This afternoon, the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking onstage at an event on the campus of Utah Valley University. Kirk, 31, was one of the most influential figures on the contemporary American right. In the below essay, Adam Rubenstein remembers Kirk, the subject of his 2018 profile “Kid Trump.” Here he is on “The Charlie Kirk I Knew.” We’ll be bringing you more on this story in the coming hours and days. —The Editors
In 2019, Charlie Kirk and I were, by complete coincidence, on the same flight, Denver to Chicago. I was going to visit my girlfriend in law school, and he was going home to visit his family in Lemont, a Chicago suburb. He technically still lived with his parents—for the few days a year he wasn’t on the road building his organization, Turning Point USA—and was returning home after a campus visit in Colorado.
While walking down the aisle, Charlie spotted me, sitting in a middle seat at the back of the plane, and asked the person next to me to switch seats so we could catch up. She obliged, and Charlie sat down next to me. It had been about a year since I’d seen him last. We knew each other because I had written a profile of him in The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine that was shuttered later that year—a sign of how the conservative movement was transforming in the age of Trump. While we closed our doors, Charlie was raising millions and speaking in front of sold out audiences.
The profile I wrote ended up on the magazine’s cover in August 2018. “Kid Trump” was its headline. To deliver the story, I had spent a week with Charlie, then 24 years old, in Washington, D.C., backstage at a summit he put on for high schoolers in Turning Point USA, on George Washington University’s campus. Five members of the cabinet appeared, as did Mark Cuban, Kellyanne Conway, and Fox News’ Jesse Watters. Students traveled from across the country to attend. Parents came with their children, thrilled by the prospect of seeing Charlie up close.
In the months before publication, I’d meet him periodically at “The Trump,” as he called it—the old post office where President Trump had a hotel.
