“I forgive him.” They were three little words, and yet, they were huge.
In a stadium packed to capacity, Erika Kirk’s address to an assassin was delivered in tears and received with silence until the crowd grew into applause.
“The answer to hate is not hate,” she added. It is, perhaps, the message America needs to hear most and the one it has heard least.
As it happened: Trump delivers speech at Charlie Kirk’s memorial
The memorial to Charlie Kirk felt like a Republican state funeral in all but name.
This was MAGA in mourning, an occasion that laid bare the influence of Charlie Kirk and his politics.
They had travelled in their tens of thousands to the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.
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They saluted a conservative icon and the dress code crafted a patriotic spectacle in red, white and blue.
It was an act of remembrance on a stadium scale, huge in size and sentiment. It was also big on politics.
From the president down, the Trump administration’s top tier spoke of politics after 10 September, the day Charlie Kirk was killed.
This was a Republican movement in one place, with one microphone, after an assassination that accelerated the tectonic shift in US politics.
A week and a half since the assassination, political reaction has distilled into a war over freedom of speech and that was revisited by the president, even if he reserved most of his speech to pay homage to Charlie Kirk.
The White House decanted a full team from Washington DC to Arizona.
They came for reasons of sympathy and bereavement, of course. It was also an occasion laced with politics.
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This was Washington’s travelling roadshow swinging by the support that Charlie built.
The same support was critical in helping Donald Trump back into power at the last election, and the challenge confronting the White House is in harnessing that vote in his absence and carrying it forward.
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Politically, it was a full-court press to style the horses amongst the youth vote and Christian nationalists.
Charlie Kirk brought them onside, and Team Trump wants to keep them there.
