LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Turning Point USA's annual conference this weekend featured four days of speeches from some of the most prominent figures in the MAGA movement and exposed some underlying rifts in the Republican Party. The event was the organization's biggest gathering since its founder, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated in September. NPR political reporter Elena Moore was at AmericaFest in Phoenix and joins us from there now. Good morning, Elena.
ELENA MOORE, BYLINE: Good morning.
FADEL: So what does this event tell us about the state of the GOP?
MOORE: That some of its loudest voices are clashing. On one hand, the GOP has really rejected this idea of cancel culture. But at the same time, this conference highlighted a pretty large debate within the MAGA movement about which kinds of voices are being amplified. And there was this really notable moment on the first night when conservative commentator Ben Shapiro criticized a bunch of right-wing media personalities, including Tucker Carlson for his recent interview with the white nationalist Nick Fuentes. And that's someone who's praised Hitler and someone that Kirk himself didn't support.
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BEN SHAPIRO: He knew that Nick Fuentes is an evil troll and that building him up is an act of moral imbecility. And that is precisely what Tucker Carlson did. He built Nick Fuentes up.
MOORE: And Carlson spoke later that night, and he didn't address Shapiro specifically but told the crowd that antisemitism is immoral. And he said he was surprised, frankly, that there were calls for deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event.
FADEL: Now, President Trump has repeatedly headlined Turning Point events in the past, but at this one, it was Vice President JD Vance who gave the closing speech. What was his message?
MOORE: Well, notably, Vance didn't directly weigh in on this debate over antisemitism. But he did say that the GOP is open to folks of all backgrounds, saying that as long as they love America, they have a home inside the America First movement.
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JD VANCE: We have far more important work to do than canceling each other. We have got to build.
MOORE: You know, and like you mentioned, President Trump is often the headliner. So having Vance step into that role is a shift, and it comes at a crucial moment. Over the past decade, many factions of this party were really unified by their collective support for Trump. And now the next generation of Republicans is grappling with how they want to move forward as the party stares down a challenging midterm in 2026, and many are counting on Turning Point to help with that.
FADEL: OK. And that gets us back to the future of this organization...
MOORE: Right.
FADEL: ...Kirk's organization. What did this conference suggest about how Turning Point is navigating without him?
MOORE: For one, this was the first conference since his widow, Erika Kirk, took over as CEO. And she says she plans to carry out her husband's work of getting more young people engaged with conservative and Christian beliefs. And as Republicans court the youth vote, Turning Point has become an influential force. Erika Kirk says it's now got a network of more than 1 million students, and the group is already kind of eyeing their possible role in 2028. I mean, case in point - on the first night of the conference, Erika Kirk threw her support behind Vance if he does indeed decide to run for president in 2028.
FADEL: OK. And how did all this sit with the young people who attended?
MOORE: I mean, a lot of young voters I talked to said that they felt compelled to show up to this year's conference to honor Kirk. But some, like 25-year-old Angie Perez (ph), also found the party infighting to be counterproductive.
ANGIE PEREZ: If we're divided, then the Democrats, the liberals can get an upper hand on that. And we're just here bickering with - you know, amongst each other. And that's not going to do anything for us.
MOORE: But, you know, the supporters I talked to are still pretty broken up about losing Kirk, and Perez got pretty emotional as she talked about it with me. She told me that Kirk was her hero.
FADEL: That's NPR political reporter Elena Moore reporting from Phoenix. Thank you, Elena.
MOORE: Thanks, Leila. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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