Charlie Kirk took his seat underneath a tent that said Prove me wrong. I wedged myself into the crowd at the University of Montana, next to a cadre of middle-aged men wearing mesh hats. A student standing near me had on a hoodie that read Jesus Christ. It was late September, and several hundred of us were here to see the conservative movement’s youth whisperer. Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, was in Missoula for a stop on his “You’re Being Brainwashed Tour,” in which he goes from college to college doing his signature shtick of debating undergraduates. He invited anyone who disagreed with him to come up one by one and take their shot, in a carnivalesque “step right up” style.

I had not traveled to Montana simply to see Kirk epically own college kids. (That’s not a hard thing to do, and in any case, I could just watch his deep catalog of debate videos.) I’d made the trip because I had the feeling that Kirk is moving toward the heart of the conservative movement. Few Republicans have as much purchase with all factions of the party. In Montana, Kirk delivered a simple message. “Now, all of you—I’m sure you’re feeling this: Things are unaffordable,” he said. “They’re out of reach. It is harder than ever to be able to have the American dream … and that is because of Kamala Harris.” Days before the Missoula event, however, Kirk had said that Haitian migrants “will become your masters” should Donald Trump lose the election, that “this election is literally about” whether Americans will be “allowed to fight back against invading armed hordes,” and that “swarms of people want to take our stuff, take women, and loot the entire nation.”

I arrived in Montana thinking that Kirk’s code-switching was part of a cynical move to expand his reach. He hosts one of the most popular news podcasts in the country, and his YouTube channel is a clout machine. But I came away realizing that Kirk is less of an influencer than an operator. While he spoke, volunteers moved around the crowd asking people if they were registered to vote. Later in the day, Kirk appeared at an event with Tim Sheehy, the GOP candidate trying to defeat Senator Jon Tester. Kirk bragged that Turning Point had registered 100 new voters that day. (A spokesperson for Turning Point USA did not respond to multiple requests for comment or an interview with Kirk.)

Kirk’s apparatus has gone from a conservative youth-outreach organization to an all-encompassing right-wing empire—one that has cultivated relationships with influential conservative faith groups, built out a powerful media arm, and hosted rallies for Trump and other top Republicans. It has allowed Kirk to wedge himself into a powerful role: He is the gatekeeper of a bridge between mainstream conservatism and its extreme fringes. Instead of merely serving as a roleplayer on the right, Kirk now leverages his influence to bend conservatism closer to his own vision. Kirk has power, and he knows it.

For a while, Kirk embraced a vanilla brand of conservatism. He founded Turning Point USA in 2012 to fortify a small but stable conservative youth movement with a focus on free markets and limited government. The group wanted to reach young people where they were, which included college campuses but also the internet. Early Turning Point memes read as though the organization had hired a Popsicle-stick-joke writer to make bland, conservative-minded witticisms. Kirk’s Twitter account featured mundane perspectives, such as “Taxes are theft” and “USA is the best country ever.”

Even as Trump began to take over the Republican Party, Kirk relentlessly extolled free-market capitalism and repeatedly praised markets as a near-panacea to America’s problems. Though personally Christian, he said that politics should be approached from a “secular worldview.” In 2018, he said that he understood that most people “don’t want to have to live the way some Christian in Alabama” wants them to. He would probably have never described himself as an LGBTQ ally, but he was also not known to go out of his way to bash trans people or speak out against the gay “lifestyle.”

This approach did not please everyone on the right. In 2019, the young white nationalist Nick Fuentes encouraged his followers, called Groypers, to show up at Turning Point events and troll Kirk for not being far enough to the right. “You have multiple times advocated on behalf of accepting homosexuality,” a man in a suit with a rosary around his hand said at one event to Kirk, who was sitting onstage next to a gay Turning Point USA contributor. “How does anal sex help us win the culture war?” Another person used the Q&A time to tell Kirk that “we don’t want centrists in the conservative movement.”

Something began to change around the end of Trump’s first term. Kirk hasn’t just followed the rest of his party to the right. He is now far more conservative than much of the mainstream GOP. Christianity in particular has become a dominant feature of Kirk’s rhetoric and Turning Point USA. Kirk’s position on religion has veered from “We do have a separation of Church and state, and we should support that” (his words to the conservative commentator Dave Rubin in 2018) to “There is no separation of Church and state. It’s a fabrication. It’s a fiction” (his words on his own podcast in 2022).

