Despite crowning himself the headliner, Trump couldn’t win over Charlie Kirk’s mourners

President Donald Trump was the final speaker at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, capping off six hours of an intensely evangelical, borderline nationalist Christian revival. He entered with the biggest pyrotechnics of the day while Lee Greenwood himself serenaded him live with “God Bless the USA.” And the moment he began to speak, I noticed something odd: people were already streaming toward the exits.

It was curious, for up until that point, the crowd of 70,000, packed to the gills of the State Farm Stadium in Arizona, had been completely enraptured. Trump had followed pastors who’d spoken about Kirk’s faith, influencers who’d exhorted the audience to put on the “armor of God” to fight the left, politicians who’d called him a “warrior,” and conservative intellectuals who’d called Kirk’s death a flashpoint for Western civilization. He’d followed Kirk’s friends and colleagues, who spoke movingly of Kirk’s beliefs and politics. “He always wanted to figure out how to bring the Holy Spirit to a Trump rally,” said Tyler Bowyer, the COO of Turning Point USA, which is the student youth group that helped deliver the White House to Trump. And he was right after Erika Kirk, his grief-stricken widow and the new CEO of TPUSA, who brought the crowd to its feet when she said that she forgave her husband’s killer.

But as more and more people got out of their seats — they wouldn’t be able to get back into the stadium due to security protocols, and they clearly didn’t care about that, they just wanted to beat traffic — Trump dropped a bomb that obliterated the presence of the Holy Spirit. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. But I disagree with Charlie,” he smirked. “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.” Apparently, forgiveness is an absolutely foreign concept to the MAGA mindset, even for ones who claim to be Christian.

After Erika Kirk’s message of forgiveness, Trump’s hatred was jarring — for me, for the journalists that I was texting who’d covered Trumpworld for years, and for the remaining crowd, who also started standing up to leave. “I’m sorry. I am sorry,” Trump continued, not looking sorry at all. “Erika can talk to me, and they hope that maybe they can convince me that that’s not right, but I can’t stand my opponent.”

The stadium continued to empty while Trump began rambling about autism and tariffs — by the time he wrapped up, more than half the audience was gone — and everything I’d witnessed beforehand suddenly shifted into a new context. The people who’d come to the memorial from across the country, and perhaps the world, had treated it as a pilgrimage. They were venerating a martyr who had been fighting culture wars on a deeply spiritual level. They were there for the Christian rock blasting through towers of speakers; to wear red, white, and blue, per the memorial’s instructions, and sing every word of “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” They were there to listen to Charlie’s pastor, Charlie’s friends, Charlie’s wife.

They had not necessarily come for the MAGA influencers, politicians, or even Trump himself. And once that dynamic became apparent, I suddenly realized that every speaker was not only delivering a eulogy for their friend — they were also auditioning for his crowd.

For the past several days, the Republican Party has lionized Kirk as a generational talent whose feats cannot be replicated. TPUSA was the right’s most successful project to win college students, a demographic that they’d long given up on. (As Secretary of State Marco Rubio recounted telling Kirk: “Why don’t you start somewhere easier, like, for example, communist Cuba?”) Kirk had pioneered the MAGA influencer model, finding a way to convert young people to conservatism at scale. Kirk was also a political talent and coalition-builder, able to get bitter enemies into some sort of accordance by simply asking if they’d ever want to speak at a TPUSA event.

And Kirk, in death, had done something unthinkable: he drew a bigger indoor crowd than Trump ever has.

While Trump often inflates the size of his outdoor crowds, it’s much harder to fudge the numbers when there’s an occupancy cap and a limited number of seats. To date, Trump’s biggest indoor rally was last January at the Capitol One Arena in Washington, DC, with an estimated 20,000-plus in attendance. But a reported 300,000 people had registered for free, first come-first serve tickets to Kirk’s memorial service. An estimated 100,000 people had come to Phoenix to try and get in. Some had reportedly camped outside the stadium, home to the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals, all night. Traffic was backed up for miles, partially due to tightened security, partially due to thousands of cars trying to get to parking and Ubers dropping their passengers off.

I’d tried to get there by 5:45AM in order to get my bag screened by the Secret Service — if members of the press wanted to bring their laptops in, they only had one chance to do so — but by 6:04AM, we were still stuck in traffic, and my window to enter the stadium was rapidly closing. “I’ll just get out here,” I told the driver, and I immediately ran the fastest half-mile of my adult life down a massive boulevard, past thousands of people — families, elders, some of them MAGA, all of them faithful — walking along the dusty desert sidewalks as the pink sun rose.

