Charlie Kirk Is Haunting The Trump Administration’s Iran Debate

As the Trump administration considers taking military action against Iran, a surprising figure is emerging as the voice of MAGA’s anti-interventionist faction: the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Online, major MAGA figures who oppose renewed hostilities in the Middle East have been digitally resurrecting Kirk, resurfacing old posts in which the conservative activist bluntly objected to the prospect of a war with Iran. Last week, the commentator and close Kirk ally Jack Posobiec posted a short clip from Kirk’s show last June, in which Kirk pointedly questioned the wisdom of a “regime change” war in Iran: “So we are just going to take out the ayatollah? Oh really! What next? What happens after regime change?”

In a similar vein, Republican Senate candidate Mark Lynch, who is running against incumbent Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, recently resurfaced a clip of Kirk criticizing Graham for his hawkish position, calling war with Iran “a weird, fanatical obsession” that would be “destructive to our own country.”

Meanwhile, several pro-Trump accounts have reposted one of Kirk’s more direct warnings about war with Iran, made on social media in the days before the U.S. bombed Iranian nuclear facilities last June: “Keep the pressure up. Regime change in Iran would be a catastrophe.”

The effort to marshal Kirk’s memory against an attack on Iran speaks to his singular influence within the MAGA movement, an authority that has paradoxically deepened in the five months since he was shot and killed at a Turning Point USA campus event in Utah. But it also underscores a hidden liability of MAGA’s canonization of Kirk. In the months since Kirk’s death, the White House has gone out of its way to align itself with Kirk’s legacy, issuing proclamations in his honor and sending a steady stream of senior administration officials to appear on his show. But now, as the White House considers launching an extended ground war with Iran in direct contravention of Kirk’s urgings, his memory could come back to haunt them.

“Charlie's legacy has kind of become this political football, but I think what Charlie said speaks for itself,” Posobiec, a close friend and ally of Kirk, said in an interview. “His goal [last year] was about keeping the coalition together and trying to prevent what he viewed as the potential risk of the United States getting involved in a prolonged war.”

The White House did not provide a response to a request for comment on Kirk’s previous opposition to military action against Iran. A White House official instead sent an unsigned statement noting that the president “would like to see a deal negotiated” with Iran “but he has been clear that ‘either we will make a deal or we will have to do something very tough like last time’.”

This isn’t the first time that an intra-MAGA squabble over Kirk’s legacy has created a political headache for the White House. Immediately after his death, Kirk’s shifting position on the U.S.-Israel relationship became a flashpoint in the ongoing clash between pro-Israel conservatives and conservative critics of Israel, with both camps seizing on elements of Kirk’s commentary to claim him as an ally. In December, the White House was compelled to dispatch Vice President JD Vance to Turning Point USA’s annual conference to attempt to quell the infighting.

But unlike on the Israel issue, where Kirk had a history of making both supportive and critical pronouncements about Israel’s conduct, his record on Iran is relatively unambiguous: As early as 2019, Kirk publicly cautioned Trump against starting a major conflict with Iran, arguing that a “ground war” would be “a massive mistake.” Last summer, as the Trump administration contemplated bombing Iranian nuclear facilities as part of the “Twelve Day War” between Israel and Iran, Kirk emerged alongside Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon as the leaders of the anti-interventionist camp within MAGA, using his popular podcast to caution viewers that a major war with Iran would “make Afghanistan and Iraq look like a cake walk.”

That same month, Kirk even went so far as to convey his concerns about a war with Iran directly to President Donald Trump in a private Oval Office meeting, according to the Washington Post. After the Trump administration ultimately went through with the strikes, Kirk backed off his harsher criticisms, praising Trump for acting “with prudence and decisiveness” while continuing to caution the administration against escalating the conflict into a broader regime change war or regional conflict.

This time round, MAGA’s anti-interventionist camp have been much more muted in their public lobbying against a U.S. attack on Iran, with some “America First” figures wagering that Trump has earned a degree of deference following his operations in Iran and Venezuela, and others acknowledging that the president doesn’t seem to respond well to public pressure campaigns like the one the anti-interventionists carried out last June. But the MAGA figures who have spoken out against renewed hostilities have leaned heavily on Kirk’s own words — preserved in his myriad social media posts and podcast appearances — to make their case.

“His unique insight was that he would spend hours upon hours on campus talking to students and talking to Gen Z, and then he would report back to the White House” about their views, said Posobiec. “These are members of the coalition who are diehard Trump supporters, they're America Firsters, they're going to wear the MAGA hat, but they're totally opposed to another war in the Middle East — just totally, categorically opposed to it.”

Meanwhile, Kirk’s successors at TPUSA have been more circumspect in their messaging. On an episode of “The Charlie Kirk Show” last week, Kirk’s longtime producers Andrew Kolvet and Blake Neff, who have taken over hosting duties from Kirk, acknowledged that Trump’s recent interventions in Iran and Venezuela had been “limited and successful” but urged the White House not to test its luck with an extended military conflict. “It is a political mess for the administration to go into the Middle East,” Kolvet said on the show. “At some point, you have to ask the question ‘Why now?’” They ended the segment on Iran by displaying a 2019 social media post from Kirk: “Another ground war with US troops IS NOT the answer. End the endless, senseless wars.”

“It's no secret that Charlie was very reticent to see the use of America's military power, but he also praised the president for finding a third way that involved precision strikes when necessary and avoiding drawn out forever wars,” Kolvet said in a statement. “Charlie grew to trust the president's decision-making process, but he was always very firmly [of the belief] that it’s time to nation build in America and to avoid wars of blood, sand, and death in the Middle East.”

Senior administration officials are, at minimum, aware of the fraught political dynamics surrounding Kirk’s record of anti-interventionist statements and have tried to square them with the administration’s more aggressive military activity. On an episode of Kirk’s podcast guest-hosted by Vance shortly after his death last fall, Tucker Carlson, himself a vocal opponent of war with Iran, invoked Kirk’s opposition to war with Iran, noting: “I think the reason Charlie was able to bridge the gap [on the right], particularly around foreign policy, is because he had genuine affection for Israel … but [he also said], I don’t think we should have another forever, regime-change war with Iran.”

In response, Vance acknowledged that Kirk had privately conveyed his concerns about a war with Iran to him as well, but he countered that Kirk served as a model of productive intra-coalitional disagreement, saying: “I think [Charlie] modeled a really good way of applying pressure, of disagreeing when you do disagree, but also recognizing that so long as you’re operating in good faith, we’re all part of the same team.”

Still, the administration seems to be wagering that its successful operations in Iran and Venezuela have bought it some goodwill even with intervention-skeptical members of its coalition. That may be true to a degree, Posobiec said, but it wouldn’t have completely allayed the concerns that Kirk voiced last summer about a protracted war in Iran.

“It really wasn't that long ago," Posobiec said. If Kirk were still alive, “I would expect that you would be hearing the same thing he said in those clips.”