When Charlie Kirk was alive, his wife Erika had a retrograde role that was easy to understand. She didn’t use the word, but she was a tradwife. Her position at Turning Point USA, the organization her husband co-founded in 2012 to promote conservative politics on high school, college and university campuses across the country, was essentially to dote on him as her leader. After they married in 2021, she became the evidence that Charlie Kirk was living up to his own beliefs about male leadership — and female submission — at home during the crucial period that he was rebranding himself as an evangelical leader from the secular libertarian he had been.
He died a year ago this week, shot to death while speaking at Utah Valley University. While Erika Kirk is still out there preaching marriage and submission, her message doesn’t cohere like it did when her husband was alive. She obviously doesn’t live the tradwife life anymore. As many people have noticed, she seems like she’s doing just fine without a husband to lead her.
At a recent TPUSA Chapter Leadership Summit, Kirk inadvertently illustrated her brand’s incoherence in her keynote. Her rhetoric about being a submissive housewife contrasted with her role as TPUSA’s CEO. After beginning her pitch for traditional gender roles by insisting that “submission is not a dirty word,” she rolled out a strange metaphor. Marriage, she said, was like a cathedral, with the husband serving as the building itself, “strong” and “hold[ing] the weight.” But “those stained glass windows are the wife.” She summed up her comparison this way: “If you remove the frame of the cathedral, those stained glass windows shatter. They’re useless.”
But does Kirk think of herself as a shattered, useless person now, a year after her husband’s killing? Judging from the rest of the speech, it’s hard to imagine she does. At points, she compared herself to a soldier in “this battle against Satan.” She offered detailed advice on how to build TPUSA chapters. She outlined the work she’s been doing to run the organization and the plans she is implementing to secure its future. She described herself as someone who has turned her “grief into purpose.”
It makes no sense: Erika Kirk really wants to lead TPUSA while also insisting that a woman’s place is in the home. This dissonance is why she is failing.
It makes no sense: Erika Kirk really wants to lead TPUSA while also insisting that a woman’s place is in the home. This dissonance is why she is failing. She can’t offer any real leadership, and that vacuum has invited chaos.
In the aftermath of his tragic death, her husband was intended to be a MAGA martyr. Instead, a year later, his legacy has become a joke. The circumstances of his killing have been turned into a so-called debate between two of the right’s most ridiculous influencers, Candace Owens and Andrew Wilson. The word “debate,” though, lends too much dignity to the proceeding, which was hosted by “The PBD Podcast” and advertised widely with WWE-style graphics, which featured the enlarged faces of the interlocutors imposed on a background of what looks like explosions. One would think they were discussing monster truck rallies or mixed martial arts, not the killing of a man that Owens claims was a dear friend and mentor.
The debate itself was absurd. Owens and Wilson largely ignored the substantial evidence prosecutors collected for the trial of the accused Tyler Robinson, which is expected to begin this fall. Instead, Owens pretended there are numerous holes in the case. Wilson flailed, clearly unprepared to explain the facts laid out in the indictment. The two sniped, traded personal barbs and, unsurprisingly, focused more on building their own social media brands than getting to the truth. In subsequent weeks, both filmed more reactions and other content, milking the tragedy for every penny.
But it’s not just the right that can’t take the Kirks or TPUSA seriously. Charlie Kirk had been barely put to rest before public attitude toward him shifted from bipartisan horror and outrage at his killing to, frankly, mockery. Memes, some of them gruesome and offensive, began spreading rapidly. “We Are Charlie Kirk,” an A.I. song originally meant to memorialize him, was immediately reappropriated as a joke.
When he died, his fans and supporters naturally turned to Erika Kirk to secure his legacy. But that choice has revealed itself to be a disaster. Perhaps there is no one who could have succeeded at what now seems a nearly impossible task: transforming Charlie Kirk, a bully who dressed up his angry rhetoric in a costume of debate, into a noble hero in death. But his widow has been uniquely bad at convincing people, even her own political allies, that they should care. From the moment she walked onto the stage at his public memorial in Arizona to fireworks more suited for a World Series championship, Erika Kirk has alienated people, even drawing accusations of faking her sorrow. Her inability to lead not only hurt the TPUSA brand, but also made it much easier for hucksters like Owens to capitalize on her family’s tragedy.
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While Kirk isn’t a compelling figure, the levels of animosity she draws — from both the left and right — go well beyond simply not liking the woman. Her affect can be off-putting, but that alone can’t explain the extreme negative reactions she generates. Simply by existing, she doesn’t make sense — at least within her own ideology. Kirk is a tradwife without a husband, a CEO shilling for traditional gender roles. Even though it’s not her fault, she’s single — and she is still trying to argue that a woman’s whole existence should be defined by her marriage.
Owens traffics in dangerous conspiracy and misinformation, but she does understand that the paradox at the heart of Kirk is why people of all political stripes find her aggravating. In the midst of Owens’ nonsense claims about Charlie Kirk’s killing during her pseudo-debate with Wilson, she did make a lucid point, arguing that Erika Kirk did not have “to take over Charlie’s company when they don’t have a parent [for their children] at home.”
“His legacy is his children,” she continued, while calling out Wilson’s own hypocrisy for defending Erika Kirk despite long arguing that a woman belongs in the home, not the office. Owens understands that this incongruity between Kirk’s ideology and behavior unsettles people. Like the talented conspiracy theorist she is, Owens has spent much of the past year directing those frustrated feelings toward a wrong, sick conclusion: implying that Kirk was somehow complicit in her husband’s death. But Owens isn’t wrong that Kirk’s choices don’t make sense, especially since TPUSA has a lot of male leaders who could have taken over and underscored the organization’s message of strictly adhering to traditional gender roles.
Maybe someone smarter or more charismatic than Erika Kirk would have been able to navigate these contradictions. Owens herself manages to do a bang-up job of distracting people from the way she doesn’t practice what she preaches. But looking back, Kirk’s transformation from grieving widow to unsuccessful CEO feels preordained. She herself said a wife without a husband is shattered and useless. If she truly believes that herself, she can’t be surprised when people want her to go away.
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