The doors opened at 8AM. The first 70,000 people in line were granted entry into State Farm Stadium, while a 10,000-plus overflow crowd went to the Desert Diamond Arena across the street, and another 10,000 watched nearby, according to TPUSA estimates. And to reiterate, I have never seen Trump fill an NFL stadium. (According to my cousin, a Phoenix local, neither could the Arizona Cardinals.)

I saw dozens of MAGA influencers I’d tracked for a decade — Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Raheem Kassam, Laura Loomer, Alex Bruesewitz, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Jack Posobiec, and, reportedly, several more inside Vice President JD Vance’s private box. Elon Musk showed up. Members of Congress showed up. Nearly the entire presidential line of succession showed up. A man wheeled around a massive wooden cross around the stadium floor the entire time. And for a community that was all about content creation, very few people were making #content — though it would have been hard, considering that no one was allowed to bring bags into the venue, much less camera equipment, unless they were credentialed media. (That said, the credentialed media for this event did include a high proportion of right-wing internet outlets, several independent MAGA influencers, and student journalists from college papers.)

There seemed to be three categories of speakers at Kirk’s memorial: those who were Christian, those who were Christian nationalists, and those who were nationalists trying to be Christian. The first two types of people had an easier time with the crowd, though the syncretic nature of Christian nationalism occasionally popped up. At one point, Posobiec, a conservative activist, pulled out a Catholic rosary (this was not a Catholic service) and waved it menacingly: “Put on the full armor of God! Do it now!” At another point, Carlson, who had recently implied Kirk was a target of an Israeli pressure campaign, told a story about the “guys eating hummus” in Jerusalem who decided to kill Jesus — an antisemitic trope his followers immediately clocked.

Given the circumstances of Kirk’s death and the crowd in attendance, the nationalists couldn’t really ignore the “Christian” part, though they did give their best attempts. “You have no idea the dragon you have awakened,” bellowed Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s harsh anti-immigration policy. “You have no idea how determined we will be to save this civilization, to save the West, to save this republic, because our children are strong and our grandchildren will be strong, and our children’s children’s children will be strong. And what will you leave behind? Nothing.”

“Our call to action is now, and every one of us needs to be a warrior like Charlie: to take shelter in God, to draw strength and fearlessness from the lord who sits within every one of our hearts, to stand together continue the mission that Charlie dedicated his life to,” said Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence. A Washington friend immediately texted to ask if Gabbard had recently converted from Hinduism. (When she was elected to Congress in 2013, she swore her oath of office on a copy of the Bhagavad Gita.)

“According to the book of Acts, the first martyr in the early Christian church was Stephen who was stoned to death, and as Stephen was being killed, he said, ‘Behold, I see the heavens opened and the son of man standing at the right hand of God,’” said Donald Trump Jr., of all people. “Now there are many times in the Bible where Jesus is seated at the right hand of God, but this is the only time he’s seen standing. And while the Bible isn’t explicit about this, I like to think Jesus was standing to welcome Stephen, the courageous martyr, into heaven.”

And Vance, who had been close to Kirk, made a startling confession: “As much as faith is an important part of my life, I have talked more about Jesus Christ in the past two weeks than I have in my entire time on Earth.”

If Trump had not spoken last — if I had not witnessed the crowds immediately start leaving once Erika Kirk was done and Trump took the podium — I would have left convinced that Christian theocracy was imminent in America. If I’d only watched the livestream, a narrow, hyperproduced slice of the full experience, I’d have thought the same thing. But oddly, Trump’s presence deflated the entire experience, and the only thing I can compare it to is a wet fart. Perhaps, as a lame-duck president, Trump could finally drop the pretense that he cared as much about his faith as his Republican voters did. But it also hinted at another crack in the MAGA coalition that he kept together: what would Trump’s secular followers think about the “muscular” Christian nationalism, as Bannon put it later, that manifested at Kirk’s memorial?

Had Kirk lived, the 31-year-old would have had ample time to manage the growth of that coalition, perhaps even inheriting it one day from Trump. But Kirk is now a martyr, and by the end of his memorial, it was clear: even if it wasn’t natural to them, MAGA’s aspiring leaders had to learn how to harness the religious fire his death had ignited.