Why Republicans Are Turning Against Charlie Kirk Despite Trump Ties

Charlie Kirk has been a GOP bombshell since he founded Turning Point USA in 2012. He has raised millions of dollars for conservative causes and gotten thousands of young people to turn out and vote down ballot for the Republican Party. But 14 years on, Kirk’s biggest critics aren’t leftists—they’re fellow conservatives, who claim that the 30-year-old’s vision is wilting and dragging their campaigns down with it.

A brutal report published Tuesday in The Guardian notes the growing discontent with Kirk.

Tudor Dixon, a Republican candidate who lost Michigan’s 2022 gubernatorial race, has publicly vented that Turning Point’s backing meant practically nothing when it came to the ballot box.

“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,” Dixon said on her podcast in February. “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.”

Even in Arizona, where Turning Point has transformed the state legislature into a cohort of Trump acolytes and former Turning Point employees, Republicans have lost faith in Kirk’s approach, slamming his rhetoric as “toxic” without “winning messages.”

“Turning Point has become toxic in Arizona,” Tyler Montague, an Arizona-based Republican strategist, told The Guardian. “They’ve helped to cement an extreme worldview, creating anger that in turn generates political energy that they harness. That’s their game.”

And Kirk’s white-supremacist ideals on race have made even far-right-aligned Black communities question Trump’s values for keeping Kirk so close by. One Black pastor in Cleveland who has been close to Trump for more than a decade accused Kirk of trying to raise the next generation of Hitler Youth and claimed that Trump was only hurting his chances of winning over people of color by keeping Kirk—who has disparaged George Floyd as a “scumbag” and claimed that Martin Luther King Jr. was “not a good person”—so close by during this election season.

“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 told The Guardian.

Donald Trump provided a small window into his preparation strategy for Thursday night’s debate hosted by CNN, and it seems like the former president is in deep, deep trouble. 

Before Trump’s rally in Philadelphia Saturday night, Trump stopped for an interview with conservative radio talk show host Chris Stigall, during which they discussed the former president’s approach to the upcoming presidential debate.

Stigall asked how Trump was feeling about CNN’s debate terms, including mutable mics and the lack of live audience, suggesting that the terms to which the former president readily agreed suddenly present an unfair burden. 

“It’s probably a one-on-three,” Trump said, referring to Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, the two CNN anchors tapped to host. Amid all of his whining about an event he fully opted into, Trump confirmed that his actual debate prep is nonexistent.

“People say, ‘How are you preparing?’ I’m preparing by taking questions from you and others, if you think about it,” said Trump.

It’s difficult to imagine how being interviewed by a fan could possibly prepare Trump for the difficult questions that are likely to come his way on Thursday night. Trump will likely face questions about his role in the January 6 insurrection, the millions of dollars he owes author E. Jean Carroll, or the additional millions he owes in penalties from the Trump Organization’s civil fraud case in New York. He’ll likely also face questions about his recent conviction on 34 felony charges in his hush-money trial, allegations that he stole classified documents and obstructed their retrieval, and his racketeering indictment in Georgia for a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election election. 

Trump will likely field questions about his whole range of unsavory, in many cases illegal, deeds and dangerous proclamations, which conservative pundits would never deign to ask him about. 

“So, uh, I’m preparing by dealing with you. You’re tougher than all of them, right?” Trump said, grinning crookedly. 

Stigall burst into laughter, appearing overjoyed. Trump then shook Stigall’s hand, and thanked him for being a “good friend.” Stigall promptly changed his profile picture on X, formerly Twitter, to a photo of him shaking hands with the former president. 

This is hardly on par with the “hostile environment” Trump’s spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt described during her Monday interview on CNN, which was ultimately cut short. Leavitt said her candidate was wading into dangerous waters so that he could reach the broadest possible audience—admitting that the debate will be the furthest thing possible from these softball interviews with his own supporters.  

But appearances like Leavitt’s, which devolved into airing grievances about Tapper’s coverage of the former president, are Trump’s real debate prep, and it started weeks ago. Through escalating conspiracy theories alleging Joe Biden will be on performance-enhancing drugs, whining about biased moderators and the weaponization of mutually agreed-upon debate terms, Trump’s spin campaign and his debate prep are really one and the same: a battle plan that demands no real strategy because it discounts the outcome before the fight even takes place. 

It’s not dissimilar from Trump’s election strategy. If you can’t beat ’em, there was no race, right? But for someone obsessed with not being a loser, it’s shocking how blatantly Trump telegraphs his inability to win. If his comments are anything to go by, Thursday night will be a fiasco.

It’s common for politicians on the campaign trail to make a show of sampling the local cuisine to look more like an “everyman.” So when Donald Trump was in Philadelphia, of course, he got a cheesesteak. But then, he did something unusual.

Trump had stopped by Tony and Nick’s Steaks Saturday to grab one of Philly’s famous sandwiches. An interviewer asked him about it, and the convicted felon contradicted himself in his answer.

“Ohhh, that was good,” Trump said. “I haven’t sampled it yet, but I will.”

