Who is Who – Charlie Kirk: Trump’s ally “fond of Serbs”

Donald Trump’s close associate and executive director of the organization Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, succumbed to his injuries after being shot during a lecture at a school in Utah. He was known as a conservative Republican and a blunt speaker, but also as a great friend of the Serbs. At one point in his life, he was the only American on the Serbian basketball team “White Eagles of Illinois,” with whom he traveled across the United States.

Kirk was shot on the campus of Utah Valley University on September 10 and died from his injuries the following day. Eyewitnesses described the attacker as an older man, but the person arrested immediately after the assassination attempt was quickly released.

“The great, legendary Charlie Kirk has passed away,” Trump wrote on his social network, Truth Social.

In the United States, Kirk was considered an important figure on the conservative scene. He was one of the strongest opponents of abortion as well as of same-sex marriage. He often held public forums where he defended his views, frequently engaging in heated debates with opponents.

Since October 2020, he had hosted a daily three-hour radio show called The Charlie Kirk Show on Salem Media’s “Answers” radio channel. Just last year, this podcast averaged between 500,000 and 700,000 views per day.

He founded Turning Point USA in 2012 to promote conservative values among young people, particularly on high school and college campuses. From it later emerged, in 2019, the organization Students for Trump, whose idea was to gather about one million students to join Trump’s campaign.

Although a staunch Republican, Kirk was not an early admirer of Trump. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, he said he was not “the biggest Donald Trump fan in the world,” but that he would vote for him nonetheless. Soon after, he “switched to his side” and actively participated in both presidential campaigns of the current U.S. president.

“I want to thank Charlie, he’s an incredible guy, his spirit, his love for this country. He did an incredible job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created,” Trump said after his victory.

In March 2025, Trump appointed him as a member of the Board of Visitors of the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Grew Up with Serbs

Charlie Kirk repeatedly emphasized that he was “fond of Serbs.”

“I grew up with a lot of Serbs in Chicago. I have a soft spot for Serbs. They’re great. I know the worst thing you can say in Serbian, and I won’t say it on the show, because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would find a way to come after me,” he said in one interview.

He explained that he was invited to the team by then-coach Seva Kurkevic and even had a jersey with his name on it.

“Everyone else was Serbian except me, but I kind of looked like I came from the Balkan Peninsula. I looked like I was Croatian, Bosnian, Albanian, or Serbian,” he explained.

He added that they played in a local league mostly against African-American teams, but there were never any problems, especially not racist ones.

“And we never even thought about it. I’m not joking. There wasn’t a single moment. And this is a little off-topic, but we suddenly realized, yeah, we’re a white team. And we said, yeah, we all just know each other, and everyone knows each other from the Serbian community. That was kind of cool. And that was it,” Kirk said.

Biography

He was born in the suburbs of Chicago on October 14, 1993. He was a member of the Boy Scouts of America and achieved the rank of Eagle Scout. During his junior year of high school in Wheeling, he volunteered for the U.S. Senate campaign of Illinois Republican Mark Kirk.

In his senior year of high school, Kirk led a campaign to overturn an increase in cookie prices at his school and wrote an essay for Breitbart News arguing that high school textbooks displayed liberal bias, which led to an appearance on Fox Business.

Kirk attended Harper College near Chicago but dropped out before graduating. Instead, in 2012 he founded Turning Point USA and, at the Republican National Convention, persuaded prominent Republican donor Foster Friess to finance the organization.

In 2018, he was named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list in the field of law and politics.

The following year, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humanities (D.Hum.) degree from Liberty University.

At the end of his first term in office, in 2020, Trump appointed him to a commission that promoted “patriotic education.” Kirk also authored several books, the most notable being The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas That Will Win the Future (2020) and The Conservative Revolution: How to Defeat the Woke and Save the West.

He was married to former Miss Arizona, Erika Frantzve, with whom he had two children.