In 2021, he established Turning Point Faith, a division of his organization that he has used to make significant inroads with hard-right evangelical churches and their leaders, many of whom have lent their pulpits to Kirk. He has laughed off accusations that he embraces Christian nationalism. Liberals fret about a “disturbing movement of ‘Christian nationalism,’” he said in 2022. “Do you know what that’s code for? That’s code for: You’re starting to care, and they’re getting scared.” But there aren’t a lot of other ways to describe his goal of eroding the barriers between Church and state, and Turning Point Faith’s mission of returning America to “foundational Christian values.”

Kirk has also embraced rhetoric that was previously the territory of white nationalists, making explicit reference to the “Great Replacement” theory, the conspiracy that immigration is a plot to dilute the cultural and political power of white people. Since 2022, he has posted that “Whiteness is great,” and that there is an undeniable “War on White People in The West.” On his podcast, he has accused an ambiguous “they” of “trying to replace us demographically” and “make the country less white” by using an “anti-white agenda” of immigration to enact “the Great Replacement.” Because of “them,” he’s said, “the dumping ground of the planet is the United States southern border.” Some other Republicans now dabble in Great Replacement rhetoric, but Kirk has avoided being outflanked on the right: He’s attacking Martin Luther King Jr. as “awful” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as “a huge mistake.”

Some of Kirk’s rightward shift is potentially driven by him astutely putting his fingers to the wind of what’s bubbling among the base. In Montana, the crowd was most energetic when Kirk delved into points about how immigrants and trans people are making America worse. When I went out of the crowd to stand under a tree nearby, I heard a mother talking to her small daughter. “You don’t want to go over there. There’s liberals,” she said, gesturing at the fringes of the crowd, where people were observing Kirk with dour expressions. She then parroted stuff I usually see only in the most unsavory corners of the far-right internet: “They want to kidnap you and brainwash you and probably molest you.”

Late last month, Trump came out onstage with pyrotechnics blasting in front of him and dozens of Turning Point logos behind him. Kirk and his group were hosting a rally in Duluth, Georgia, for the former president. “He’s a fantastic person, the job he does with Turning Point,” Trump said of Kirk during the rally. “I just want to congratulate and thank him. He’s working so hard.”

Kirk had spoken to the crowd of roughly 10,000 just before Trump took the stage. He used the platform to explicitly suffuse the event with a nod to Christian conservatism. “We are here in a state that is a very Christian state,” Kirk said. “A state that loves God and loves Jesus.” He led the crowd in a “Christ is King” chant.

Despite Kirk’s embrace of the far right, he has continued to gain standing in the establishment wings of the right. He sat down with J. D. Vance at a Turning Point event in September, and again on Halloween. Kirk has had public conversations with high-profile conservatives such as Vivek Ramaswamy and Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt. Kirk has spent much of this year campaigning for Republican politicians. He has gone to Nebraska, where he tried to get the legislature to change how the state awards Electoral College votes, and to Ohio, where Republicans are trying to win a Senate seat.

Unlike other, sycophantic portions of right-wing media, Kirk isn’t simply a hanger-on to the conservative elite. When he can, he will try to bend elected officials toward his political vision. On multiple occasions, Kirk has publicly gone after Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Last January, several months after Johnson was elected as House speaker, Kirk posted a podcast episode titled “You Deserve Better Than What the GOP Is Giving You.” Johnson, he said on the show, was “a disappointment.” A few minutes later, he added: “Speaker Johnson is trying to gaslight you. Dare I say, he’s just lying.”

In March, Johnson went on Kirk’s show to kiss the ring. Kirk approached the conversation cordially and in good faith, but he also didn’t shy away from directly criticizing the speaker. Kirk pressed Johnson on why he hadn’t shut down the government last year and dismissed the speaker’s explanation that it would have been politically damaging: “We have been hearing that excuse for 11 years.”

