The first major Turning Point’s AmericaFest since the assassination of the organization’s founder, Charlie Kirk, was marred by bitter infighting and several high-profile surprise appearances — including a sit-down talk with Nicki Minaj and a phone call from President Donald Trump.
“Hello everybody, I want to be with you, but I’ll be with you soon,” the president said Sunday on a call from Mar-a-Lago. “We won in a landslide, and we’re going to continue to do it, and I just want to thank everybody. You got out there and they voted and pressed doorbells, and I just want to thank you all.”
But the real headline-grabbing appearance of the weekend came when rapper Nicki Minaj made a surprise appearance at the event, walking out hand-in-hand with Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, to a cascade of sparklers and thunderous applause.
Minaj, clad in a modest purple turtleneck, sat down with Kirk for a 15-minute conversation in which she commended the leaders in the White House, suggested white women have been the victims of reverse discrimination and doubled down on her opinions about transgender youth.
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“This administration is full of people with heart and soul, and they make me proud of them. Our vice president, he makes me ... well, I love both of them,” Minaj said referring to JD Vance and Trump. “Both of them have a very uncanny ability to be someone that you relate to.”
Minaj, who has flirted with conservatism in recent years after being critical of the first Trump administration, recently appeared alongside U.S. representatives at a United Nations event to support Trump’s claims of Christians being persecuted in Nigeria.
Speaking Sunday, Minaj said she doesn’t hear criticism about her recent support of the Trump administration.
“We’re the cool kids,” she said to Kirk. “The other people, they’re the ones who are disgruntled, but really they’re just disgruntled with themselves.”
“That it’s OK to change your mind,” Minaj said is the legacy she wants to leave behind for her family and fans.
Despite the splashy celebrity appearance, the story of the weekend quickly became a bitter spate of infighting that has consumed the youth conservative movement Charlie Kirk spearheaded until his death at the hands of a gunman earlier this year in Utah.
In his opening remarks Thursday, right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro used his time at the podium to name-drop several other right-wing influencers and slated speakers, including Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson who he felt were peddling conspiracy theories around Kirk’s death.
“The conservative movement is in serious danger,” Shapiro said, especially from some “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.”
In regard to Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, Shapiro said he was a “PR flack for Jeffrey Epstein.”
Carlson appeared on stage before the crowd of 30,000 supporters shortly after Shapiro, using his time to call Shapiro “pompous.”
Kelly took to the stage as well, alongside conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, and said she no longer considers Shapiro a friend.
“He thinks he’s in a position to decide who must say what to whom and when,” Kelly said. “So, I don’t think we are friends anymore.”
Erika Kirk, who first stepped on stage to a backdrop of sparklers, used her opening address to endorse Vance for the 2028 presidential election and attempted to bring attention to the lack of diverse opinions.
“We are going to get my husband’s friend JD Vance elected for 48 in the most resounding way possible,” Kirk said, referencing the 48th presidential election in the U.S.
Nodding at the diverse set of voices and hearty debate at the center of this year’s Turning Point event, Kirk said: “AmFest is not about echo chambers.”
Meanwhile, on Sunday, White House officials and the president’s family used the last day of the festival to redirect the crowd to the upcoming midterms and tamp down on the infighting.
“The real enemy? It’s not Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro, it’s the radical left that murdered Charlie and celebrated it on a daily basis,” Donald Trump Jr. told the crowd Sunday.
“President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests,” said Vance to loud applause. “We have far more important work to do than canceling each other.”
At one point in his 30-minute address, Vance said, “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”
“We don’t persecute you for being male, for being straight, for being gay, for being anything,” Vance went on. “The only thing that we demand is that you be a great American patriot.”
Correction: This story has been corrected to show that Megyn Kelly said at the event that she thinks she and Ben Shapiro are no longer friends.
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