Why would Trump answer the question in that way? Clearly, he wouldn’t know the sandwich was “good” unless he had tried some, but maybe he just loved the experience of having his order taken. And why not eat a hot, melty sandwich right away? It doesn’t taste as good when it’s cold.

But the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has always been weird about food. He loves eating fast food such as McDonald’s because he reportedly has a fear of being poisoned and thinks those places are “safer.” He’s posted staged photos that call into question whether he eats fried chicken with a knife and fork, or even at all. In 2011, he was famously called out by Jon Stewart for eating chain-store pizza with a knife and fork. Maybe Trump didn’t want to make a mess by eating a hot, melty cheesesteak.

Or maybe he forgot if he ate it or not. Trump has shown numerous signs of cognitive decline in recent months, whether it’s fumbling through speeches at rallies, ranting about boats and sharks, or making bizarre, nonsensical claims about migrants. He continues to brag about acing a cognitive test, but he changes the details every time he relates the story. MeidasTouch even made a supercut of several of his gaffes, including him mixing up Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley.

Maybe Trump ought to be a little more careful taking shots at Joe Biden and claiming he’ll be on drugs at Thursday’s presidential debate. After all, Biden’s pretty clear about what he enjoys eating.

CNN commentator and former New York Representative Lee Zeldin made a mess of a simple question about political violence ahead of the first presidential debate.

When CNN’s Kasie Hunt asked Zeldin if he thought Donald Trump was “living up to what you say, that leaders should use rhetoric that discourages political violence,” Zeldin, a former New York gubernatorial candidate, talked in circles around the question, evidently still bound by the party diktat that Trump’s conduct is beyond reproach.

“Well, listen, there’s a lot that I would say, you know, as far as President Trump, what he has said, stuff that President Biden has said, that is not maybe you know, what my particular style is, but President Trump is a fighter. You know, he is, he is on offense. I’m sure he’ll be on offense again on Thursday.… Again, not just talking about what, I, my preference is for that positive, uplifting message. But I do think that a lot of people also want to see that contrast outlined. And this is high stakes. Talking about the president of the United States,” Zeldin said.

The verbal contortion act, aside from its shameless refusal to engage with Trump’s long history of encouraging political violence, was not exactly an incisive bit of analysis.

And Zeldin, who unsuccessfully ran against current New York Governor Kathy Hochul to replace Andrew Cuomo, should know the implications of violent political rhetoric better than most; he was attacked while giving a speech on the campaign trail in 2022. Party loyalty, however, seems to have overridden firsthand experience.

Judge Aileen Cannon is considering throwing out a collection of sealed notes on Trump’s behavior that practically prove that he knowingly stole and withheld classified documents from the U.S. government after he left office.

The notes, written by Trump’s former lead attorney Evan Corcoran two months before the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, describe a man who knew that he had taken troves of sensitive documents from the government and who then continued to knowingly conceal the documents from federal investigators, out of concern that being caught with them could result in criminal charges.

“He raised a question as to, if we gave them additional documents now, would they, would they, the Department of Justice, come back and say well, why did you withhold them, and try to use that as a basis for criminal liability or to make him look bad in the press,” Corcoran wrote of a May 2022 interaction with Trump, according to documents reviewed by ABC News.

Cannon is hearing arguments Tuesday on how strongly prosecutors can lean on the note package, and whether the case could be dismissed outright based on the role the notes play in the prosecution’s case.

A quick refresh: The National Archives requested as early as May 2021—just four months after he left office—that Trump return the missing documents to the government. Months later, a Trump representative would admit that 12 boxes of such material were at Mar-a-Lago. The National Archive ultimately retrieved 15 boxes, 14 of which included classified information, though some of the documents were discovered to have been torn up by Trump upon their retrieval. By May 2022, the Justice Department had obtained a subpoena for “any and all” classified documents at Trump’s residence, expecting the documents by the end of the month.

After Trump failed to respond to the subpoena, three FBI agents and DOJ counterintelligence chief Jay Bratt traveled to Mar-a-Lago in June to iron out the dispute. When they arrived, Trump’s attorney handed over an envelope double-wrapped in tape that they said held more classified documents and, despite being made aware that the boxes holding the sensitive documents were being held in a storage room at the resort, the agents were given “no opportunity … to confirm that no documents with classification markings remained.”

Meanwhile, Trump has practically confessed that he took the sensitive records. In an interview on Newsmax earlier this year, Trump claimed point blank that he actually did take the classified documents, describing the process of shamelessly packing them away while leaving office.

“I took ’em very legally,” Trump told the far-right network in March. “And I wasn’t hiding them.”

Trump faces 42 felony charges in the case related to willful retention of national security information, corruptly concealing documents, and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Meanwhile, the Trump-appointed judge overseeing the case has slow-walked the trial so aggressively that she has been accused by legal experts of attempting to postpone it indefinitely. Last week, Judge Aileen Cannon began hearing arguments not related to Trump’s actions—but instead on whether special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment to the case, and its subsequent prosecution, was constitutional.

If Trump wins the election in November, he could potentially pardon himself, considering all of the alleged crimes are federal charges.