Erika Kirk threw her support behind Vice President JD Vance for president during her opening night address at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest Thursday night — and revealed that the conservative nonprofit will return to college campuses next year in the wake of her husband Charlie’s assassination.
“We’re going to ensure that President Trump has Congress for all four years,” she told attendees at the Phoenix Convention Center.
“We are going to get my husband’s friend JD Vance elected for ’48 [sic] in the most resounding way possible.”
It appears that Kirk meant to say ’28, and had previously signaled that TPUSA was leaning toward backing Vance in the next presidential election.
The 36-year-old widow of assassinated TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk also vowed to carry on with her husband’s work in fighting for Republicans to prevail in the 2026 midterms.
The mother of two was forced to ad-lib the opening of her address after her prepared remarks vanished from her iPad.
“The enemy has thrown a lot of curve balls at us today,” she said at the top of her speech after realizing her prepared remarks were gone. “And one of them is the fact that my entire speech has been wiped because my iPad won’t even turn on.
“So that’s a fun technical difficulty that we can figure out. So we’re just going to wing it.”
Undeterred, Kirk carried on with her speech, riffing about various anecdotes from her late 31-year-old husband. At one point, a staffer brought over a sheet of paper with some stats she intended to read.
After bouncing around different anecdotes while walking around on stage in her sparkling gold attire, the widow began to delve into the stats about TPUSA’s recent successes and data about AmericaFest.
“All 50 states represented,” she said, referring to the event’s attendance. “We have 25 countries represented, plus Puerto Rico. But I have the list here. Don’t worry, guys, Egypt is not on the list.”
The joke was a not-so-subtle knock at right-wing podcaster Candace Owens, who has peddled conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, including her eyebrow-raising claims that an Egyptian plane was tracking Erika.
“Oh, how funny. I say Egypt and my iPad turns on,” Erika remarked after finishing rattling through the stats.
Erika met with Owens privately on Monday in Nashville to discuss the rightwing podcaster’s bashing of Turning Point USA in the weeks that followed Charlie’s murder.
The meeting also replaced a planned rebuttal that producers of “The Charlie Kirk Show” initially planned for Monday to dispute some of the bonkers claims that Owens has peddled.
After Erika’s speech came back up on the screen, the Turning Point USA CEO began reading some of the conservative grassroots organization’s major announcements, including plans to return to campus next year.
“Charlie’s love for debate will always be the DNA of Turning Point USA, because we believe in truth, and we believe in civil discourse, and we believe that truth can withstand scrutiny,” she said.
“So that is why we’ll be launching the “Pick up the Mic” initiative and getting back on campus for Prove Me Wrongs and campus tour events this spring and fall of 2026.”
Over the past few of months, Erika helped ensure that her late husband’s “The American Comeback Tour” was completed after he was fatally shot in the neck at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10.
During an interview with podcaster Megyn Kelly, Kirk recounted that one of her final conversations with her late husband was “how intentional he was about supporting JD for ’28.”
Earlier this month, at the New York Times’ DealBook summit, Erika refrained from endorsing Vance for the 2028 race, though she stressed how her late husband backed him for Senate in 2022.
“I adore JD, and my husband was very vocal about supporting him,” she said. “I will enjoy the fact that my husband worked so hard — so hard for this past election. And I think it would behove us to appreciate that hard work and enjoy the fact that we do have a president in office that we voted for.”
