Mister Vice President, thank you so much for joining us.
Of course. Good to see you.
Where were you when you heard Charlie was shot?
So I was in my office in the West Wing. The Vice President actually has a couple of offices. There's the Executive Office Building office and the West Wing office. I was in the West Wing, and I just finished a meeting with somebody, I'm not even sure who, and I looked at my phone, and there were a bunch of group chats, frankly, a lot of them that Charlie was in where they said, Charlie, praying for your brother, hope you're doing okay.
And I opened up my door and somebody said, Charlie has been shot and it kind of hit me like, oh my God. This is very real. This is very serious. And you know what happened over the next hour or so, I'm guessing, is, you know, we knew Charlie -- it is called your body guy, your special assistant, the person who's always with you.
And I had a very dear friend in the West Wing who knew Charlie's body guy, and so his name is Mikey, and called Mike and said, hey, like, what's going on? And what was really -- I mean, obviously, you know, the news was discombobulated. No one knew it was actually happening. It was a very chaotic moment, but there was a brief period where we were getting good reports from the hospital.
And I don't know if you were -- how plugged in you were to that.
I heard those, too.
And so, you know, I saw the initial video. I've only seen it that one time. I refused to watch it again. I don't want to see that happen to my friend ever again. But I initially thought terrible, terrible news. And then I started to feel kind of hopeful. And then, of course, we got the news from Mike that Charlie had passed probably about an hour before the rest of the world found out.
And I was the person who walked into The Oval Office and said, Mr. President, I'm sorry, but Charlie passed, and that was a very, very tough moment. Susie Wiles, the White House Chief-of-Staff was in tears, and she doesn't show emotion, she is even keel the whole way and she was in tears. And I just gave Susie a hug.
And I think all of us kind of lost it, and it felt like -- you know, it felt like we were all mourning our friend. Before any of the politics or the thought about, you know, what a titan he was and how influential he was to the movement. How do we possibly replace him? We were all just sad because our friend had died, and we supported each other in that moment, as you do with your friends.
But, man, it was a bad, bad day.
When you told the President, Charlie was dead. How did he take it?
You know, the President is very stoic, but he was clearly upset. He just kind of went quiet and let it absorb a little bit, and then just shook his head and said, man, he is -- he was a good guy, and we really loved him. And that's exactly right. That was a good thing to say. And we all just kind of have that same realization that he was a good friend, that he really loved what we were trying to do. He was great supporter of ours, and it was a great honor to have him, both as a friend and as a supporter.
And frankly, I mean, Jesse, I would not be the Vice President of the United States, were it not for Charlie Kirk. Aside from Donald Trump, I can't think of a single person who deserves more credit, who advocated more for me, both in my Senate primary back in 2021, who advocated more for me to be the nominee as Vice President, who advocated more for us to get in there, not just advocacy, but effective action and organization.
I wouldn't be the Vice President. I wouldn't have this job without Charlie Kirk, and I'll never forget it.
Do you believe the people out in the country should watch the video? I know it's very hard to stomach.
Yes.
Is it important for people to process it?
Look, I go back and forth on it. I mean, look, it's my friend, and it's incredibly gruesome. And what I think is -- maybe it's useful for everybody to see at one time, because then you see what they did to Charlie Kirk, but I don't want anybody to remember Charlie Kirk in that five seconds at the end of his life.
I wanted to remember Charlie Kirk, the skilled debater. I want to remember those videos, those incredible videos of him and his wife and his babies and how much he loved Erika and how much he loved those kids. I want to remember Charlie for that. I want to remember Charlie for the guy for when it was these kids behind me. Now, I hate to call you guys kids, but you are, you know who, a progressive would step up to the microphone at a Turning Point USA event, and some of the audience would jeer and cheer, and Charlie said, no, no, let them speak, because he so desperately believed in this idea that we should be talking with and debating one another.
So maybe see the video to understand what the far left did to Charlie Kirk, absolutely, but that should be one fraction of one percent of your memory of Charlie Kirk, 99.9 percent of it should be a titan of the conservative movement, a beloved friend and a dear husband and father.
You brought the casket on Air Force Two back to Erika, his wife to Arizona. What was that like, delivering that to her?
Oh, man, I want to try to keep it together here. One, it was a great honor. You know, as sad and as heartbreaking and as difficult as it was emotionally, I just kept on thinking, what an incredible thing it is to be able to take my friend back to Phoenix, to be able to take his wife and his family, to be able to provide some just basic support and friendship in their moment of grief.
What an honor to be invited into Erika's you know, inner circle in that moment of terrible grief. And it was -- it was tough, though, man. I mean, I've still and I think that this is a pretty common thing when you're grieving somebody you love. I had this moment a couple of days ago where I whip out my phone, I type in Charlie Kirk on Signal, I get halfway through a text message where I realized he's not here anymore, and nobody's going to receive this message, and that thing was so much more true in the 20 hours after he had died, and you could see that.
