Trump builds youth reelection effort with Turning Point USA appearance

On Tuesday morning, President Trump took the stage at the organization’s Teen Student Action Summit in Washington, D.C., for more than 70 minutes, slamming media reports he thought unfair to his administration and touting his accomplishments. His appearance at the conference was very reminiscent of his campaign rallies rather than an ordinary speech. The president walked onstage to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” following a 12-minute video about his road to the White House, and was greeted by “USA!” chants from the energetic student crowd.

At one point, the president invited students onto the stage, including Hunter Richard, a high school student in San Antonio, Texas, who openly declared his pride in wearing a “MAGA” hat wherever he goes.

“Every day I go to school, I always wear a red MAGA hoodie … I proudly wear my ‘Make America Great Again’ hat every time I go out of my house … Mr. President, I do have one problem with you. And that’s that I only get to have you as my president for six more years!” Richard said and was rewarded by the crowd with loud applause.

It was the organization’s first national gathering since founder Charlie Kirk announced in early July that it would expand to include Students For Trump, an effort aimed at fighting Democratic attempts to rebuild an Obama youth coalition. The initiative showed the organization’s intent to assist the president’s reelection campaign, though the group’s conferences had typically placed heavy emphasis on conservative-libertarian thought and it was widely considered a home for student conservatives to express themselves and engage in political dialogue.

The president nodded his head in approval of chants yelled by student supporters throughout his speech and even laughed when a “Lock Her Up!” chant broke out among some in the audience, a staple of Trump’s campaign rallies.

Trump left his audience to the tune of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones, something regularly done at his rallies. But the campaign atmosphere was evident outside the regular conference schedule.

In a meeting for social media influencers Monday, Kirk said social media personalities were critical to the president’s reelection and a unified political front on social media could make or break the election for the president. The organization alone has 300,000 followers on Twitter, half a million followers on Instagram, and nearly 1.5 million likes on Facebook. Their combined online presence, he added, could successfully reach hundreds of millions of users. But Kirk cautioned that these influencers should avoid publicly criticizing other Trump supporters over social media.

Throughout the conference, speakers tailored their speeches around either defending the president or educating students on how they can win cultural victories for him. Former Fox commentator Eric Bolling based his entire speech around defending the character and actions of the president. Jared Kushner, a White House senior adviser and the president’s son-in-law, spoke of the administration’s achievements on policies like criminal justice reform and immigration. And during Tuesday night’s Liberty Gala, the keynote speakers offered laudatory endorsements of the president in the 2020 presidential race.

One of the gala’s keynote speakers was Nigel Farage, a British member of the European Parliament and the leader of the Brexit Party. Farage endorsed Trump, beginning with his recorded support for Britain’s full separation from the European Union and role in Europe’s growing acceptance of nationalism. He pointed to Conservative Party leader Boris Johnson’s election as prime minister as a “step in the right direction” and criticized the globalism embraced by Prime Minister Theresa May. Trump is “a man who gives inspiration and leadership, not just to America, but across the whole of the Western world,” he said.

Another of the night’s keynote speakers, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, devoted her speech to praising Trump and criticizing Democrats, saying the president’s opponents want both “anarchy” and “socialism.”

“What we have in this country today is an attempt at anarchy. Where they want open borders. They want socialism. They want you to pay for them … There’s only one man who’s gonna be able to keep that from happening in this country. There’s only one man, and you know who that man is: Donald Trump,” Pirro said.

While Pirro’s defenses of the president were largely well-received, her support for some of the president’s recent tweets aimed at four freshman Democratic congresswomen widely criticized as racist was met with less enthusiastic applause from a visibly skeptical audience. She asserted that even if Trump intended to be racist, the president was simply exercising a constitutionally protected, “natural right” of free speech.

“He didn’t say ‘go back and don’t come home.’ He said fix it and come back like you told us … But you know, even if he did say it in the worst way possible, and honestly he didn’t, the United States Supreme Court has held that hate speech is protected. It is protected free speech, and I want you to remember that,” Pirro said.

Students were demonstrably happy to celebrate Trump’s accomplishments but seemed less eager to applaud comments they disagreed with.