By Nathan Layne, Nandita Bose and Joseph Ax
GLENDALE, Arizona (Reuters) -A memorial service for Charlie Kirk on Sunday is expected to draw a massive crowd at a football stadium in Arizona, where President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other prominent MAGA allies will pay tribute to the slain conservative activist.
Organizers said they expected to fill State Farm Stadium in Glendale, which has a capacity of more than 73,000, and had arranged for overflow space at a nearby arena, according to Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Kirk’s advocacy group, Turning Point USA.
Security will be extremely tight, given Trump’s attendance as well as the ongoing political turmoil in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. A senior Department of Homeland Security official said the service had been given the agency’s highest level security rating, reserved for “events of the highest national significance” such as the Super Bowl.
Kirk, 31, was assassinated by a single bullet on September 10 during a campus event in Utah. The 22-year-old suspected gunman has been charged with murder, and investigators say he told his romantic partner in text messages that he had killed Kirk because he had “enough of his hate.”
The killing has raised fears about the growing frequency of U.S. political violence across the ideological spectrum, while also deepening partisan divides. Trump, a close ally of Kirk’s, has cited the murder in escalating his calls for a crackdown on his political opponents, including left-wing organizations that he has blamed for the shooting even though authorities have said the gunman acted alone.
The firestorm over Kirk’s assassination only intensified last week, when Disney’s ABC network abruptly pulled late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel off the air after conservatives expressed outrage over remarks he made about the killing on Monday. The company’s decision came just hours after Brendan Carr, Trump’s head of the Federal Communications Commission, threatened to use his agency to punish the network over Kimmel’s comments.
Kimmel’s suspension has drawn objections from civil rights groups, Democrats and television and film writers, who say the Trump administration is using Kirk’s death as a pretext to stifle critical media in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s free speech protections.
The roster of speakers at Sunday’s service, titled “Building a Legacy: Remembering Charlie Kirk,” demonstrates Kirk’s influence as the leader of the country’s biggest conservative youth organization.
In addition to Trump and Vance, who was personally close to Kirk, senior administration officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy will address the crowd. Kirk’s widow, Erika, who was elected as Turning Point’s chief executive last week, is also scheduled to speak.
In his remarks, Trump planned to cast Kirk as a martyr for the conservative movement and highlight his legacy as a cultural and political force, according to a White House source. He was also expected to use the moment to again draw a line between Kirk’s death and what he calls left-wing extremism; the source declined to say whether the president would urge supporters to remain peaceful or whether his tone would be unifying or combative.
Kirk, who built a massive following through his savvy use of social media, radio shows and campus tours, when he often invited skeptical students to debate him, was credited with mobilizing young voters to Trump’s cause in 2024.
Braxton Mitchell, a 25-year-old Republican state legislator in Montana, jumped in his friend’s Ford F-150 pickup truck on Tuesday and began the 17-hour drive towards Phoenix to attend Sunday’s memorial.
Mitchell said it was Kirk who inspired him to speak out as a young conservative. He organized a pro-gun rights walkout at his high school in 2018 in response to other students protesting gun violence following the Parkland school shooting in Florida.
“He’s the guy that set the tone, set the stage for what I’ve done in my life in politics,” said Mitchell, who joined Turning Point’s ambassador program in 2019 and met Kirk in person several times.
(Reporting by Nathan Layne and Nandita Bose; Additional reporting by Ted Hesson; Writing by Joseph Ax; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
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