How the Iran war set off a MAGA fight over Charlie Kirk’s legacy

(CNN) — A visible fracture has emerged in President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement in the aftermath of the United States’ latest military campaign against Iran, and many outspoken conservative opponents across social media have rallied around the words of one influential figure to express their concern: the late activist Charlie Kirk.

Rob Smith, an Iraq War veteran and conservative commentator, resurfaced an informal X poll Kirk circulated last June asking followers whether the US should get involved in “Israel’s war with Iran” (90% opposed intervention). Former congresswoman and MAGA firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene reposted a clip of Kirk with 2.7 million views calling regime change in Iran “pathologically insane.” The conservative comedy duo known as the Hodgetwins shared with their 3.5 million followers a clip of Vice President JD Vance posthumously crediting Kirk with persuading Trump to avoid deeper engagement with Iran last year.

Posting the same video on X, the right-wing cleric Calvin Robinson wrote: “God bless Charlie Kirk. We are worse off without him.”

Others in Trump’s sphere of support have pushed back against efforts to use Kirk’s voice to shape the debate from beyond the grave. Trump loyalist Laura Loomer, who said she spoke to the president this weekend after the strikes, wrote on X that outspoken opponents of Trump’s alliance with Israel “never miss a beat exploiting his death to say our entire foreign policy has to be dictated by the opinions of Charlie Kirk, who is dead.”

“Of course it’s sad, but Charlie Kirk was wrong about a lot,” she added. “Just like he was right about a lot.”

The public feud is a reminder of the uncertainty among many of Trump’s most-engaged online supporters over how to reconcile his repeated pledges to keep the US out of foreign wars with his aggressive actions in Venezuela and Iran.

It’s also a sign of Kirk’s enduring influence over Republican politics — an influence that has, in some ways, grown in the six months since a gunman killed him during an event on a Utah college campus. Statues honoring Kirk have been proposed for universities in Minnesota and Florida. His image has appeared in GOP campaign advertisements across the country, and a banner bearing his likeness now hangs from the US Department of Education headquarters.

As the founder of Turning Point USA, a group focused on mobilizing younger conservatives — many of whom are skeptical of foreign wars — and as a millennial who came of age in the shadow of the September 11 terrorist attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kirk had been a prominent critic of military intervention.

Before his death in September, he left behind an extensive trail of public warnings about Iran. He derided talk of war with Iran as a “a weird fanatical obsession” within the Republican Party and specifically called out South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former national security adviser John Bolton for beating the drums of war. He argued last summer that toppling Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei could trigger a “bloody civil war,” unleash countless refugees and pull the US into another costly, open-ended Middle East campaign.

“We have seen this play before,” he said in June. “With regime change, you have no idea how this is going to work out.”

Now, with Khamenei dead, American troops killed in action and Graham and Bolton cheering Trump on, video clips of Kirk’s warnings are circulating widely on social media — shared not only by the president’s critics on the left, but by members of his own base.

Kirk’s views on Iran, however, were more complicated than selective clips. When Trump bombed Iran last year, Kirk wrote on X that Tehran gave the president “no choice” and he described the operation as a “surgical strike, operated perfectly.” After the strikes, he told his podcast listeners, “I support President Trump. … In a situation like this, I support my friend. And he’s had my back, and I have his.” Kirk later hosted Vance on his show to further explain the administration’s decision to strike Iran.

In the days since American missiles again struck Iran, some of Kirk’s closest allies have watched with unease as factions within the conservative movement claim Kirk’s legacy for their side. Blake Neff, the longtime producer of the Charlie Kirk Show, which has continued since Kirk’s death, acknowledged on Saturday’s broadcast the videos circulating all over social media.

“I know people, all of us, are feeling the lack of Charlie in a moment like this, because he was a natural leader of the movement,” Neff said.

The two-hour episode captured the emerging tension. In a studio featuring an image of Kirk beside the president’s official portrait, show host Andrew Kolvet and his guests addressed concerns among younger followers about a military strike against Iran while also emphasizing Kirk’s unwavering loyalty to the administration. Neff said while Kirk may have objected in the lead up to military action, after he would “look for the bright side of things” and “pray for our success once that began.”

“It’s really irritating for me to see so many people on social media have the opposite reaction,” Turning Point USA chief of staff Mikey McCoy said, “to use his voice to actually cause chaos, to actually cause fear of this situation, to actually cause hatred of President Trump in this whole ordeal, when actually that’s not what he would want.”

Even so, some allies remain clear-eyed about the potential political fallout. Jack Posobiec, a longtime friend of Kirk’s who traveled with the president last week, said on Saturday that Kirk regularly warned the White House how young voters might react if the US turned its attention toward the Middle East.

“Last year, Charlie Kirk told us all that younger generation (sic) of Americans are far more interested in domestic policy that pursuing international conflicts,” Posobiec wrote on X, “and we can’t forget that in a midterm year.”

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