TAMPA, Fla. — The future activist base of the Republican Party found themselves at the center of MAGA’s biggest rifts Friday as young conservatives’ favorite influencers spoke about Iran, Epstein and immigration.
Top advisers to President Donald Trump and figureheads of the online “America first” movement shared the stage before around 5,000 students ranging from high school freshman to college seniors gathered in Tampa, Florida, for Turning Point USA’s largest-ever Student Action Summit.
Charlie Kirk, the organization’s founder, president and so-called “youth whisperer of the American right," energized attendees by repeatedly telling them they “delivered the White House to Donald Trump.” For three days, Kirk declared, Tampa Bay would be the “center of the political universe of the planet.”
Starting as a celebration of Trump’s return to the presidency, complete with a crowd of red-hat-wearing adolescents doing the “Trump dance” to YMCA, the event quickly became centered on the biggest debates among Trump’s political base.
In remarks that felt directed at the Oval Office as much as at the auditorium, government officials loyal to the president and influential independent media personalities weighed in on whether the motley coalition that calls MAGA home could outlive the administration’s attempt to fulfill all its promises.
The Trump administration has waged a shock and awe campaign during its first six months, flooding the zone with hundreds of executive orders that were counted as immediate “wins” by those who volunteered with groups like Turning Point to reelect Trump.
But the president has also prompted spirited disagreement among some of his most outspoken supporters as his Cabinet has taken decisive action in the Middle East, while sometimes vacillating on the extent of mass deportations and on releasing documents related to Jeffrey Epstein.
Was bombing Iran ‘America first’?
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, during remarks that doubled as a military recruitment pitch, told thousands of prospective service members that Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites exemplified “peace through strength” by “reestablishing deterrence around the world.”
“That was not just a message to Iran’s nuclear capabilities,” Hegseth said. “It was a message to all of our adversaries and all of our allies that American leadership and strength is back.”
Hegseth hailed the recent agreement of NATO members to increase their respective defense spending from 2% of gross domestic product to 5% over the next decade as another example of Trump foreign policy pressure yielding results for American interests.
But one of the most well-known skeptics of foreign intervention, Tucker Carlson, whose podcast cracked the top five on YouTube and Spotify last month, argued that the administration had failed to explain why attacking the Islamic Republic should be a priority for the U.S.
“What’s in this war for us?” Carlson asked. “Credit card debt is the single biggest cause of human suffering that I’m aware of in the United States; it’s not Iran.”
What’s going on with Epstein?
As the evening progressed, attendees heard more and more about what Megyn Kelly, host of the “Megyn Kelly Show,” called the “first big scandal” of the Trump administration for his supporters: the mixed messages coming from the Justice Department over the Epstein files.
On Sunday, the Department of Justice appeared to leak a memo to Axios stating that it and the FBI had concluded there was no evidence that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had kept a client list and blackmailed people in power.
Subsequent reporting found that the handling of the situation by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who had previously said the DOJ would release information about Epstein, led Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, himself a former podcast host who focused on Epstein’s case, to consider resigning.
For years Epstein, a convicted sex offender who authorities say committed suicide in 2019 in his jail cell, has been seen by some on the American right as the key figure in a child sexual abuse ring and cover-up among the international elite.
Attempting to close the investigation on Epstein without resolving the questions that many Trump supporters are asking has “created a real hornet’s nest for the administration” that falls at the feet of Bondi, according to Kelly.
“Her days are numbered. She can’t recover from this. She’s shot herself in the foot on her own credibility,” Kelly said.
Is immigration reform amnesty?
Some of the event’s keynote speakers also took aim at members of Trump’s Cabinet and the GOP majority in Congress who have floated expanded pathways to legalization for some migrants after the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that allocated over $100 billion to immigration law enforcement.
Last month, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer announced plans to fast track visa permits for U.S. farmers who rely on migrant labor.
And some congressional Republicans, according to Kirk, are considering bigger plans that grant legal status to unauthorized immigrants or that exempt certain industries from Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions.
If there’s one campaign plank that holds those who voted to “Make America Great Again” together it’s a relentless agenda of mass deportations of all unauthorized immigrants, Kirk reiterated during his opening remarks and his conversation with Donald Trump Jr. on Friday.
“No amnesty. Period. End of story,” Kirk said, asking the crowd to repeat “no amnesty” together. ”We will not put up with any exceptions, any carve outs, any loopholes, any asterisks, any iotas."
The ‘new MAGA’
The crowd of teenagers and 20-somethings seemed acutely attuned to the algorithmically accelerated news cycle popping up in real time on their social media feeds, cheering and booing in all the right places in reaction to “Alligator Alcatraz” or “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”
But the students, many of them leaders of their local Turning Point chapters, seemed less concerned than the speakers about the zero-sum struggle between foreign and domestic policy goals.
“We can 100% do both,” said Levi Fisher, a 17-year-old high school junior from Texas. “Right now Iran isn’t our biggest concern. But if we didn’t do anything it would be. ... Now we can focus at home.”
The majority of those attending the event, who fell between ages 18 and 25, though they were joined by another thousand or so who were older, also appeared more optimistic about the momentum of the movement they are hoping to inherit.
Amid arguments over what “Make America Great Again” will look like during the remainder of Trump’s second term, and beyond, speakers told attendees again and again that the movement was already in their hands.
From the confidence the young activists showed, during Q&As with their favorite celebrities, and impassioned sidebar conversations, it was clear that they agreed; the feeling maybe best captured by the inscription on one young woman’s hat: “the new MAGA.”