Charlie Kirk finally fell asleep sometime later, in another bed in the house. Erika Kirk heard him slip out early the next morning. She texted “I love you” to him before his chartered plane took off for Provo, Utah. A staff member later told her that he had overheard her husband proclaiming to the pilot as he disembarked, “Today’s going to be a great day.”
Erika Kirk, 36, spoke in a composed voice while fighting through tears about a husband lionized on the right as an inspiration to young Republicans and pilloried on the left for his attacks on civil rights, feminism, and Islam. She acknowledged her struggle to make sense of an unfathomable tragedy.
“I’m allowing myself to feel this so deeply,” she said, “without medication, without alcohol. The Lord is giving me discernment.”
She sat in workout clothes with her legs folded under her on a couch in a rented condominium in Scottsdale, Ariz. Her husband often used the condo as a way station between their home in a gated community outside Scottsdale and the Turning Point USA headquarters in east Phoenix.
Around her neck was the pendant of St. Michael that her husband was wearing when he was shot. The medics had ripped it from his body while attempting to stop the bleeding. A trace of blood remained in the crevice of the cross.
The bathroom floor of the condo was still littered with towels from her husband’s last shower there, a little more than a week ago. “To this day, I can’t go into my bedroom,” she said. “I’m rotating where I sleep.”
Turning Point USA announced the day before the interview that Erika Kirk would replace her husband as its CEO. The organization’s spokesperson, Andrew Kolvet, described her as its “beating heart, spiritual center, and life force.”
But he said that no one could be expected to fill the shoes of Charlie Kirk, who had built Turning Point from scratch starting in 2012 into a sprawling conservative behemoth with $96 million in annual revenues. It was not immediately clear if Erika Kirk would seek to continue her husband’s daily podcast or, for that matter, to joust with liberal students on college campuses.
Still, numerous Turning Point staffers said Erika Kirk had the fortitude to be the group’s new leader. She has also received a vote of confidence from President Trump, who has called her twice since the shooting. The two have known each other since 2012, when Trump was running the Miss USA beauty pageants and she was Miss Arizona.
“Charlie was like a son to him,” Erika Kirk said. “And when the president said, ‘Just let us know how we can support you,’ I told him, ‘My husband just loved conversing with you and using you as a sounding board for all sorts of things. Could we continue that?’ And he said, ‘Of course.’”
The president’s tone, she said, “was soft and embracing. I could tell he wanted to hug me.”
Others have responded in the same manner to Erika Kirk, now left to care for a 3-year-old daughter and a 1-year-old son. That new life, she said, “is actually the least traumatizing thing for me,” since she herself had been raised by her mother after their parents divorced when she was young.
Kirk provided the outside world with a glimpse of her resolve during an emotional 15-minute speech to a livestream audience, two days after her husband was killed and hours after the 22-year-old man charged with his killing, Tyler Robinson, was taken into custody. Reading from notes that she had mostly compiled during the previous night when she was unable to sleep, she vowed, “No one will ever forget my husband’s name, and I will make sure of it.”
She insisted on giving the speech live, rather than recording it ahead of time, she said, “because that’s what Charlie would do, for sure.”
It had been Kirk’s plan to accompany her husband to Utah. But her mother would be undergoing medical treatment in the Phoenix area that same day. “Home needs you,” her husband told her. They agreed that she would instead travel with him on the next leg of the tour, to Colorado State University.
Kirk was sitting in her mother’s hospital room when she saw the number of her husband’s longtime assistant, Michael McCoy, appear on her phone. In retrospect, she said she knew the words — “He’s been shot!” — before McCoy screamed them.
Charlie Kirk’s chartered plane traveled back to Scottsdale to ferry his wife to Provo. He was pronounced dead as she was airborne. “I’m looking at the clouds and the mountains,” Erika Kirk recalled of those surreal hours. “It was such a gorgeous day, and I was thinking: This is exactly what he last saw.”
The sheriff met her in the hospital. He offered her the option of seeing the body but, she said, advised against it. The bullet, he explained, had ravaged her husband’s neck.
“With all due respect,” Erika Kirk remembered saying, “I want to see what they did to my husband.”
She was braced for the worst, but what she saw surprised her. “His eyes were semi-open,” she said. “And he had this knowing, Mona Lisa-like half-smile. Like he’d died happy. Like Jesus rescued him. The bullet came, he blinked, and he was in heaven.”
As Kirk prepared for her husband’s memorial service Sunday, she had her own mortal preoccupations.
Beyond the grief, she said, sometimes she is able “to see the Bible in such Technicolor. To be so serene in saying, ‘Thy will be done. I surrender to it.’ Do I like it? No. That was the love of my life, my soul mate, my best friend. But God’s plan is always greater than ours.”
Like other Christians at Turning Point, she said she sees a divine logic to her husband’s death: a young prophet whose fleeting life has achieved lasting resonance after his martyrdom. While others seek out conspiracies beyond the death of Charlie Kirk at the hands of a lone gunman, Erika Kirk is not among them.
In her view, a young but towering spiritual voice was silenced by a young lost soul. “I’m a strong believer that this was God’s plan,” she said. “And it’s so clear-cut. It couldn’t be more Charlie.”
She added, “I’ve had so many people ask, ‘Do you feel anger toward this man? Like, do you want to seek the death penalty?’ I’ll be honest. I told our lawyer, I want the government to decide this. I do not want that man’s blood on my ledger. Because when I get to heaven, and Jesus is like: ‘Uh, eye for an eye? Is that how we do it?’ And that keeps me from being in heaven, from being with Charlie?”