Kirk’s ability to dress down one of the party’s most important members is a testament to how much power he has accrued. People like Johnson sign up for this because older politicians see Millennials such as Kirk as whispers to the rest of their generation, sometimes just because they’re younger, Jiore Craig, a senior fellow at ISD Global who has researched Kirk and Turning Point USA, explained to me: “There is this nervousness that he offers something about the internet and young people that politicians don’t know.” The belief that he can turn out young people makes politicians go to Kirk even as he tries to big-dog them, Craig said. It’s not just his appeal to youth either; alienating Kirk may mean losing an avenue to faith leaders and the broader audience he has amassed. Whether Republicans like it or not (and some don’t), they have to deal with him. This is how he has the freedom to walk around noxious far-right politics and then step back into the polite mainstream with impunity.

Even at 31, clad in saggy suit pants, Kirk has the affect of an eager college conservative. He lacks Tucker Carlson’s resolute confidence and corresponding bored disdain. He lacks the poise and charisma of far-right influencers such as Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes. But to think of Kirk as only a media figure is to miss the point.

Matthew Boedy, a professor of rhetoric at the University of North Georgia, who is writing a book about Kirk and Turning Point USA, argues that Kirk’s relationships and organizations have become so robust and far-reaching that besides Trump, Kirk is the most important person in the conservative movement. “No matter who wins in November, he will be the kingmaker,” Boedy told me.

Kirk doesn’t have an outright edge in many of the fields he trades in: Carlson and others have more popular podcasts, there are more prominent figures within the conservative faith movement, and there are better-funded conservative groups. Still, almost no one else has the relative prominence and relationships he does across so many areas. “It’s like Rush Limbaugh with six other tentacles,” Boedy said.

Kirke is all but ensured to sit in an important position on the right for years to come. He is in charge of much more than helping the right win youth voters. He has a relatively prominent political-media empire that he can use to push his ideas forward—one that works in tandem with the rest of his apparatus. His years of relationship-building with faith groups cannot be replicated by would-be challengers overnight. At least for now, Kirk has convinced Republicans that his political project is divinely ordained.

In a recent interview, the former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy made an offhanded comment that connected a few dots for me. Ramaswamy was talking with Ezra Klein about the potential for tens of thousands of government workers to lose their job should Donald Trump be reelected. This would be a healthy development, he argued. It could happen, he said, by reinstituting the Trump executive order Schedule F—which stripped certain civil servants of their job protections, allowing them to be fired more easily—and installing a government-efficiency commission to be led by Elon Musk. Ramaswamy said Trump should get rid of 75 percent of federal-government employees “on day one.” Up for debate, he argued, is whether some of those people would eventually be rehired. “That’s not the character of, certainly, what Elon did at Twitter, and I don’t think it’s going to be the character of what the most important part of that project actually looks like, which is shaving down and thinning down the bureaucracy.”

Ramaswamy’s invocation of Twitter is meaningful. In 2022, after acquiring the social network, Musk infamously purged Twitter’s ranks and fired 80 percent of its employees in the first six months, and then made a series of management decisions that ultimately threw the company into further financial disarray. Listening to Ramaswamy speak and hearing the respect in his voice as he cited the centibillionaire’s tenure, it became clear that he sees a blueprint for the Trump administration. Should Musk be appointed as a federal firing czar, it will likely not be because of his electric cars or rockets or internet-beaming satellites: It will be because he acted out the dream of draining the swamp, albeit on a smaller scale. Musk’s purchase of Twitter is not just a Republican success story; it is the template for the MAGA federal government. Even Musk’s mom said as much in a recent interview with Fox News: “He’s going to just get rid of people who are not working, or don’t have a job, or not doing a job well, just like he did on Twitter … He can do it for the government, too.”

Musk’s argument for gutting Twitter was that the company was so overstaffed that it was running out of money and had only “four months to live.” Musk cut so close to the bone that there were genuine concerns among employees I spoke with at the time that the site might crash during big news events, or fall into a state of disrepair. “I am fully convinced that if Musk does what he is saying he will do, it will be an absolute shitshow,” a trust-and-safety engineer at a different tech company told me in 2022. Musk did fire most of the trust-and-safety employees, as well as those in charge of curation and “human rights,” and the Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability team. The purge of these people in particular delighted some right-wing commentators, who saw Musk’s dismissals as a long-overdue excision of the woke bureaucracy inside the company. “Nothing of value was lost,” one MAGA account tweeted at the news of the firings.

