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President Donald Trump on Tuesday posthumously awarded conservative activist Charlie Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom, honoring the Turning Point USA co-founder who was assassinated last month while speaking at Utah Valley University.
“We’re here to honor and remember a fearless warrior for liberty, a beloved leader who galvanized the next generation like nobody I’ve ever seen before,” Trump said during a Rose Garden ceremony. Calling Kirk “a visionary” and “a champion in every way,” the president said he “raced back halfway around the globe” from the Middle East, where he had been brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, to attend the event.
Kirk was fatally shot on Sept. 10 during the first stop of his college campus tour. He was 31. Trump announced the next day that he would award Kirk the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Erika Kirk, his widow, accepted the medal on what would have been her husband’s 32nd birthday. She was recently named CEO of Turning Point USA.
“God began a mighty work through my husband, and I intend to see it through,” she said. “The torch is in our hands now — mine, yours, and all the students with Turning Point USA.”
Kirk thanked Trump, first lady Melania Trump, and Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance, close family friends who accompanied her home from Utah aboard the vice president’s plane. Turning to Trump, she gently corrected his earlier comment that her husband “didn’t love his enemies.”
“He did pray for his enemies,” she said, as Trump smiled. “He loved people when it was inconvenient, and he ran his race with endurance, and he kept the faith. Now he wears the crown of a righteous martyr.”
Kirk shared messages from her two young children — a daughter who wished her father a happy birthday and a son who, she joked, had “decided to become the man of the house” by potty training at just 16 months.
The audience included Cabinet members, Republican congressional leaders, and conservative media figures Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity.
Alex Bruesewitz, a Trump adviser and family friend, called Erika Kirk “a gifted leader” and said no one was better suited to carry on her husband’s mission. “She was by Charlie’s side as he took [Turning Point] from a small organization to a behemoth,” he told NBC News.
Under Charlie Kirk’s leadership, Turning Point USA became a major conservative force, especially among young voters. Trump credited the group’s outreach with helping him capture a larger share of voters under 30 than any Republican in decades.
The medal presentation came as Trump vowed to intensify his administration’s crackdown on what he described as “radical left violence and extremism.”
“In the wake of Charlie’s assassination, our country must have absolutely no tolerance for this radical left, violence, extremism, and terror,” Trump said. “We’re dismantling the networks that fund them and finance them, and we’re finding out who those networks are.”
As sirens echoed near the Rose Garden, Trump paused and gestured toward the sound. “You hear those sirens going off — that’s good,” he said. “They’re real-deal sirens, not politically correct sirens. Listen to the beauty of that sound.”
