Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirk was a guest on CNBC’s Squawk Box Wednesday, an inexplicable and indefensible booking even in light of networks wanting to reach a politically diverse audience.
The growth of TPUSA since its founding in 2012 is unquestionably impressive from an objectively numerical standpoint, but it is odd for a show focused on business news and financial market analysis to devote an entire segment to a guy with no formal education credentials past a high school diploma.
All things considered, “deliver a catchy speech that catches the attention of a GOP megadonor who underwrites the creation of an entire organization to employ you for your entire professional career thus far” isn’t exactly the sort of potentially replicable strategy a CNBC viewer would expect to hear from the parade of entrepreneurs, investors, corporate executives, and business leaders who usually take turns with politicians and government officials in filling out the show’s guest roster.
Still, with President Donald Trump in the White House and Republicans in the majority in the House and Senate as well as many key state legislatures, television networks are understandably cognizant of the risks of alienating the right-leaning half of the country, especially with their potential audience already diverted to the plethora of online and streaming options. There is a market for outlets seeking to focus on a specific ideological niche, as MSNBC does for the left and channels like Fox News and Newsmax do on the right, but CNBC is already hemmed in by their topical focus on economic and business issues; deliberately narrowing their audience seems an unwise tactical move.
Other media outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, have struggled with covering the Trump administration, incorporating conservative voices in their reporting and opinion commentary, and providing their viewers with in-depth analysis of the latest developments in the White House. Having on-air personalities — both among the anchors and hosts and the guests who are invited to share their perspectives — who come from and understand the right can add to both the accuracy and depth of an outlet’s reporting.
But is there really no one else willing to go on television and discuss conservative views, GOP policies, and the Trump administration’s agenda from a center-right perspective besides Charlie Kirk?
During Kirk’s nearly seven minutes on Squawk Box, co-hosts Joe Kernen and Andrew Ross Sorkin rolled through a number of timely and topically relevant questions, but the 31-year-old was unable to offer much more than diluted White House talking points and declarations of MAGA fealty.
Kernen commented that Kirk was something of a “mind reader of the president” and asked him “how should the business community think about what he says.”
Kirk’s answer was that it was “very simple” and “not complicated,” that Trump “wants what’s best for America, it’s not ideological and he wants what’s best both for capital and labor and he wants the market to succeed and wants wages to go up,” before prattling on about Trump’s “victories” with the trade deals.
That’s a perfectly fine opinion for a supporter of the president to have (even though it doesn’t hold water with economists on both sides of the partisan aisle), but it neither answers the question nor provides any guidance for an anxious business owner trying to make plans based on the whims of a mercurial president.
At the end of the segment, Kernen asked Kirk if he was ever “uncomfortable trying to defend some of the things” Trump had said.
“I’m uncomfortable defending some things I’ve said a couple of years ago, but I just look at results and I look at — this is a guy that goes to work every single day and produces wins for the American people,” Kirk replied, urging business owners to “rework our mental model when it comes to Donald Trump,” because they were focusing too much on the noise on social media and “not looking at the macroeconomic geopolitical victory that President Trump is driving every single day, which is recentering America as the forefront leader of the world economy.”
Besides the fact that the U.S. was the leader of the world economy before Trump and will hopefully remain in that position after his presidency, none of what Kirk said actually offers any guidance at all for the Squawk Box audience.
Kirk’s on-air time revealed him to be the MAGA equivalent of one of those stuffed animal toys that can babble one of a handful of recorded phrases when you pull a string or push a button: Trump wants what’s best for America! There’s going to be so much winning, you’ll be sick of it!
Well, print that on a t-shirt or bumper sticker for a merch table at the next TPUSA conference but it won’t help a small business decide if now is a prudent time to hire more employees, invest in new property, open another location, or launch a new product line.
The real problem, however, goes to something that Kirk himself admitted during this segment: there are a long list of things he’s said that are simply not defensible.
And contrary to the way Kirk tried to minimize it — “I’m uncomfortable defending some things I’ve said a couple of years ago” — some of the most controversial and vile comments have come just in the past few months.
This summer alone, Kirk dropped a series of race-baiting (and factually inaccurate) tweets, told a 14-year-old girl at a TPUSA conference to treat college as nothing more than an opportunity to get an “MRS degree,” and then posted an Islamophobic tweet about New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, bashed Mamdani as a “parasite” and railed against even legal immigration, and then blamed people who “don’t belong” in New York City for a shooting in downtown Manhattan that left four dead, including an NYPD officer.
These aren’t “youthful indiscretions” or little “slips of the tongue.” Kirk is a 31-year-old married father of two who heads a multimillion dollar political organization.
CNBC viewers deserve better than empty MAGA platitudes, and they darn well deserve better than the hateful garbage Kirk has spewed for years.
Watch the video above via CNBC.
