Why the Charlie Kirk Memorial Might Spell the End of Trump and MAGA
Speeches by the president, Stephen Miller, and Tucker Carlson will accelerate dislike of the president’s agenda.
Sunday's massive, televised memorial service for Charlie Kirk contained grace notes that were simply breathtaking to behold. "That young man…I forgive him," said Kirk's widow Erika, speaking of alleged killer Tyler Robinson. "I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it's what Charlie would do."
Yet such a profound expression of grief and forgiveness was overwhelmed by the crassly political messaging voiced by speakers such as President Donald Trump, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, and media hypeman Tucker Carlson. By using the occasion to score cheap partisan points and indulge in weird personal obsessions, they managed to drag the service into Idiocracy meets The Hunger Games territory. Indeed, far from being the launching pad for "the storm" and the "awaken[ing]" of the "dragon" that Miller prophesied, Sunday's event may well represent the high-water mark of Trump's final term and the crescendo of MAGA more broadly as the negative and unpopular effects of his policies become unmistakable.
Taking the stage after Erika Kirk, Trump averred, "He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don't want the best for them." While some Trump supporters insist that the president was engaging in a self-deprecating display to honor Charlie Kirk's memory, even they show discomfort. As PJ Media's Tim O'Brien grants, "On paper or online, this is an easy line to misread. A short video clip of it may also remove tone and context. To be fair, Trump's patented deadpan delivery doesn't help with some people, who, even when they watch him say his words, still aren't able to pick up his self-deprecation. Then, of course, is the fact that there is a certain degree of truth in what he says."
Indeed, Trump is nothing if not vindictive to opponents big and small, real and imagined. In his remarks, he managed to squeeze in a reference to late-night host Jimmy Kimmel as an "anchor [who] had no talent and no ratings" along with an ardent defense of his controversial and unpopular tariff policy. "Tariffs are making us rich again," he said. "Richer than anybody ever thought was possible. And the only one challenging them are people that hate our country or foreign countries that are paying a price….Charlie understood that." He also promised that "I think we found an answer to autism," teasing yesterday's announcement about a supposed connection between Tylenol and the condition.
These are strange things to say at a memorial service for a 31-year-old father of two felled by an assassin's bullet. But Trump was overshadowed in sheer weirdness and off-putting affect by the massively popular former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who told the thousands in attendance that Kirk's assassination reminded him of "his favorite story ever." He proceeded to set the scene: "It's about 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem, and Jesus shows up and he starts talking about the people in power, and he starts doing the worst thing that you can do, which is telling the truth about people." Carlson then describes a room full of presumably Jewish critics of Christ, saying, "I can just sort of picture the scene in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus, thinking about—'What do we do about this guy telling the truth about us? We must make him stop talking.' And there's always one guy with the bright idea, and I can just hear him say, 'I've got an idea. Why don't we just kill him? That'll shut him up, that'll fix the problem."
Carlson laughs in a way that can charitably be described as demented, even as he is invoking a version of the "deicide myth," or the idea that Jews killed Christ and continue to bear responsibility for his death. He is clearly drawing a comparison between Jesus and Kirk, though the analogy seems off, if only because Kirk was on speed dial with Trump and many members of the Republican Party who control both houses of Congress and a majority of statehouses. Indeed, the story seems less intended to say anything about Kirk and more to burnish Carlson's reputation as "America's leading purveyor of antisemitic ideas," as a recent National Review article called him.
Then there was Miller, who in an August appearance on Sean Hannity's Fox News program said, "The Democrat [sic] Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization."
Earlier in September, Miller inveighed against "a vast, organized ecosystem of indoctrination" comprising "child services, law clerks, hospital nurses, teachers, gov't workers, even DOD employees" who "have been deeply and violently radicalized." This is the paranoid style in American politics on steroids, spoken not from some marginal fringe position but from the White House itself. Like his boss and many MAGA social media stalwarts, Miller cannot conceive of disagreement as stemming from anything other than a to-the-death commitment to destroy Western civilization or, same thing, Trump's policy agenda.
