On a Sunday evening in late March, about 70 students showed up to a Turning Point USA event at Arizona State University in Tempe, a sliver of the crowds Charlie Kirk once drew. The format was “Pick Up the Mic,” an open-question session Kirk used to turn into combative, viral confrontations with progressive hecklers. Kirk is dead. The podcasters who replaced him onstage, Jack Posobiec and Blake Neff, fielded questions about whether his widow was a CIA operative and why the Trump administration was sitting on the Epstein files.
They answered with rambling non-answers. A Democratic group called National Ground Game, which sends influencers to conservative campus events to challenge speakers, showed up looking for a debate. Turning Point wouldn’t engage. That same week, white nationalist Nick Fuentes, banned from every Turning Point event Kirk ever ran, told the New York Times he wants to convince young conservative men to sit out the midterms or vote Democrat, aiming to gut five to 10 percent of Republican youth turnout. “The gatekeeper is gone,” Fuentes said, “and the gate is wide open.”
Kirk was shot dead at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025. He’d spent over a decade building TPUSA into an $85 million-a-year operation sitting on a $64.3 million endowment. Seven months later, the evidence of collapse is everywhere.
Voters in metropolitan Phoenix crushed TPUSA’s slate in an April 7 election for the Salt River Project (SRP), Arizona’s largest public utility. Seven university student governments have rejected chapter applications. CEO Erika Kirk — who took over eight days after her husband’s death — has fired more than 60 staffers in what survivors called the “TPUSA Purge.” Comedian Druski’s prosthetics parody of her has crossed 160 million views on X alone. Republicans are counting on this Phoenix-headquartered organization to deliver the 2026 midterms. It cannot win a utility board race in its own backyard.
Twelve thousand miles from Phoenix — far enough that the American leadership apparently forgot he existed — Joel Jammal runs Turning Point Australia. In late March, he went public with a rebuke of the American headquarters. Jammal holds a branding agreement with TPUSA — no money changes hands, he said, but he carries their name and has been building chapters in the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand. When he tried to contact the American leadership, they brushed him off. The last text he got from a TPUSA staffer read: “We only deal with seven-figure donors now.”
Jammal is not a donor. He runs an entire country’s TPUSA operations for free. He called the mass firings and former TPUSA staffer Candace Owens’ conspiracy theories a “PR disaster.” He then raised a harder question about the money: “If there is any sense of impropriety in America with the way you’re running your books, with the way you’re running your operation, I want nothing to do with it.”
Jammal’s “books” comment refers to the fact that, under Charlie Kirk, the organization accumulated close to $400 million, funded by megadonors including the Uihlein family and the Wayne Duddlesten Foundation, whose $13.1 million made it TPUSA’s largest known backer. The endowment anchors what TPUSA calls its “50-100 year plan.”
Within days of Kirk’s death, fundraisers for his family topped $6 million — eventually approaching $10 million, the largest share raised through a GiveSendGo campaign run by Tucker Carlson’s nicotine-pouch company — despite Kirk’s estimated $12 million net worth.
Losing on Home Turf
Turning Point Action (TPA) poured serious money into the SRP race and sent volunteers to collect ballots door-to-door — the same practice Kirk spent years calling “ballot harvesting” when Democrats did it. A clean energy slate backed by the Jane Fonda Climate PAC flipped two board seats to take an 8-6 majority despite being outspent by as much as 10-to-1. Turnout hit 36,000 ballots — five times the 2024 turnout in a race most voters used to ignore. Republican Maricopa County Supervisor Thomas Galvin tied the loss to TPA defeats in the Pennsylvania and Wisconsin Supreme Court races — a losing streak the Phoenix New Times blamed on the organization’s “toxic brand.”
SRP is the water and power utility for metropolitan Phoenix, serving more than two million customers, and it needs to roughly double its generating capacity over the next 10 years as the population and data centers continue to grow. The utility’s election rules have not changed since it was founded: only landowners can vote, and votes are weighted by acreage. One acre, one vote. Board member Sandra Kennedy told E&E News the new majority plans to change that: “We’ve got to move to a direction where everybody that pays a bill should at least be able to vote on a board that could raise their rates.”
Unwelcome on Campus
At Baylor University, the largest Baptist university in the world, five student groups organized a counter-event called “All Our Neighbors” to coincide with TPUSA’s April 22 rally featuring Donald Trump Jr. and Border Czar Tom Homan. Then, administrators did something Baylor has never done. They granted permission for two openly gay Christian keynote speakers, Kelley Robinson of the Human Rights Campaign and the Rev. Paul Raushenbush of Interfaith Alliance, to speak on a campus that still formally labels same-sex relationships sinful.
Faculty member Greg Garrett, who sits on TPUSA’s “Professor Watchlist” for his writing on racial justice, will also speak. The Watchlist predates the current political moment; TPUSA launched it in 2016, but its target lists and campus harassment campaigns laid the groundwork for Project 2025’s assault on diversity in higher education.
The Baptist General Convention of Texas responded by saying it was “hearing strong concerns” and reaffirmed its “long-held view of biblical sexuality.” Pastors had already moved to defund Baylor at the convention’s 2026 annual meeting. The university had rescinded a $644,000 grant in July 2025 for studying the exclusion of LGBTQ+ individuals and women in churches. None of that stopped its administration from greenlighting the gay keynote speakers once TPUSA’s rally went on the calendar.
