I doubt it
Charlie Kirk is a major influencer on the right and his Turning Point organization is the MAGA CPAC. I doubt very seriously that Trump will dump him because he’s a racist. That’s a feature not a bug.
But this story does show more of the fault lines in the GOP and that’s always good news:
For more than a year, Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist and MAGA influencer, was aimed like a heat-seeking missile toward one goal — ousting Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.
It’s a battle he won. Just this week, former President Donald Trump endorsed a new slate of leaders to head the party apparatus and signaled that McDaniel’s four terms would soon come to an end.
Few Republican groups have had as meteoric a rise as Kirk’s Turning Point USA, which launched in 2012. It sought to activate young conservatives and saw its fortunes grow as it attached itself to the Trump movement in 2016. The organization has raised roughly a quarter-billion dollars since, as The Associated Press reported last fall, with its fundraising exploding during the Covid pandemic.
But the RNC effort has Kirk increasingly under the microscope in Trump world. In recent weeks, at least three people, including McDaniel herself, have privately warned Trump about Kirk’s conduct, seven sources familiar with the discussions told NBC News.
Kirk came up during her conversation with the former president at his Mar-a-Lago resort this month in which her future at the helm of the RNC was discussed. It’s disputed who first brought up Kirk, but McDaniel blamed him for some of the RNC’s fundraising woes, saying his organization is collecting from donors who would otherwise fund a more robust party effort.
The discussion of Kirk was first reported by RealClearPolitics. NBC News spoke with more than two dozen Republicans for this report. Both the RNC and Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
McDaniel also asked Trump if he was aware of comments Kirk made on his popular podcast questioning whether Martin Luther King Jr. deserved a federal holiday and remarking that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the airline industry made him skeptical that Black pilots were qualified. He was not, so she relayed them to him.
Those comments sparked a second person, Darrell Scott, a pastor from Ohio who was one of Trump’s first vocal Black allies and has been an adviser to him, to express concerns directly to the former president, four people familiar told NBC News. Scott had already shared his complaints publicly, on a podcast hosted by conservative commentator Tudor Dixon, a Trump-endorsed candidate for governor of Michigan in 2022.
Scott said he could “neither confirm nor deny” that the conversation with Trump took place. But he acknowledged that he has heard from people close to Trump who share his view that Kirk’s commentary may harm the former president’s prospects with Black voters.
“I’ve got to say, racism is like the word ‘ugly.’ I can’t always describe it, but I know it when I see it,” Scott said in an interview with NBC News. “That boy’s a racist right there.”
It’s unclear how Trump has taken to the warnings. Trump allies offered conflicting accounts of whether he was bothered by any of the issues raised to him, with one ally who has warned him about Kirk saying Trump believes Kirk is a “juggernaut.”
“Trump is f—ing pissed that Charlie is out causing problems for him in the Black community,” said another person close to Trump who claimed direct knowledge of his thinking.
Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son and a close Kirk ally, said the idea that Kirk is in anything less than “great standing with both my father and the entire Trump campaign” is “nothing more than fiction coming from people jealous of the close relationship Charlie has built with our family.”
“Frankly, it’s sad that there are some people attempting to increase their own relevancy by manufacturing lies that Charlie is on the outs,” he said in a statement. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
It’s a fascinating story of a greedy grifter vs other greedy grifters and they’re all at each others’ throats. Delicious. Read the whole thing.