[Read: I watched Elon Musk kill Twitter’s culture from the inside]

Twitter did not self-destruct as my sources feared it would (though parts of it have, perhaps most memorably when Musk tried to host Spaces events with Trump and with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, only for them to glitch out). Small-scale disruptions aside, the site has mostly functioned during elections, World Cups, Super Bowls, and world-historic news events. But Musk’s cuts have not spared the platform from deep financial hardship. His chaotic managerial strategy for Twitter has been to rebrand the site as X, alienate many of its most important advertisers, institute a dubious paid subscription program, and dabble in AI features in the hopes of someday turning the platform into an “everything app.” The end result has been calamitous for the company’s bottom line. Soon after taking over, ad revenues plummeted 40 percent, and the bleeding hasn’t stopped. According to estimates, last year, X lost about 52 percent of its U.S. advertising revenue. A recent Fidelity report suggested that the company may have lost nearly 80 percent of its value since Musk bought it (for arguably way more than it was worth). If this keeps up, some have speculated that Musk may have to sell some of his Tesla stock to keep the company afloat. Musk’s financiers have also been left with massive loans on their balance sheets in what The Wall Street Journal has called “the worst buyout for banks since the financial crisis.”

Trump and Ramaswamy don’t seem to care about any of this. What matters is that Musk has turned X into a political weapon in service of the MAGA movement. X, as I wrote last week, has become a formidable vector for amplifying far-right accounts and talking points; it is poisoning the information environment with unverified rumors and conspiracy theories about election fraud. The far-right faithful do not care that his platform has occasionally labeled pro–Kamala Harris accounts as spam, temporarily banned journalists, restricted accounts that have tweeted the word cisgender, and complied with foreign-government requests to censor speech. Nor do Republican lawmakers seem to care that Musk is wielding his platform to get Trump elected, even after they spent the better part of a decade outraged that tech platforms were supposedly biased against conservatives. Their silence on Musk’s clear bias coupled with their admiration for his activism suggest that what they really value is the way that Musk was able to seize a popular communication platform and turn it into something that they can control and wield against their political enemies.

This idea is not dissimilar from the vision articulated by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the conservative policy proposal to reshape the federal government in a second Trump administration. Project 2025 is a dense, often radical, and unpopular set of policy proposals that, as my colleague David A. Graham notes, “would dissolve the Education Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, slash Medicare and Medicaid, ban pornography, establish federal abortion restrictions, repeal some child-labor protections, and enable the president to lay off tens of thousands of federal career workers and replace them with political appointees.” Put another way: If Trump were elected and decided to make Project 2025 a reality, his administration would take an existing piece of bureaucratic infrastructure, strip it of many of those who can check its power, and then wield that power to ideological ends and against their political enemies.

The parallels between this element of Project 2025 and Musk’s Twitter are stark. They should also be alarming. The federal government is not a software company, nor should it be run like one. Perhaps there is bloat in our departments and agencies, but civil servants labor over daily technical problems that are crucial to a functioning country—such as census taking, storm tracking, and preparing for pandemics. To simply cut these people with abandon (and replace others with political appointees) could have severe consequences, such as stifling disaster response and increasing the likelihood of corruption.

Consider also the financial dynamic. Last week in a virtual town hall, Musk said that the Trump administration’s second-term agenda—which includes tax cuts, slashing the federal budget, and tariffs on imports, “necessarily involves some temporary hardship,” but would ultimately result in longer-term prosperity. “We have to reduce spending to live within our means,” Musk added. The line is similar to his justification for the layoffs at Twitter, which at the time he called “painful” and necessary so that Twitter could balance its budget. But Musk bought the platform with no idea of how to turn it into a profitable business. His primary interest seems to be prioritizing shitposting and trolling rather than finding advertisers or making good on his ideas to turn X into a WeChat-style commercial app. Musk has never appeared interested in understanding the mechanics of a social network or the complexities of content moderation or even the specifics of the First Amendment. His incuriousness about the thing he ended up in charge of has been exceeded only by his desire to use it as a personal playground and political weapon.

Before Musk officially took over Twitter, the tech oligarch at least feigned an interest in running the company with an eye toward actual governance. “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,” he tweeted in 2022. Trump, however, has made no effort to disguise the vindictive goals of his next administration and how he plans, in the words of the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, to “merge the office of the presidency with himself” and “rebuild it as an instrument of his will, wielded for his friends and against his enemies.” In other words, he plans to run the Elon Musk Twitter playbook on the entire country.