JD Vance is now the undisputed heir to the MAGA throne – but at what price?

2 hours ago 1

Phoenix: When Erika Kirk, widow of assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk, swept on stage in a sparkly gold pantsuit to kick off Turning Point USA’s annual summit, AmericaFest, she issued a determined call to arms.

“We are building the red wall. Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire,” she declared. “We’re going to ensure that President Trump has Congress for all four years. We are going to get my husband’s friend JD Vance elected for [president number] 48 in the most resounding way possible.”

Turning Point USA chief executive Erika Kirk welcomes Vice President JD Vance at its AmericaFest summit in Phoenix this month.

It was an early and important endorsement from a woman who, as the new chief executive of Turning Point, is now one of the most influential conservative figures in the country, and runs one of its most vital campaigning outfits. If the 2028 presidential contest hadn’t begun in earnest already, Kirk fired the starter’s gun.

Her support is no surprise – Charlie Kirk and Vance were close for years, with the murdered activist playing key roles in Vance’s election to the Senate in 2022 and then pushing, successfully, for Trump to choose him as vice presidential running mate in 2024. Vance, a practising Catholic convert, fits more neatly into the Turning Point world than Trump ever would.

But the endorsement of Vance comes at a significant and potentially critical time, when the MAGA movement faces ructions over a raft of issues, particularly US support for Israel, the Epstein files, Trump’s policy priorities and his backing of foreign workers and students.

Denounced by Ben Shapiro as “charlatans”.

Erika Kirk told the crowd her murdered husband was a peacemaker and a coalition-builder; someone who was able to unite the conservative movement through a genuine commitment to open debate.

“[Since] he was assassinated, we saw infighting, we’ve seen fractures, we’ve seen bridges being burned that shouldn’t be burnt. We saw a lot on full display,” Kirk said.

Indeed, the infighting resumed as soon as she left the stage. The first speaker, conservative media personality Ben Shapiro, used his speech to denounce “charlatans” in the MAGA movement, naming conspiracy theorist Candace Owens, ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon among them.

“These people are frauds, and they are grifters, and they do not deserve your time,” Shapiro said, arguing the conservative movement was in serious danger if more people did not denounce the quacks.

Carlson, speaking later that evening, fired back by implying Shapiro was defying Kirk’s legacy. “I watched it. I laughed,” he said. “To hear calls for de-platforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event, I’m like, ‘What?! This is hilarious’.”

The divisions were evident throughout all four days inside the giant Phoenix Convention Centre, where some 31,000 Turning Point supporters gathered last weekend. On stage – and in the bars of Phoenix each night – the debate raged: should there be any “red lines” in the MAGA movement, over which you cannot step? What to do with people like Carlson who play footsies with avowed racists and antisemites such as Nick Fuentes? Or with conspiracy theorists like Owens who want to – without evidence – impugn Israel in Kirk’s assassination?

And then, there’s the bigger question. Looking ahead, who can unite the movement and preserve the winning coalition built by Trump?

By the time Vance arrived in Phoenix to headline Turning Point, this infighting had been playing out in full public view for four days. All eyes were on how the anointed successor would respond – would he cut anyone loose, or would he embrace all-comers?

He chose the latter, though without explicitly endorsing anyone’s views. Denouncing and cancelling was the habit of the progressive left, Vance cautioned – it was not a path down which conservatives should venture.

“President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests,” he said.

JD Vance, then a Senate candidate, speaks alongside Donald Trump at a rally in 2022.

“We don’t care if you’re white or black, rich or poor, young or old, rural or urban, controversial or a little bit boring – or somewhere in between. If you love America – if you want all of us to be richer, stronger, safer and prouder – you have a home on this team.

“I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to de-platform … We build by adding, by growing, not by tearing down.

“Charlie Kirk was a great builder, too. He understood that any family can have its disagreements, its tough conversations. We can learn and improve and treat one another better, we can love each other despite the disagreement.”

No one should be doing something after Charlie Kirk’s death that he refused to do in life – cancelling people, Vance argued. “He invited all of us here.”