I mean, I don't want to reveal too much about the conversation we had with Charlie and his family, but we were all kind of going through these hills and valleys together of oh my God, I can't believe he's gone, but then just telling stories and laughing and hugging, and it was -- it was an amazing experience, but it was very sad, and it just gave me this sense of resolve that they put Charlie in this box.
They put him in this box for doing the most American thing possible, which is debating and talking to people, even the people, maybe especially the people with whom you disagree and we cannot let this incredible legacy get extinguished by an assassin. Another -- a couple of the people that traveled with us, it was Charlie's family, and it was his wife and his parents and his sister, all incredibly kind people.
But there are also a couple of Charlie's dear friends, people who are involved in TPUSA. And you know, every single person, both in Turning Point, but also Erika, said, is we cannot let this die with Charlie. That was her main wish. And of course, I've talked to her since then. I'll see her on Sunday at the funeral in Arizona.
She really wants this incredible not just mission and organization, but really a movement that Charlie Kirk built to keep on going long after he's gone. I think that's the best way that we can honor him, is to honor her wishes and to keep Charlie's memory alive.
He touched so many people, especially young people.
Yes.
And as a strong Christian, will that be part of his legacy, bringing people closer to God?
I think it has to be part of his legacy. And how many people that I talked to in the last week who said, yes, I'm a Christian, but I haven't been to church in three years, three months. I went to church this Sunday to pray for Charlie. Or how many people that I speak to who said, you know, I was kind of an agnostic and atheist, but I'm kind of interested in this God thing, because this guy really believed that he gave his life for it. If we're true to Charlie's memory, the number one thing that people will remember about Charlie Kirk is that he was a great advocate for the Christian faith.
He was thoughtful. I mean, I remember talking to Charlie, even in the last months before he died, about Catholicism and Protestantism and all of these different minutiae of the Christian faith, because I said this, he loved God, and because he loved God, he wanted to understand God. And so he was constantly thinking about it. But more importantly than that, he was constantly going out and talking about it. Like you look at these Turning Points USA events, and you look at the interactions he was having with people, and people would say, why are you a Christian?
And he would say, well, because I'm a sinner, and Jesus saved me. Jesus saved my life. He wanted to be a true evangelist, in the truest sense of the word, and the way that St. Paul was an evangelist, and I think that has to be part of his legacy. And I've seen just in my own inner circle, people come back to the church purely because Charlie's death caused something inside them to stir.
I would love to see that happen all over our country, and I think it is.
That's why it feels like it's a spiritual attack, that evil showed its face. Do you believe that evil is out there and we have to confront it?
You know, I've always believed that history makes a lot more sense when you both believe in God and follow God, but accept that the devil is real. And I think that evil is very much a real thing. It has a will. It has a very -- it has an evil and very negative purpose. But it also clearly has people who are trying to accomplish that purpose, I think, in the spiritual realm, but also in the realm that we live in every single day, too.
So yes, I believe that one of the takeaways of Charlie's death and of Charlie's life is that speaking the truth, what is the devil? What is evil, if not the opposite of truth and the opposite of life. They tried to extinguish Charlie's truth and extinguishing Charlie's life, we cannot let them. And that is one of the great -- if you look at the 2,000 years of the Christian faith, one of the great lessons is that each of us have our role to play.
Each of us have a particular part of the race to run. We each have something that we have to do, and then God calls us home, and it's on to the next man. We are all the next man in that great journey, for as long as God gives us the ability to be that next man.
People are celebrating Charlie's killing.
It's disgusting.
They're saying he deserved to die. How do you wrap your head around that?
Well, one way you wrap your head around it is disgusting evil. What kind of person looks at a grieving young mother, two beautiful young kids and feels a certain sense of celebration? And I actually think I don't know if it's a couple people, I don't know if it's thousands of people, but I would ask you, if you were the kind of person who feels joy at the death of a grieving mother and grieving children, what bad decisions have led you to where you are today, and why don't you get back on the right path?
I really believe that there are people who recognize that the joy that they're feeling, the celebration they're feeling at Charlie's death, is evidence of evil within them, and they have to extinguish that evil. I think that, and I've even seen some social media posts where people have said, you know, I was feeling kind of good about this guy dying, and now I realize that meant there was something wrong in me. That's another way I think that God is speaking to people through Charlie's death, is these incredibly evil people celebrating it, we're seeing it. We're seeing that evil in the public eye for all to see.
But I also think people are turning away from that evil because they recognize that it is so opposite of everything good and true and righteous in the world.
If these evil people don't repent and continue to revel in the murder, what should be the consequence?
