When I landed in Phoenix, Arizona, the weekend before Christmas, the weather was gorgeous. Phoenix is an ugly town, all concrete blocks and wide, uncrossable roads, but it is set against a dramatic landscape of red rock mesas which jut impossibly from the desert.
For the weekend, 30,000 or so conservative activists and influencers had descended here for a convention called AmericaFest – the crown jewel in the calendar for the conservative student political organising group Turning Point USA, founded by the late hard right activist Charlie Kirk. The event boasted an all-star line-up of speakers across the conservative media landscape, as well as breakout sessions, stalls, and parties.
What became clear in those few days I spent at the conference was that the MAGA coalition that brought Donald Trump to power, with its uneasy alliance of nationalist-isolationists, Silicon Valley techno-libertarians, conspiracy theorists and outright neo-Nazis, is coming apart at the seams – and at AmFest, the cracks were more visible than ever. Far from unifying behind any one inheritor of Kirk’s mantle, it seems like a far more extreme ideology on the US right is gaining strength as the movement descends into infighting.
This dark shift in political tone was accompanied by bouts of outright weirdness. “Oh Gavvy-poo, it only gets worse from here for you, buddy,” the rapper and songwriter Nicki Minaj told the audience from the stage. “It’s the end of the road for you, my love. Get on the nearest jet ski and let that beautiful hair blow in the wind.” Minaj was reading a series of her own social media posts off her phone about California governor Gavin Newsom, who she refers to as “Newscum”.
Minaj was seated in a white armchair on stage talking to Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie. What advice did Minaj have for young men, Erika asked? “Don’t be Newscum,” Minaj answered, speaking weirdly slowly, kind of dreamlike. At the back of the auditorium on the press riser, I found myself wondering whether she was high, or whether I was.
“Yes, see, there, young men, you have amazing role models like, the handsome, dashing president,” Minaj went on, apparently referring to Trump, adding, “and you have amazing role models… like the assassin JD Vance.” Assassin was a very unfortunate choice of word to use in conversation with Erika Kirk.
There was an audible gasp in the cavernous auditorium, and then a wave of tense, awkward laughter. Kirk, after a brief moment, went with it. “This is what’s so beautiful about this moment, because if the internet wants to clip it, who cares? I love this woman.”
“Thank you,” Minaj said as they closed their conversation. “For boys, boys be boys,” Kirk replied. Thirty thousand people applauded, a little awkwardly.
Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, and rapper Nicki Minaj on stage on the final day of the conference.
featuring an image of Trump
as attendees arrive at the
event’s main hall.
An image of the late right wing activist Charlie Kirk at the conference.
Turning Point USA was launched by Charlie Kirk in 2012, back when he was a student activist and it quickly grew into a political organising behemoth. In 2024 alone it had $84m dollars in revenue. Expanding rapidly, opening chapters on thousands of university and school campuses across America, it became a powerful engine – perhaps the most powerful – of the MAGA movement and Kirk became one of the most influential figures in American right wing politics. His murder, in September, by a gunman at a TPUSA event in Utah, made him a martyr – but it also left a power vacuum.
In the past, AmericaFest has been a celebratory affair, a time when stars of the right-wing political firmament come together with the common cause of firing up the core of the MAGA youth base. This year, though? Not so much.
There was no shortage of mawkish tributes to Charlie, the new saint of the right. On the main stage, in a glass case, was the microphone he had been holding when he died. In the convention hall next door to the auditorium, where ICE and Homeland Security recruitment tables abutted stalls selling dietary supplements and vibrating massage tables, a replica of the tent in which he had been speaking when he was shot was set up where attendees could take selfies.
Which isn’t to say the crowd wasn’t having fun. Turning Point is, fundamentally, a student organising group, and this was a different crowd to the one you’d see at CPAC or a Republican convention.
Still overwhelmingly white, but less stuffy, they dressed informally – t-shirts and slacks for men, often cocktail dresses for women. The dominant colour was the now-familiar shade of MAGA-red that seems as close as TPUSA gets to a uniform. More than anything, they all looked ready to go on TV at any moment; in part, that’s probably because they most likely would: small-scale influencers seemed to be everywhere, roaming the halls conducting impromptu interviews for podcasts or Instagram reels, often with each other.
The biggest stars were the ones with online clout: a big YouTuber like Ben Shapiro could barely cross the lobby without being surrounded by a baying mob, whereas older right wing luminaries like Roger Stone attracted less attention.
Even before the conference began, the burning question was: who would inherit Charlie Kirk’s mantle as de facto leader and avatar of the MAGA youth? Structurally at least, the answer for now seems to be Erika.
“This is a full circle moment for me,” she said as she opened the festivities. “Two years ago, my husband stood on this stage and said ‘here I am, lord. Use me,’ And boy, did he.” Kirk wore a gold sequined power suit that seemed to glow in the stage lights. Thirty thousand people in the vast auditorium went wild.
“Amfest is not about echo chambers,” she continued. “It’s about sharpening one another. It’s about digging deeper into ideas instead of retreating into slogans. And it’s about remembering that freedom requires responsibility and truth requires courage.
