger.
Turning Point Action (TP Action), the political advocacy wing of his mushrooming operation, is planning to inject more than $100m in a get-out-the-vote campaign. Should it live up to Kirk’s extravagant claims, it could propel Trump back into the White House.
Dubbed “chase the vote”, the plan is being conducted in direct coordination with the Trump campaign. It will target what Kirk calls “low-propensity voters” who rarely bother to cast ballots yet are open to Trump’s increasingly authoritarian allure.
Turning Point activists will descend on three vital swing states – Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin. They will also fan out over six battleground states: Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
“We are hiring hundreds of ballot chasers to work as full-time activists in the cities in which they live, and we believe we will absolutely have the most boots on the ground,” TP Action’s spokesperson, Andrew Kolvet, told the Guardian.
The stakes for the US in November’s election could not be higher. The same could be said for Kirk personally.
The bigger his empire has grown, the more money has poured in – revenues for his non-profit group Turning Point USA skyrocketed from $8m in 2017 to $80m in 2022 – giving rise to questions about where that money, and Turning Point, are going.
Above all, people want to know whether Kirk and his souped-up kids’ operation is as effective at mobilizing voters for the Make America Great Again (Maga) movement as they contend. Kirk can talk all he likes about channeling God through Trump, but can he cut it where it counts: at the ballot box?
His toughest inquisitors are not the mainstream media which Kirk routinely disparages, but people from within his own ranks. Take Tudor Dixon, a Republican politician from Michigan who ran with Turning Point’s backing for governor of the state in 2022, and lost.
Dixon recently let rip on her podcast. “As a candidate who didn’t win, and who was promised that Turning Point would have a big influence in Michigan, it makes you crazy,” she vented.
“I gave up a salary for 18 months, sold my car, did everything I could to run for office. And people like [Kirk] are the reason we are not winning.”
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Kirk, 30, grew up in Wheeling, a suburb of Chicago where he attended a school which in the course of his childhood switched from being mostly white to majority Black, Latino and Asian. The experience of being cast into the minority had a profound effect on the young Reagan-obsessed Kirk, according to Kyle Spencer, author of Raising Them Right, which chronicles the rise of Turning Point.
“His rage really seems to have originated with this idea, that he was seeing his power base dwindle,” she said.
Spencer spent about four years following Kirk around the country in Turning Point’s infancy. She was struck by how he was “really smart, a voracious reader. Like Trump, he knows how to read a room and activate people.”
He also had an innate understanding of power and gravitated towards it. He zeroed in on big donors with pockets as large as his ambitions, like the born-again Christian Foster Friess, who wrote the first $10,000 check to Turning Point.
Over time, Spencer qualified her initial glowing report card for Kirk. “He had increasing rage, and as he became more famous he became more open about expressing it – white supremacist ideas, disdain for feminism, and what disturbed me most: his comfort with authoritarianism.”
Paradoxically for an activist who started out waging war against what he saw as the liberal bent in academia, Kirk did not complete college. Instead, he hurled himself straight into battle, guided by the Tea Party manual of low taxes and small government.
But what really gave him his lift was the advent of Trump in 2015 and the 2016 presidential campaign in which Kirk served as personal aide to Don Jr. Since then, Kirk has hung on tight to Trump’s coattails and has been handsomely rewarded for doing so.
He participated in Trump’s “stop the steal” conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election as one of the main proponents of the false claim that mail-in voting was riddled with fraud. He also deployed buses to carry Trump supporters to the Save America rally in Washington DC that preceded the Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021.
Though he has since toned down his election denial rhetoric, Kirk still pays lip service to Trump’s lie. He told the people’s convention: “We will not forget the injustice of 2020; we will avenge it in November.”
Kirk’s outsized influence on the Republican party is seen nowhere more clearly than in Arizona, where TP USA has been headquartered since 2018. In a few short years, the group has transformed the Arizona legislature by replacing moderate Republicans with far-right Trump acolytes.
“Turning Point has become toxic in Arizona,” said Tyler Montague, an Arizona-based Republican strategist. “They’ve helped to cement an extreme worldview, creating anger that in turn generates political energy that they harness. That’s their game.”
Turning Point now exerts an iron grip on the Arizona legislature through the all-powerful Freedom caucus, which is led by Jake Hoffman, former communications chief of TP USA. Hoffman is closely connected to Tyler Bowyer, Turning Point’s chief operating officer who represents Arizona on the Republican National Committee.