Student governments at Barry University School of Law, St. John’s, Seton Hall, Lehigh, California Lutheran, Fort Lewis College, and Valparaiso have all turned down TPUSA chapter applications. Barry’s associate dean told students TPUSA’s model of “political advocacy and confrontation” was “inconsistent with the University’s educational philosophy.” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier fired back with a two-page letter accusing Barry of “blatant viewpoint discrimination,” giving it until May 15 to respond. TPUSA’s own website describes its mission as playing “offense with a sense of urgency to win America’s culture war.” Newsmax, the American Bar Association Journal, and Inside Higher Ed all covered the dispute. Meanwhile, eight Republican governors have signed partnerships to plant TPUSA’s Club America chapters in public high schools, which Indiana State Senate Minority Leader Shelli Yoder called “state-sanctioned youth recruitment.”
The Purge
Beginning January 12, a string of terminations staff dubbed the “TPUSA Purge” swept through the organization under CEO Erika Kirk. PR manager Aubrey Laitsch posted a video saying she was dismissed after an Uber driver told an executive that the driver’s daughter had a friend who didn’t like Erika. That was enough. Laitsch alleged that employees pulled 20-hour days without extra pay and that questioning the organization’s direction got you walked out. Candace Owens said executives were “dragging people into offices asking about their allegiance to Erika” before cutting them.
Weeks earlier, Kirk had told staff in a company-wide message: “I don’t want anyone to think their job is in jeopardy. Because you’re family.” Not one of the fired employees received severance or payout of accrued paid time off — a fact that prompted 1,600 donors to pour more than $75,000 into a GoFundMe on their behalf. Meanwhile, a Kirk confidante told the Daily Mail that Groyper ideology — the far-right, antisemitic current tied to Nick Fuentes — had “seeped in and influenced much of TPUSA in recent years.”
Then comedian Druski posted a sketch to X, captioned “How Conservative Women in America act.” He wore full prosthetics — blonde wig, heavy makeup, white suit — and played a character widely read as Erika Kirk, delivering lines about protecting “all men in America, especially all white men.” The skit crossed 160 million views on X alone. Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot, fed a still from the sketch, identified the person in it as Erika Kirk — not Druski dressed as Erika Kirk.
Amanda Marcotte, writing in Salon, called her “a weak and ineffectual leader” running a movement “dominated by hustlers.” American University professor Aram Sinnreich told Newsweek the turmoil reflects a “major schism” within MAGA — corporate conservatives against ethno-nationalists, with TPUSA splitting down the middle. Kirk has sent three cease-and-desist letters to influencers pushing conspiracy theories about her husband’s death. The first episode of Owens’s YouTube series targeting her drew nearly five million views.
The Shrinking Congregation
Kirk bet TPUSA’s future on Christian nationalism. The numbers suggest that bet is losing. The Public Religion Research Institute’s 2025 American Values Atlas surveyed 22,000 adults across all 50 states and found two-thirds qualify as skeptics or outright rejecters of Christian nationalism. Just 11 percent call themselves adherents — roughly the same number as in 2022. Only white evangelical Protestants and Hispanic Protestants show majority support. Among Americans under 50 — the age group Kirk’s campus operation was built to recruit — opposition runs above 70 percent. While Christian nationalist policy has accelerated under the Trump administration, public appetite for it has not. PRRI president Robert P. Jones described Christian nationalism as “a worldview that’s fundamentally opposed to a pluralistic democracy” — and pointed out that the white evangelical Protestants at its core represent just 13 percent of the country. Pew found that 77 percent of Americans say churches should not endorse political candidates. Turning Point’s model depends on them doing exactly that.
The 2026 Test
In 2024, the Trump campaign outsourced much of its Arizona ground game to Turning Point Action. TPA’s “Chase the Vote” program claimed 315,000 ballots chased and 400,000 voter relationships in the state. The canvassing ran through at least 22 evangelical churches across six swing states, with Kirk himself telling congregations they could not “be a true born-again Christian and vote Democrat.” Trump carried Arizona by 5.5 points.
Without Charlie Kirk, that infrastructure is struggling to elect Andy Biggs governor. TPA organized Biggs’s launch rally 16 months early and has spent $459,000 on his behalf. Turning Point Action Chief Operating Officer Tyler Bowyer — himself one of 11 Arizona Republicans indicted on felony charges for signing a fraudulent 2020 electoral certificate, later pardoned by Trump — framed the SRP race as a dry run for November. The dry run failed. Before Kirk’s death, David Byler of the polling firm Noble Predictive Insights said Biggs “could be getting more than an endorsement” from TPUSA. “He could be getting an army.” Seven months later, the army can’t find its own boots.
Biggs leads Rep. David Schweikert 40-19 in the Republican primary, but Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs holds a five-point general election lead. Noble Predictive Insights founder Mike Noble called it “competitive but structurally polarized” and said the decisive question is “who wins the middle — particularly women under 50 and independents.”
The Empire Kirk Built
Kirk took a secular campus outfit and rebuilt it into seven interlocking divisions that advance New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) doctrine. This wasn’t the NAR taking over TPUSA, but rather Kirk appropriating their congregations, their networks, and their prophets. He gave NAR believers something they’d never had: a political operation with youth appeal, campus infrastructure, and serious money. What had been campus debates about fiscal responsibility turned into prayer rallies where students believed they were hastening Christ’s return. Kirk built the pastoral networks and donor relationships that converted a fringe theological position into a nationwide political operation. Erika Kirk inherited the endowment, the chapters, and the title. She has not yet demonstrated she can do the one thing her husband could — walk into a room and make people follow.