Well, look, I think the consequence should be, by the way, justice exists for both the people who repent and ask forgiveness. Justice also exists for people who don't repent and don't ask for forgiveness. I really do hope that the person who murdered Charlie Kirk eventually accepts that what he did was evil and terrible, but we still got to have justice anyway.
And I think for the people who are celebrating Charlie Kirk, look, we have a First Amendment in this country. The First Amendment protects a lot of very ugly speech. But if you celebrate Charlie Kirk's death, you should not be protected from being fired for being a disgusting person. If you're a university professor who benefits from American tax dollars, you should not be celebrating Charlie Kirk's death, and if you are, maybe you should lose your job, or your university should face a loss of funding.
If you are the kind of person who thinks that Charlie Kirk was justifiably murdered, sometimes the government can't do anything about that, but you know what can is civil society. And I've actually been gratified to see all these people standing up and saying, yes, we have free speech, and yes, we have free debate.
But if you're celebrating the death of a young father, you ought to pay some consequences for it and the American people are rising up against that evil. It's a great thing to see.
So the Democrats in the media are preaching unity. They're saying there's an equal amount of violence on both sides, and we need to all just lower the temperature and come together. You say?
It's statistically absolutely bonkers. The idea that left wing violence and right wing violence in 2025 in America are equal. It's preposterous. The statistics don't bear it out, Jesse. You look -- you ask, how many -- what percentage of political liberals believe that political violence is sometimes justified?
It's about one in four. If you ask young conservatives that same question, it's about one in 25 which, by the way, is still too high. It should be zero, but the problem is much bigger and much more malignant on the far left. You know, I saw something. Maybe it was the ADL, or one of these ridiculous organizations that said that right wing violence is as common as left wing violence.
And then you go and look at the data, and you say, what is it that you're causing right wing violence? One of the things that they called right wing violence is literally a gang of Black Americans beating up on a Mexican guy. Well, yes, if you categorize everything under the sun as right wing violence, you can make your point for you, but that's B.S. Nobody's buying it. Look at the way they're celebrating Charlie Kirk's murder.
Look at the way that this assassin was radicalized by left wing and probably trans related stuff. Look at the way that even if you're not committing an act of violence, you were supporting those who do, you see that so much more on the far left. And I wish my friends who are on the left would just look themselves in the mirror and accept that they have a problem.
Yes, absolutely by all means, let's take down the temperature. But if you want to take down the temperature, and you're on the left of center, the first and most important thing you can do is look in the mirror.
The media is now saying the assassin may have been MAGA. Why would they lie?
Well, they would lie because they can't do that simple, basic thing of looking themselves in the mirror. They can't admit that their radicalism and their craziness helped to cause this problem. Look, this is not in dispute. You talk to the shooter's mother, you talk to the shooter's father, you talk to the local District Attorney, you talk to the FBI director, or the Deputy Director of the FBI. You look at every ounce of evidence that we have, and it is clear this is a person who grew up in a pretty normal family, actually had a pretty good home life, who was radicalized by the far left, by the social networks of the far left, by the ideas of the far left, and got so far down the path of radicalization that he killed my friend.
That is not a both sides problem. My friend is dead because of left wing political radicalization, and if you want to cut that shit [bleep] out, then be honest about it and look yourself in the mirror. Excuse me, I know I shouldn't cuss on Fox News.
That's okay.
[Commercial break]
The FBI is now looking into as many as 20 or more other people who may have corresponded with this assassin beforehand?
Right.
There may have been foreknowledge of the shooting. If there are co-conspirators here, what kind of threat level are we talking about?
Well, we don't know, Jesse, and that's why I've been so proud of Kash and the way that he's handled this investigation, because he's cast as wide a net as humanly possible, and the FBI really is looking at everything. By the way, there's a lot of weird stuff out there. For example, the CEO of Discord, or one of the leaders of Discord said that there were no Discord chats that involved this guy.
Now, we know that there were Discord chats that involved this guy. So we need to look at everything. We need to leave no stone unturned. My own attitude to this, and people will send me stuff, Jesse, you know, from the deepest, darkest corners of the internet. Some of it sounds pretty crazy, but I'll send it to Kash and I'll talk to my team, because I want us to leave no stone unturned.
It's the only way to honor Charlie, is to get to the bottom of exactly how this person was radicalized and who else was involved in it. Now we could find out that this person was radicalized, and it was terrible, and there are a lot of very evil people in his life, but they didn't have foreknowledge. We may find out that there were many, many people who were involved in helping this guy pull off the shooting.
We just have to get to the bottom of it. That's what justice demands. That's what being a good friend to Charlie demands.
The militant transgender movement is that a domestic terrorist threat?
If you are encouraging people to commit acts of violence against the United States government or against your fellow Americans, absolutely, you're involved in a terrorist movement. I don't know enough about that particular organization, but what you increasingly see, Jesse, is you see people in the trans community and other members of the far left who are saying they are so threatened by negative rhetoric that they must take arms and attack people.
