President Donald Trump's MAGA coalition has fractured in the months following the assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk and turned on itself over its internal battle over anti-Semitism.
Following Kirk's death, his Turning Point USA organization had anticipated bringing together MAGA loyalists to continue Kirk's attempt to unify the group during its AmericaFest in December — but that backfired when "one by one, MAGA’s leading lights took the stage and began shivving one another in public," according to an analysis from Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic published Wednesday.
"When Kirk was killed, conservatives believed that his death would galvanize his cause," Rosenberg wrote. “'Millions of Charlie Kirks were created today,' declared Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado. But as it turned out, Kirk’s assassin didn’t kill just one man; he destabilized the entire Trump coalition by removing a pivotal person who had been holding it together. In doing so, the killer helped unshackle dark forces—chief among them anti-Semitism—that now threaten to overtake the conservative movement."
Kirk had viewed the rise of anti-Semitism as a threat to the MAGA movement and was actively fighting against it both on college campuses and within his own coalition.
"Before his life was ended by an assassin’s bullet, Charlie Kirk was trying to save the conservative coalition from turning on itself. To liberals, the late activist was known for debating left-wing students on college campuses. But on the right, Kirk was waging another battle, against people on his own side," Rosenberg wrote.
Despite Kirk's attempts, the rise of hate speech hasn't stopped.
“'In the last six months, I’ve seen more anti-Semitism on the right than I have at any time in my life,' Senator Ted Cruz told the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention in November," Rosenberg wrote. “'It is growing. It is metastasizing. There are about a half-dozen vocal apostles, and it is in particular finding purchase with the young.' Soon after, the Princeton professor Robert George, once dubbed 'the reigning brain of the Christian right,' resigned from the Heritage Foundation’s board. Dozens of staffers reportedly left the organization. One month later, Turning Point’s flagship conference descended into recriminations over the very controversies and conspiracies that its founder had endeavored so assiduously to suppress."
And although Trump appears to have kept his hold on his MAGA base, what Kirk had hoped to avoid has appeared to have only grown.
"On one level, this conflict is about Jews and Israel. But on another, this debate is downstream from something much bigger: a power struggle over who will define and control the MAGA movement once Trump is gone. By painting rivals as tools of the Jews, hard-right influencers such as [Tucker] Carlson and [Steven] Bannon hope to delegitimize the competition not by besting their ideas, but by slurring their loyalties and identity."