“If it weren’t for Charlie Kirk, I would not be the vice president of the United States,” J. D. Vance said as he hosted The Charlie Kirk Show on Monday. This may well be true: Kirk lobbied for Vance to get the vice-presidential nomination. It’s also a reflection of how deeply Donald Trump’s White House is intertwined with a thriving ecosystem of partisan podcasters who amplify his agenda—and help set it.
In the past decade, American public life has undergone two major transformations: The MAGA movement has swallowed the Republican Party whole. And influencers such as Kirk have elbowed aside traditional media outlets in the quest for attention. Even more important, the boundary between the movement and the influencers is nonexistent: Kirk’s campus-outreach group, Turning Point USA, was ostensibly a grassroots operation, but it was also a mouthpiece for Trumpism. Here’s Kirk talking about his voter-outreach operation during last year’s presidential race: “We’re working directly in harmony with the Trump campaign,” he announced in an archive clip aired at the start of Vance’s tribute show. “It’s been vetted, it’s been cleared, it’s been blessed,” he said of his event, adding, “We’re going to try to win this thing.”
Vance and Kirk were personally close, and the vice president was clearly moved by the shock and injustice of his friend’s assassination. He traveled to Utah to bring Kirk’s coffin home to Arizona on Air Force Two. But the vice president’s decision to host The Charlie Kirk Show was also a political act. As the party’s most likely nominee for 2028, Vance must hope to inherit Kirk’s organizational infrastructure—and his audience.
[From the January 2025 issue: The ‘mainstream media’ has already lost]
Just last week, Kamala Harris was confessing that she felt sidelined as vice president, confined to unpopular policy areas by a president who didn’t want to be overshadowed. Vance has realized that podcaster in chief is a more powerful position than the one he currently holds. Imagine how strange a sitting vice president’s decision to host The Charlie Kirk Show would seem to a time traveler from 20 years ago. Had Rush Limbaugh died during George W. Bush’s presidency, would Dick Cheney have hosted the radio host’s call-in show?
To those inside the MAGA movement, Kirk was not merely a friend, a young father, and a passionate advocate for conservative-Christian values—he was just like them. From the president down, this is a group of people obsessed with “owning the narrative.” The “performative utterance”—a sentence that bends reality into the speaker’s preferred form with words alone—might be a concept championed by the postmodern left, but it has been embraced by Trump and the MAGA right, who believe that saying something is 90 percent of doing it.
Trump’s White House is a government by the podcasters, for the podcasters. Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, was a podcaster. His deputy, Dan Bongino, was a podcaster. Katie Miller, the wife of the immigration czar Stephen Miller, left DOGE earlier this year and started a podcast. Throughout last year’s campaign, Trump took his message to a bunch of male podcasters, who duly rewarded him with softball interviews—or, in some cases, open endorsements. At the same time, Tucker Carlson hosted a live series of conversations across the country with other podcasters (Russell Brand, Jack Posobiec, Glenn Beck) and three people who are now in the administration (Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard).
The symbiotic relationship has continued during MAGA’s return to government: Carlson was one of the guests on Vance’s tribute show. Their opening discussion was about how Kirk first contacted Vance after seeing him on Carlson’s former Fox News program. (In one of this era’s many unexpected outcomes, Carlson is now one of the more Trump-critical voices within MAGA, even though his son, Buckley, works for Vance.) Earlier this year, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tested a new briefing format in which lucky contestants competed to ask her the most sycophantic question. Can you guess who they were? Podcasters. When the Trump administration wanted to pretend it had released the Epstein files—actually some binders full of boring and mostly public information—a group of useful idiots was summoned to the White House: podcasters. Trump recently gave a personal tour of the Oval Office to three hosts of the podcast All-In. One of them is his crypto czar, David Sacks, who obligingly gushed about Trump’s redecoration of the room. “If you look at before-and-after photos, which I’m sure we’ll put on the screen, the Oval looked kinda drab before,” Sacks told his fellow hosts as they waited for the president. Now, of course, the Oval has so much gold leaf that it looks like a Vegas version of Versailles.
