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.