But Kirk was resolute about people such as Fuentes. “I don’t align with Jew-haters, sorry,” he told a young questioner before his death. “I’m not going to put up with Jew hatred in the conservative movement.”

Naturally, Vance aced the Turning Point straw poll for preferred Republican nominee, with 85 per cent of the vote. In wider polls, he commands an average of 48 per cent, well ahead of Donald Trump Jr (11 per cent) and Secretary of State Marco Rubio (9.3 per cent), according to Real Clear Polling.

Bill Galston, who holds the Ezra Zilkha Chair in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and was a deputy assistant to Democratic president Bill Clinton, said about two-thirds of Republicans identified as supporters of the MAGA movement, giving an instant advantage to the person who could claim to be the successor to Trump’s creation.

Charlie Kirk repudiated the anti-Jewish views of Nick Fuentes.

“Right now, JD Vance has done a much better job at that than anyone else,” Galston says. “He’s paid a price in doing that, however. He has refused to draw the line against antisemitism. He has repeatedly declared that the United States is and must remain a Christian nation. He has associated himself with the blood and oil wing of conservatism.”

Vance has, in fact, called out antisemitism. In a recent interview with British publication UnHerd, he said it had “no place in the conservative movement” along with any other form of ethnic hatred. He also rebuffed Fuentes and others over slurs on his Indian-American wife, second lady Usha Vance. They could “eat shit”, Vance said.

But Vance argued people like Fuentes – a podcaster with many young fans – received outsized media attention relative to their actual importance. He said he wanted to stay focused on the Democrats and their support for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, which were more damaging.

Galston says Vance’s overriding position is that the MAGA tent is a big one. “He’s not going to throw anyone out of it. And that means in practice that antisemites like Nick Fuentes are acceptable dialogue partners even if one disagrees with those people, and says so forcefully. But the fact that they’re still inside the tent, in Vance’s view, sends an unmistakable signal.”

“The idea of a ‘heritage American’ is about as loony as anything the woke left has actually put up.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, former presidential contender

By contrast, another presidential contender, Vivek Ramaswamy, used his Turning Point speech to deliberately call out the supposed supremacy of the “heritage American”, a term gaining popularity in parts of the online right (sometimes called the “woke right”), boosted by people like Fuentes.

It denotes someone with American lineage dating back to the Revolution or earlier – the so-called “blood and soil” of the country – and is associated with white supremacism.

“The idea of a ‘heritage American’ is about as loony as anything the woke left has actually put up,” Ramaswamy said to some applause.

“There is no American who is more American than somebody else ... You’re either American or you’re not.”

He said such thinking would inevitably lead someone to conclude that Trump, whose mother was a Scottish immigrant, was somehow less American than Joe Biden.

In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Ramaswamy warned that if Republicans went down the same identity politics path as the Democrats – asserting that how you were born dictates whether you are greater or lesser or privileged or disadvantaged – they would face the same electoral fate.

While it’s a long way from the kitchen-table economics that occupied most households’ time, this debate now shapes as a factor in determining who will become the next Republican candidate for president.

Republican strategist Matthew Terrill, who was chief of staff to Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, said there was no doubt Erika Kirk and Turning Point’s endorsement of Vance mattered, but he cautioned the primary process was still far away.

And it would not be a coronation. “Whoever wants the nomination in 2028 is going to have to earn it,” he said. “President Trump is the founder of the MAGA movement. No one will ever have a relationship with the MAGA movement like Trump has had.”

Terrill said Republicans’ top priority had to be the 2026 midterms, which would require laser-like focus on the economy and what the Trump administration was doing to improve the lives of the American people. Much of 2025, including the One Big Beautiful Bill and its tax cuts, was “setting the table” for next year, he said.

Vance helps put a face to that story, Terrill said. “He came from Ohio, very humble background. That resonates with a lot of Americans out there. For him to go to places like Pennsylvania or Ohio and be that champion, that surrogate – that’s important for the Republican Party. They are utilising him in a very smart way.”