Some of the MAGA-aligned podcasts are organic successes; others appear to be little more than vanity projects, sustained by their proximity to the administration. Katie Miller’s podcast, for example, has 5,000 subscribers on YouTube. Her first guest was Vance; her most recent booking was Attorney General Pam Bondi, who insinuated that people should be fired for “hate speech.”
In dictatorships, the government has to spend taxpayers’ money on state media. Here in America, the land of free speech and the free market, people volunteer to be Baghdad Bob. Right-wing commentators frequently accuse their opponents of exactly the same vice—being “regime journalists” who are part of the “Cathedral.” But many traditional news organizations have strict rules forbidding their reporters from donating to candidates or attending fundraisers, let alone running a grassroots campaign to elect a president. The Republicans have a huge and flourishing podcast industry dedicated to boosting their talking points. The Democrats have Pod Save America, on a good day.
[Quinta Jurecic: The influencer FBI]
This administration is profoundly hostile to the mainstream press because there are now less bruising ways to gain attention. MAGA allies control X and the video platform Rumble, and Trump himself controls Truth Social. Trump-friendly investors have just pledged to buy out TikTok. Mark Zuckerberg appeared next to the president recently and, at Trump’s prompting, talked about how much money his company, Meta, was planning to invest in data infrastructure in the United States. Afterward, Zuckerberg was caught on a hot mic admitting apologetically that he had no idea what numbers the president had wanted him to announce. At the same time, Trump and his allies have sued newspapers and broadcasters, and the head of the Federal Communications Commission pressured TV stations to have Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show taken off the air. Yes, what Kimmel implied about Kirk’s case—that the murder suspect was right-wing—was factually wrong. But when has that ever been the standard applied to things said during late-night monologues? In any case, Trump’s Truth Social posts reveal that the existence of Kimmel’s show—“Less talent than Colbert!”—has bothered him for some time.
The right might say that it’s winning in the marketplace of ideas, but that rings hollow when it’s also trying to buy the market.
Over the past week, Elon Musk’s X, which acts as the storefront for many of these podcasts, and the place where their titans interact, has been a mirror image of Twitter immediately after George Floyd’s murder in 2020—an inchoate mass of rage and grief looking for a lightning rod. Back then, in one particularly gratuitous example, a Mexican American utility worker was fired after a photo on Twitter showed him making an ambiguous hand gesture that some people construed as a white-power salute. In the past week, Kirk’s fans and friends have similarly targeted private individuals who criticized his views, or who have spoken callously about his death. The dean of a Tennessee university was fired for saying she had “zero sympathy” for him. The managing partner of a Texas Roadhouse was fired after his wife referred to Kirk as a “Nazi.” One MAGA influencer claimed that this would make the restaurant’s staff feel “intimidated,” in an unintentional echo of the language used by New York Times staffers in 2020, when they argued that an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton endangered their lives.
For several days, a website called “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” claimed to be collating the names of those who celebrated Kirk’s death. (The site now appears to be offline.) That reminded me of another left-wing mass movement, when a list purporting to expose “Shitty Media Men” circulated in private chats at the height of #MeToo. That list captured some genuine wrongdoing, I’m sure, but was also a forum for anyone with a grudge or a flimsy allegation to air it unchallenged.
[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s dangerous response to the Kirk assassination]
The background of the “great awokening” is being used as the justification for the MAGA purges of the past week. Many conservative podcasters who condemned the peak cancel-culture era are now arguing that their own doxxing and firing campaigns are somehow different. “There is a big difference between the left canceling people and the right canceling people,” posted the podcaster Matt Walsh, a repeat offender in this regard. “The left cancels you for saying things that are true. To the extent that the right cancels you, it is for saying things that are abhorrent and sick.” The obvious rejoinder is: Who gets to decide what is abhorrent and sick? Personally, I find references to “prowling Blacks” quite sick, or the suggestion that a 10-year-old girl should be forced to bear her rapist’s baby. But Charlie Kirk had every right to argue his positions.
Which is exactly what he did. To use his assassination to restrict free speech is an insult to what Kirk’s friends have told us repeatedly that he stood for, but that’s what you get when you have a government whose highest goal is to podcast. Many parts of American life have proved resistant to the MAGA movement’s performative utterances—the economy, for example, cannot be bullied into growing. But the podcast-industrial complex is useful for establishing new norms and taboos, and expanding the administration’s power.
