If different people got different impressions of Kirk’s views on Israel, it was for good reason.
A bereft White House official told me that Kirk functioned as something like a Republican chairman and Rush Limbaugh “rolled into one.” Clips of his speeches and debates are everywhere, but movement-building is a subtler thing, and Kirk’s public statements, friends said, often reflected attempts at intraparty diplomacy.
And one of Kirk’s preoccupations this year, in public and in private, was holding together the Republican Party on the question of Israel. “His No. 1 concern was that this was ripping the MAGA movement apart,” said Wolicki. “He was trying to hold the coalition together in many ways.”
He was, in particular, trying to keep young Republicans inside the tent, two other friends said. He followed that generational path into a flirtation with the theory, for which there is no evidence, that Jeffrey Epstein worked for Mossad; Kirk also invited Carlson and the anti-Israel commentator Dave Smith to his annual conference.
Future historians will puzzle over why the conflict between Israel and Palestine has been the issue, above all others, to split both US political parties in the 2020s. But one thing the feuding MAGA factions agree on is that there isn’t really another prominent figure like Kirk — a big voice who was focused on smoothing over his movement’s fractures, not hashing them out in public for clout.
The only other one, in fact, is Donald Trump, who has proven — in his transactional way — a master of holding together disparate Republican factions. But so far, Trump has firmly chosen Israel’s side in the intraparty dispute. And now it’s not clear who remains to try to smooth over the generational divide, or who would even want to try.