If your movement is telling you to commit acts of violence against people for speaking words that you don't like. Number one, you're evil. And number two, you are engaged in a terrorist movement and that's part of what we have to root out in The White House. And this is very important, Jesse, talked to a lot of people about this.
I talked to, you know, Stephen Miller probably seven times in the past two days. We are working very hard to ensure that the funding networks for left wing violence, that the radicalization networks for left wing violence, that if you encourage or fund your fellow Americans or anybody else to commit acts of violence because you disagree with political speech, you are going to be treated like a terrorist organization, and we're going to go after you.
Yes, because Joe Biden said White Supremacy was the biggest domestic terror threat.
Which, of course, is absurd. The statistics don't bear that out, but if you look at what the Biden administration did against the phantom threat of white supremacy, we actually need to take some of the lessons and say, if there is funding sources that is going for this stuff, if you're an NGO and you're actually funding riots and other kinds of political violence, why wouldn't we go after that?
Why wouldn't we cut off those funding sources, and why would we prosecute people who engage in violence? It's interesting, Jesse, the people who are saying this is Gestapo stuff. They're calling us Nazis for saying that if you're funding or supporting left wing violence, you ought to pay consequences for it. It really makes you think that the left has not done any of the soul searching it has to do to actually deal with political violence in this country.
Jasmine Crockett says, yes, she calls people Hitler, but it doesn't mean she's responsible for any violence that happens.
Well, I'd ask Jasmine Crockett, what is it that you want people to do when you call them Nazis? What is it that you want them to do when you call them fascists? What is the proper response when you say that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and Charlie Kirk are threatening your safety? What do you expect people to do? This rhetoric is completely out-of-control and it's part of this entire network of violence that exists on the far left.
You dehumanize your political opponents. You fund paid activists to go and harass them and terrorize them. We've had a White House senior staffer just in the past week, who has had actual representatives of the Democratic Party going around passing leaflets trying to get his neighbors to harass him, and showing people where he lives, where his wife lives, where his young family lives.
If that's not political violence, if that's not political harassment, I don't know what the term means.
Barack Obama says your White House is dividing the country, and you're exploiting Kirk's death to attack Democrats.
We're not exploiting Charlie Kirk's death to do anything except for achieve justice. And I think of Barack Obama, I haven't seen that comment, Jesse, but if he said that, that's absolutely disgusting. What we're trying to do is understand how young people are getting radicalized, and who is funding all of these efforts at radicalization?
We saw this in the summer of 2020. Now, thank God that wasn't primarily -- actually over 20 people, over 20 people died in the riots in the summer of 2020. That is political terrorism, but it's not just the people who are killing the cops, it is not just the people who are engaging in throwing the Molotov cocktails and the riots.
Where was the money coming from? Who was organizing this violent activity? That is not going after Democrats, unless, by implication, you're saying every single Democrat is involved in planning political violence. If that's true, then the problem is on Barack Obama's side. We're going to the bottom of the truth, and we're going to stop the political violence, and we're going to do it however.
We have to do it, of course, within the constitutional limits that Charlie loves so much.
Joe Biden's FBI investigated Turning Point, investigated Charlie Kirk.
I found out a couple of days ago, Jesse, that Joe Biden's FBI investigated a dear friend of mine who is a political consultant. They were siccing law enforcement after their political opponents every single day. It's an open secret at this point. We're talking about having law enforcement go after the people who engage in and fund literal violence.
And they're saying, somehow, that's beyond the pale, even though we know Joe Biden's FBI was investigating Charlie Kirk. Maybe they should have been investigating the networks that motivated, inspired, and maybe even funded Charlie Kirk's murder. If they had, Charlie Kirk might be alive today.
I'm glad we have transparency. We need transparency on this trial. Do you support putting cameras in the courtroom so we can see this assassin face justice?
You know, I've never thought of that, Jesse, but sure, I support transparency in all ways. I think having the trial, you know, recorded, having it on T.V., that strikes me as a good idea. But the most important thing I think, that we can do as a government, aside from reporting and actually televising the trial is we just have to be honest with people about what we're finding, and we're really trying to do that.
Look, investigations are complicated and difficult. There's a fog of war where a lot of information comes in. We're trying to screen it. I've told this to Kash, I've told this to our Department of Justice. The most important thing that we can do is just be honest about what we're finding, how we're finding it, when we're finding it, because I think that transparency is going to give people the faith that we're doing this the right way.
Well, I'd like to thank you for joining us. I know this has been a tough time. You were very close with Charlie Kirk, and I'd also like to thank our Turning Point students over here for joining us.
Absolutely.
Why don't you guys give Charlie Kirk a nice round of applause.
[Audience applauds]
He was a good guy, Jesse. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President.