Miller's comments at Kirk's memorial struck a similarly combative and hyperbolic note and, like Trump and many of the speakers at the service, implied that the shooter is in no way the lone gunman he appears to have been, but a representative of some sort of vast conspiracy which is marching in lockstep against the Trump and MAGA agenda. He invoked they without ever defining the term with any precision or specificity.
They cannot imagine what they have awakened.
They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.
It would be comforting to write off such rhetoric as grief deranged by the utter horror of a political assassination if it didn't comport with everything we know about Miller going back to his student days. The logic of Miller's thinking is clear—to oppose the president is to be part of an "organized ecosystem of indoctrination" and paves the way for endless harassment of anyone or any group that challenges Trump and the MAGA agenda.
But is Miller correct when asserting to critics of Trump and MAGA, "You cannot defeat us. You cannot slow us. You cannot stop us. You cannot deter us"?
Almost certainly not, and not for any nefarious reasons. By politicizing every aspect of everyday life, Trump and MAGA have exhausted more and more of us. Coupled with policy failure, the result is falling support for a candidate who captured just shy of 50 percent of the popular vote against arguably the worst Democratic candidate of the past 50 years. It's meaningful that Trump gained voter share among young people and many ethnic and racial minorities—that's a testament to the awfulness of Joe Biden's presidency and the public's interest in reversing course.
But Trump's collapse is on his hands, not those of any conspiracy. Per RealClearPolitics' average of polls, the last time Trump's approval rating was higher than his disapproval rating was back in March. Currently, his disapproval is at 52.6 percent, just 0.1 of a point below his worst ever rating since January. His administration's lashing out at ABC and Disney over Kimmel's remarks about Kirk's shooter and Trump's response have drawn rebukes not simply from regular critics such as Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) but from MAGA allies such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas), who said Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr's censorial threats were "right out of Goodfellas." Attorney General Pam Bondi's statements about criminalizing the nonconstitutional category of "hate speech" drew similar outcries from a variety of conservatives who usually support the president, including Megyn Kelly, Matt Walsh, and even Carlson, who said, "Any attempt to impose hate speech laws in this country…cannot be allowed under any circumstances."
On specific issues that are at the center of his agenda, Trump's numbers are bad and getting worse, according to a recent Washington Post–Ipsos poll. Sixty-four percent of Americans disapprove of his handling of tariffs, 60 percent disapprove of his handling of the Russia-Ukraine war, 58 percent disapprove of his actions regarding Israel and Gaza, 55 percent disapprove of his immigration stance, and 54 percent don't like his handling of crime.
On the economy—arguably the most important issue for any president—59 percent are unhappy. "Brace yourself," cautions George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen at The Free Press. "Here comes stagflation," the defining condition of the 1970s' economic malaise, which denotes simultaneous high inflation and high unemployment. He predicts inflation pushing up to 4 percent and unemployment hitting 7 percent over the next year and a half. Though low by '70s standards, those would discombobulate further the 75 percent of Americans (and 51 percent of Republicans!) who already believe the country is headed in the wrong direction.
All causes have Trump and MAGA's thumbprints on them. Tariffs increase prices (Cowen notes that coffee is up 14.5 percent since last July and ground beef just hit an all-time high of $6.33 per pound in August) and the president is goading the Federal Reserve to reduce interest rates and increase the money supply. As happened in his first term, government spending and national debt are up, and so is unemployment, especially in the very sectors tariffs and reduced immigration were supposed to save. "The manufacturing sector is down 31,000 jobs" over the past few months, writes Reason's Eric Boehm. "Other blue-collar sectors like construction and mining are down over that same period." "The politics of stagflation tend to lead to voter dissatisfaction," writes Cowen. "So however bad the public mood feels to you right now, there is a good chance it will get worse."
The inability or unwillingness of Trump and his allies to shift course and temperament are pretty clear. ("The De-escalation of Politicization Can't Be One-Sided," blares a headline at The Daily Signal.) Erika Kirk will be taking over Turning Point USA, the organization her husband founded, and perhaps she will season its political commitments with the powerful Christian forgiveness she displayed on Sunday. "The answer to hate is not hate," she said on Sunday. "Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us."
But to the extent that the broader MAGA movement doubles or triples down on its policies and rhetoric on display, it will only become even less popular.
