US President Donald Trump walks onstage during the memorial service for political activist Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium yesterday in Glendale, Arizona. Photo / Getty Images
The five-hour memorial service for conservative activist/influencer/organiser Charlie Kirk that packed tens of thousands yesterday into a Phoenix-area stadium was a melding of religion and politics unlike any seen before.
Or perhaps it was proof, if any more were needed, that the line that used to separate them may no longer exist, particularly on the United States right.
Practically missing were the healing rituals the nation has come to know in these times when it is rocked by the all-too-common kind of tragedy that occurred when Kirk was killed on September 10 on a college campus in Utah.
With the exception of a moving and powerful declaration by his widow, Erika Kirk, that her Christian faith calls her to forgive her husband’s killer, there were almost no appeals for transcending the political divide or putting hate aside.
Or recognition that the spasm of political violence of recent years has been the work of - and inflicted upon - both of the nation’s ideological tribes, arising in an era in which deranged individuals find in the fetid corners of online culture justification for horrendous acts.
All of this formed an emblem of where the US finds itself in the Trump era.
“He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them,” US President Donald Trump, who was the final speaker, said of Kirk.
“That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.”
Though the service had begun with soothing gospel messages, it took a combative turn as Kirk’s political allies took the stage.
Many of the eulogies, including those of Administration figures, were calls to the barricades.
“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,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said.
Commentator and provocateur Benny Johnson cited the array of top government officials in the audience and demanded they use the power of government to avenge Kirk’s “martyrdom”.
“Right here is the State Department, the Department of War, the Department of Justice, the chief executive,” Johnson said. He told them their “godly mission” is “wielding the sword against evil”.
Those comments, and many others like it, came against a backdrop in which Trump is intensifying pressure on the traditionally independent Justice Department to prosecute his critics and has said he believes negative news stories about him are “really illegal”.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has imposed a mandate prohibiting reporters from obtaining military or defence information without Pentagon approval.
Disney-owned ABC has taken late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air over his comments about Kirk, after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr warned local affiliate operations could be punished because of them.
It was without irony that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claimed in her eulogy: “Charlie lived what our founders envisioned - freedom, the right to speak even when we disagree. Freedom.
“I may not agree with what you say, but I will fight to defend to the death with my very life your right to speak. Free speech is the foundation of our democratic republic. We must protect it at all costs because without it we’ll be lost.”
What many of the speakers pointed out is true: Kirk’s stature has become even larger in death than it was when he was a living political phenomenon.
An Economist/YouGov survey released a few days after Kirk’s killing found only about one in four American adults said they were “very familiar” with him before he was killed.
And surprisingly, given how much of his activism was focused on campuses and young men, the older Americans it polled had more favourable views of Kirk than the youngest set of adults.
Outside the stadium was another reminder of Kirk’s impact: an army of volunteers registering people to vote.
One of them, former grocery store owner Mikki Bizak, 70, told my colleague Yvonne Wingett Sanchez that she had begun following Kirk about four years ago and was pleased that his widow is taking over his organisation.
“You’re going to see a big huge movement among the Christian community as well as those people to the right - there are a lot of people to the right that aren’t yet Christians,” Bizak said.
In last year’s presidential election, Trump’s campaign took the unusual tack of turning over its ground game to outside groups, led by Kirk’s untested Turning Point Action.
At the time, Democrats mocked the move and pointed to their traditional brick-and-mortar campaign offices.
Nor was there much confidence that Kirk and his army would actually be able to deliver the “low-propensity” voters who don’t often show up at the polls.
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who ran Trump’s 2024 campaign, said in her eulogy: “They didn’t meet expectations. They shattered them and blew them out of the water.
“President Trump’s victory, winning the popular vote in every swing state, was powered by young people, most brand new to politics,” Wiles added. “Charlie just didn’t help. He made the winning difference.”
In another time - one that feels like another universe - it would have been unseemly to turn a religious memorial into a campaign rally.
When GOP presidential candidate Richard Nixon arrived at the funeral of the Rev. Martin Luther King jnr in 1968, some in the crowd that followed the mule-drawn cart carrying the assassinated civil rights leader’s coffin expressed their disdain, calling it “politicking”.
There were political overtones to the 2018 memorial service for Senator John McCain (Republican), whose war heroism Trump had disparaged and whose service also took place in Arizona. Eulogist Joe Biden, then a former vice-president, lamented: “All we do today is attack the oppositions of both parties, their motives, not the substance of their argument”.
Since then, that divide has only deepened.
As the memorial for Kirk so vividly demonstrated, the growing imperative for the movement that Trump started and Kirk helped elevate is not to bridge, but to conquer.
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.