“My challenge to you this weekend is very simple. Don’t just attend AmFest. Let it mark you. Let it stretch you. Let it challenge assumptions, strengthen convictions, and maybe even make you a little uncomfortable.”
It didn’t take long, in fact, for things to get very uncomfortable indeed. AmericaFest 2025 became a battlefield, as the leaders of MAGA’s warring tribes began, almost immediately, going for one another’s throats.
Looming large over the festivities were two absences. One was white nationalist activist Nick Fuentes, and the other was far right commentator Candace Owens.
Owens, who has a YouTube channel with almost six million subscribers, is an antisemitic conspiracy theorist – she’s flirted with flat-Earthism, claimed Israel was involved in 9/11 and suggested that Jews control the media and “drink Christian blood”. Owens used to work for TPUSA, but split with the organisation – and despite an apparent peace summit-style interview with Erika the previous week, spent the weekend online doubling down on her theory that Charlie’s death was orchestrated by France and Israel with the involvement of some kind of team of Egyptians.
“We have 25 countries represented,” Erika Kirk said from the stage. “I have the list here; don’t worry guys, Egypt is not on the list.” This got a big laugh from some parts of the room, but confused shrugs from others.
The other absent figure whose shadow loomed over the event was Fuentes – a livestreamer who uses his channel “America First” to promote antisemitic conspiracy theories, white nationalist, anti-gay, anti-women and sometimes explicitly Nazi stuff to a huge and rabidly loyal audience. Fuentes flavours his content with an ironically detached “u mad bro?” vibe – an approach that’s common in online subculture.
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Before Kirk’s death, Fuentes had led his followers, known as “Groypers,” in a campaign against TPUSA. His followers heckled at Kirk speeches and events, and trolled them online.
On the first day of the convention, Shapiro attacked the former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson, who would himself speak later that day. Carlson had recently hosted Fuentes on his show – Charlie Kirk hated Fuentes, Shapiro said, and “knew Fuentes is an evil troll and building him up is an act of moral imbecility.”
Fuentes, Shapiro said, was a “Nazi-loving anti-American piece of refuse.” He said Owens had “been vomiting hideous conspiratorial nonsense into the public square for years.”
This, it turns out, made Shapiro surprisingly few friends at AmFest. “Deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event? What? It’s hilarious,” Carlson said when he took the stage later that afternoon. “I don’t think we’re friends any more,” the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said when it was her turn to speak.
The first three words of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s speech were “We are at war”, and it didn’t take him long to go all in on Shapiro. “Let’s be blunt,” he said. “He is a hardcore never-Trumper.” Bannon went on to call Shapiro a “cancer”.
Shapiro wasn’t lying: right wing though Kirk was, he wasn’t a Nazi. He really did loathe Fuentes and the extremism he and Groyperism represent.
Bannon, Carlson, Kelly and others attacking Shapiro so openly for suggesting Fuentes is beyond the pale – and receiving little to no pushback for doing so – looks very much like an implicit endorsement. It is a pretty shocking development to hear these sentiments coming from the stage at a TPUSA event.
Outside the convention hall, I chatted with an attendee with a straggly goatee, smoking a roll-up cigarette. Which influencer, I asked him, was his favourite? He leaned in, grinning conspiratorially. “Nicholas J Fuentes,” he said.
By the closing day, Erika was forced to acknowledge the unfolding drama, likening it to “a Thanksgiving dinner where your family’s hashing out the family business.” Still, energy remained fairly high – one activist I spoke to had spent Saturday night sleeping outside the convention centre to secure a front-row seat for the conference’s final day, which featured JD Vance as headliner and also a “secret surprise guest”.
That guest turned out to be Minaj, and her appearance was a memorable weekend highlight, if only because of the surreal way she spoke. Despite Erika’s attempt to laugh it off, Minaj’s “assassin” gaffe turned the atmosphere awkward and tense, a feeling that didn’t fade when Vance himself took the stage – which sucked for him, because the stakes for his appearance were high.
Vance hopes to position himself as Trump’s natural and unchallenged successor. That is by no means guaranteed.
His speech itself was unremarkable, except for his shockingly racist line “Mogadishu – what? I mean Minneapolis. Little Freudian slip there.” Vance clearly decided that the people he needed to impress would appreciate simple, undisguised racism.
More important for Vance’s political ambitions than his fairly lukewarm reception in the room, though, was the fact that Erika, in her speech, explicitly endorsed him for president at the next election. But the importance of that endorsement depends on whether she can hold together the movement she has inherited as a cohesive political force. From the infighting on display in Phoenix, that looks increasingly unlikely.
TPUSA was one of the Trump-era Republican Party’s biggest assets: a disciplined, unified, nationwide volunteer machine. The chaos on show at this strange, combative and unsettling political circus isn’t itself the problem – it is, to be honest, pretty funny watching them all going at each other.
The problem is what it might mean on a larger scale. The faultlines in the Trump/MAGA coalition that currently makes up the American political right are only going to get bigger. It is not a great sign that the extremists like Fuentes and his supporters, who are pretty much neo-Nazis, are the ones who seem to flourish best in the widening cracks.
