Trump Turned an Outpouring of Respect for Kirk Into a Coliseum of Hate

At noon on Sunday, Corinthian Loyless, a 46-year-old pizza delivery driver from Hixson, Tennessee, was sitting on a bench in the pounding sun, buttoned up in a solid-black dress shirt, holding a bottle of pink Gatorade on top of his bald head. In the seat next to him were a folded suit jacket and an American flag wrapped around a wooden flagpole. He had been at State Farm Stadium since just after midnight, and as the sun broke through a blanket of morning clouds, he looked like a man flirting with heat stroke.

I bought an ice bottle of water from a vendor and returned to the bench. Hold this against your neck, I said. We started chatting. When I got his name, I told him I’d never met a person named Corinthian before.

“My grandmother named me that, for the chapter they used in the weddings,” he said, with a touch of Appalachian drawl. “‘Love is patient, love is kind.’ This gave me something to live up to.”

The final official guesstimate of the throngs in Glendale to send off Charlie Kirk (and/or to hustle “Trump 2028” merch) was around 90,000 people, well north of the NFL stadium’s capacity of 63,000. By mid-morning, the organizers at Turning Point USA, Kirk’s politics and media nonprofit, began sending folks to the nearby 19,000-capacity hockey arena to watch a big-screen video feed.

Neither arena filled up. Stragglers like Corinthian were everywhere, still trying to get their bearings. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people tried to slog through the infinite traffic before simply leaving. Security was that intense: The president, vice president and more than half the Cabinet were in the building, many as speakers. Authorities fenced off and restricted the parking lots surrounding the stadium. For the visitors who walked miles to the gate or sat in hours of traffic, or both, simply getting to the doors required Job’s fortitude.

Inside, an alleged memorial service for the slain MAGA evangelist was a mask-off Republican political rally. The President of the United States talked about having “hate” for his opponents — a half-joking rebuttal to Kirk’s widow, Erika, saying she could find forgiveness in her heart for the person who shot her husband dead.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller, per usual mustering all the charisma of a hangnail, tried to incite the ostensible mourners: “The light will defeat the dark! We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil! They cannot imagine what they have awakened!”

It was gross. By turning a service for a dead friend into a bully pulpit, Trump & Co., in short, did what they so often do: Create an ill-defined “us” and “them,” and stir us into a them-hating frenzy. Sitting in an arena seat Sunday, I felt it distinctly. These men were sadists holding a jar filled with scorpions, shaking shaking shaking it, trying to rile them — us Americans — to sting one another to death.

Meanwhile, they’ve made it clear that if you want to exercise your First Amendment right to call them on this or any other of their nonsense — including Charlie Kirk’s own incendiary rhetoric — they may encourage your employer to fire you. Free speech hasn’t been this expensive since the McCarthy era.

Many thousands who came to Glendale on Sunday didn’t make the pilgrimage for a dose of venom. Most of them were just working folks who deserve better than what Trump offers.

The us/them horseshit is meant to deflect from the fact that MAGA policies — the upward transfer of wealth to the richest people in the country, the starvation of science and social services and universities and health care, the open calls for race-based gerrymandering, the unabashed solicitation of billions in crypto payments directly to the president, the capricious tariffs and draconian deportations that are crippling businesses and which have slowed job growth in this country to a trickle in 2025 — cause harm to just about everyone you know, in ways material and psychological. Trump doesn’t just make enemies. Trump makes. enemies.

He wants you to fight your neighbor, your family, your boss, your own ethical compass. He is neither a good man nor a good Christian. Would that he instead take a note from Matthew and remember: Blessed are the peacemakers.

Take Corinthian. He spent $700 to fly to Arizona from eastern Tennessee, to book a room at Motel 6 and to rent a car. In Glendale he parked and walked for what he guessed was two miles to the stadium. When he arrived at 12:30 a.m., crowds were already pooling. He showed me videos on his phone: a group of mostly younger people, lit by the flashing reds and blues of silent police lights, singing hymns as they read lyrics off their phones. The moment touched him.

Around 4 a.m., he said, some actual lines formed, and the mood darkened. Some people cut the line. People argued. People mashed into a mob. Corinthian found himself pressed back-to-chest with strangers. He watched a woman shove a man in the chest. Parents with children started peeling away. Everyone was tired, sweaty and angry.

Then someone handed him a flag on a pole. It became an instant calling. Instead of shuffling inside the building, Corinthian spent the next several hours holding the flag aloft, wending slowly forward in the line, then going to the back to repeat the walk.

It calmed people down. They could see the flag moving, which meant the line was moving. Tempers cooled. And folks talked with him. He guessed he chatted with 2,000 people that morning. When I found him overheated and exhausted, he kept returning to the joy he found talking with so many strangers.

“A lot of people just gave me a nod,” Corinthian said. “Some of ’em said thank you, and a lot of ’em just looked up as they passed going the other way. A few of ’em told me their story — where they’re from and why they were here. I don’t use the word lightly, to be honest — I haven’t been to a church in 20 years — but it was as close to fellowship as I can get. And it doesn’t even have to mean religiously. It just means as human to human.

“Man, we’ve had a rough couple years,” he continued. “I was trying to get into crypto, made some big mistakes, lost my childhood home. I went all-in thinking that ‘You just need a break. I just hope this works.’ And I was right. I was just wrong on time. If it had went to 119,000,” — the current price of one Bitcoin, roughly — “I would’ve paid off the house, paid off our cars, and gotten my money back. And instead, I have $6,000 to my name and I drive pizzas for a living. It’s not been good. But I’m a Christian and I believe God’s will be done, and I’m trying to walk the talk. If you can’t walk the talk, then you’re full of crap. I don’t want to be a hypocrite. I want to be a better man. I want to be what God wants me to be.”

He said he came all this way because after Charlie Kirk was killed, he came to understand that Kirk was a man of deep faith. Corinthian wanted to pay respects.

Before we parted, he joked that when he flew home, he’d have to burn the suit that he’d sweated through during his 12 summer hours on the sidewalks of Glendale. I asked if he had plans for the flag, and he really didn’t, so I said, look, let me put it in the trunk of my car and I’ll mail it to you — go find some A/C. He accepted. He texted later to say he was tired and confused but had found his way not into the hockey arena, as I assumed he might, but to Bar Louie. Any port in a storm.

As I write this, Corinthian is on a flight back to Tennessee, having spent something like a 10th of his net worth to come to Arizona. If Elon Musk had spent a proportional amount on his own weekend trip to Glendale, he would’ve spent the rough equivalent of $400,000 for every man, woman and child who attended the Kirk event.