Both Hoffman and Bowyer are being prosecuted for their role as so-called “fake electors” in which they allegedly plotted to prevent Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election by sending an alternative slate of electors to Congress. They deny the charges.
In 2022, Bowyer led a campaign to oust Rusty Bowers, the then Republican speaker of the Arizona house. It was revenge for Bowers’ refusal to play along with Trump’s stolen election lie.
“I will do whatever it takes to ensure you are retired,” Bowyer threatened Bowers by text message. Bowers was duly turfed out of the state assembly in the 2022 Republican primary election.
As a result of his own removal, and that of other moderate Republicans, Bowers told the Guardian that he now sees the Arizona Republican party and Turning Point as synonymous.
“They are basically the same, they are in sync right now,” he said. “They wrap themselves in a Christian flag and get all these young kids to think they’re doing the Lord’s work, and they use that evangelistic fervor very cynically to raise money and increase their power.”
Where Arizona went, now goes the national Republican party. Over the past two years, Kirk has turned his sights on to the country’s Republican party establishment, ejecting RNC members judged to be “disconnected with grassroot conservatives” in the exact same way Turning Point ousted Rusty Bowers.
Kirk was credited as a key figure in forcing out Ronna McDaniel as chair of the RNC. Her departure came in a night of the long knives that saw leadership of the Republican party transferred to Trump loyalists including the former president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.
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Having established himself as a kingmaker within the national Republican orbit, Kirk can no longer hide behind the label of student activist. He’s playing with the adults now.
The blowback has been visceral. The reviled mainstream media has begun to focus on how comfortably Kirk is doing, with the Associated Press highlighting his $4.75m 6,800-sq-ft Spanish-style estate in an Arizona gated community. (It’s now on the market for $6.5m.)
He’s getting heat too for his stream of unabashed racist comments. Kirk has called George Floyd, whose murder by a Minnesota police officer sparked a nationwide reckoning, a “scumbag”; criticized Martin Luther King as “awful” and “not a good person”; and said that whenever he boards a plane with a Black pilot he worries whether they are qualified.
Darrell Scott, a Black pastor from Cleveland who has been close to Trump for more than a decade, has accused Kirk of breeding a new generation of Hitler Youth. Scott told the Guardian that Kirk was damaging Trump’s chances of winning in November by alienating Black voters.
“Kirk talked all this negative shit about Black people, and his proximity to President Trump caused people to wonder: Is that what Trump is thinking too? I have publicly refuted Kirk because every vote counts,” Scott said.
The Guardian invited Kirk to respond to criticism of his racist rhetoric and of Turning Point’s patchy record with electoral outcomes, but he did not respond.
Kirk presents himself as a Pied Piper, drawing young and disengaged conservative voters to the ballot box in magical ways no one else can.
The crowd at the “people’s convention” told a different story. It was largely older in age, as Trump crowds often are, and almost exclusively white – a striking contrast to Trump’s boast that he is gaining ground with Black voters.
The speakers’ rostrum and attendee list at the Detroit event were stacked with conspiracy theorists and extremists, including the promoter of “Pizzagate”, Jack Posobiec, and Alex Jones, the bankrupt InfoWars host who claimed the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax. (The Holocaust-denying neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes also turned up, but was denied entry.)
The combination of older white people in the audience and extremists on stage led the conservative Washington Examiner to denounce Turning Point as “one of the most destructive forces in Republican politics”.
Kirk’s biggest problem is his track record in electoral races. Dixon is not the only Turning Point-backed casualty. In 2022, Kirk supported several extreme election-denying Republicans for statewide posts in Arizona, including Kari Lake for governor, all of whom flopped.
“They doubled down on angry messages that were not winning messages,” Montague said. “Winning messages are based in truth – Kirk is dragging us away from that.”
Kirk and team insist this year will be different. Their new focus on “low-propensity voters” who are amenable to Trump’s embrace will have a decisive and positive impact on election day, they say.
“This event is a statement to the leaders of both political parties that ‘we the people’ are back in charge, and we are going to send a triumphant message,” Kirk proclaimed at the “people’s convention”.
Whether Trump and big money donors continue to lap this stuff up may depend on what happens in November.
