It’s hard to overstate just how much the conservative activist Charlie Kirk felt like family to many in Donald Trump’s inner circle, and to the president himself.

Kirk was close friends with Vice President J. D. Vance and with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., regularly texting on small-group threads with them and a coterie of young male aides and allies. He was a frequent and welcome presence at the White House and at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club. And his conservative youth organization, Turning Point USA, helped elect Trump in 2024.

By early this evening—after the visceral, gutting visuals of Kirk, 31, being shot in the neck during an event on a Utah college campus, followed by the sudden, jarring news that he had died—the mood at the White House was, unsurprisingly, funereal. I

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