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Why Charlie Kirk Had No Counterpart on the Left
Charlie Kirk understood — perhaps more so than anyone except Donald Trump himself — how power really operates within the MAGA movement.
As the myriad tributes to Kirk in the day since his death have captured, he served a dizzying array of functions within the broader Trumpian universe: a firebrand activist and debater; a media mega-personality overseeing a vast digital empire; the head of a multi-million-dollar political machine at Turning Point USA; a popularizer of the ideological fashions of the young and online right; an occasional adviser to Trump and his inner circle; and a bosom buddy with many of the most powerful denizens of the White House and Mar-a-Lago.
Kirk has no real equivalent on the left. A rough approximation of a left-leaning Kirk would begin with some amalgamation of gun control activist-turned-erstwhile-DNC official
David Hogg with the party consensus voice of the
Pod Save America crew, supplemented by the online edginess of lefty streamer Hasan Piker and the institution-building power of a George Soros.
Yet such a figure on the left is probably impossible. Kirk’s preternatural charisma and otherworldly fundraising abilities no doubt played a major role in his rise: During his early days of building TPUSA, stories circulated of
skeptical megadonors writing five-figure checks after even the briefest of encounters with the 18-year-old Kirk.
But a figure like Kirk is probably only possible within the unique circumstances of Trump’s GOP. Throughout his career, Kirk’s real superpower was intuiting — and deftly exploiting — the institutional hollowness of the Republican Party under Trump. Beginning in 2016, he systematically built political organizations to fulfill the functions once served by the party infrastructure that Trump destroyed. In the place of anemic campus groups like College Republicans, Kirk built Turning Point USA into a grassroots powerhouse with chapters on over 800 campuses. In the place of party-run turnout operations, he expanded the organization’s activist arm, Turning Point Action, into
a multi-million dollar get-out-the-vote machine. He inserted his podcasts and his social media presences into the space left by traditional party messaging and media initiatives. As the GOP
became an increasingly hollow shell with Trump — and Trump alone — at its core, Kirk created new institutional scaffolds to keep the rickety structure together around its leader.
He was clear about his ambition to turn TPUSA into a kind of substitute for all the old official actors of the right. “We want to be an institution in this country that is as well-known and as powerful as
The New York Times, Harvard and tech companies,” Kirk recently told
Deseret News. “And we believe we’re creating that.”
He didn’t quite succeed, but the success he did achieve gave him real political power within the GOP. In 2021, he identified then-candidate JD Vance as a rising figure in the MAGA movement and introduced Vance to the powers-that-be in Trump world. By
some accounts, TPUSA’s get-out-the-vote efforts in swing states like Arizona and Wisconsin helped tip the 2024 election in Trump’s favor, earning Kirk a quietly powerful role in Trump’s transition effort and a direct line to the Oval Office.