Charlie Kirk’s hometown newspaper predicts he could 'destroy' GOP

20 February 2024

Although right-wing activist Charlie Kirk's nonprofit, Turning Point USA, rose to prominence as a major supporter of former President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, the 29-year-old's multi-million dollar organization has since failed to help Republican candidates win elections.

According to The Associated Press, "That’s particularly true in Turning Point’s adopted home of Arizona, where its slate of deeply conservative candidates in the longtime Republican stronghold lost statewide race" in 2022, "among them Kari Lake’s unsuccessful bid for governor."

In a Tuesday, February 20 op-ed for The Arizona Republic, columnist Phil Boas submits Turning Point could soon successfully "destroy" the national GOP — just as it destroyed Arizona's Republican Party.

Boas notes, "Today in Arizona, a state in which Republicans still boast a 206,000 voter-registration lead over Democrats, the Democrats have taken control of the governor’s office, secretary of state, attorney general and Arizona’s two U.S. Senate seats. One of those Senate seats, Kyrsten Sinema’s, has since gone independent."

And although the state's "independents and moderate Republicans have punished the smash-mouthed populism of the Make America Great Again movement embodied by" the ex-president, "Turning Point was a vehicle for remaking the Republican Party more completely in the image of Trump."

Most recently, Kirk has remained an avid opponent of Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel, who once had Trump's full support.

Boas notes:

Obviously, Kirk didn’t control the fate of Ronna McDaniel. She has served at the pleasure of Donald Trump. And when Trump finally turned on her late last year, she would eventually tender her resignation.

With her ouster came recriminations, and Real Clear Politics was the first to report them.

When McDaniel realized Trump had turned on her, she went to Mar-A-Lago to meet with him, reported Real Clear’s Philip Wegmann.

'Charlie Kirk’s name came up, according to sources familiar with the discussion. One topic of conversation was whether TPUSA was attracting dollars and donors that would otherwise flow to his campaign and whether Kirk’s criticism of Martin Luther King Jr. might undermine Trump’s growing strength among Black voters.'

Boas also points to the fact one Trump source told NBC News that "Kirk and fellow Arizonan Tyler Bowyer, chief operating officer at Turning Point USA, wanted control of RNC’s dollars and donor lists."

The Trump ally said, “This is why he was trying to get rid of Ronna. He shouldn’t make it sound like, 'Oh, we’re tired of losing. We don’t have an early vote program.' He should have just said, 'Listen, he who controls the RNC controls millions of dollars and I want to get my hands on them.’ I mean, that would have been a more honest grift."

Boas' full op-ed is available at this link.

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