Kirk commanded a seven-figure budget, counted a presence at 800 high schools and colleges, sponsored a huge delegation at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and appeared regularly on cable news. Then Donald Trump upended the GOP.

Suddenly, the Republican Party’s standard-bearer was promising big deficit spending and protectionist tariffs rather than small government and free markets. Like Mike Pence, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Ted Cruz, Hugh Hewitt, Rand Paul, and many other older Republican partisans, Kirk sought to maintain his influence on the Trumpist right––the only right young people now entering college have really known––by setting qualms aside, obscuring divisive contradictions, offering absurd praise (Turning Point once posted to social media that Trump is “on track to be America’s greatest president!”), and emphasizing common enemies, especially “social justice warrior” activists and leftist college professors.

As surely as the most illiberal leftists divided the Democratic coalition, they helped unite Republicans, as did propagandistic coverage that fabricated some leftist excesses.

“You can’t watch Fox News without seeing five or six segments a day about the nuttiness on college campuses,” Kirk told Politico. “You pair that nuttiness up with people in their 60s and 70s who are beginning to map out where they want a significant portion of their wealth to go, and they’re saying, ‘I don’t want my money to go to my university. It’s not representing my values.’ Then we come along.”

Kirk cultivates an image of himself as a clean-cut, respectable man of reason––a man who can laugh it off when leftists try to discredit him with provocative labels, knowing “white supremacist” or “bigot” or “anti-Semite” won’t stick to him.

“When we do these events together,” Dave Rubin, the right-wing YouTube personality, once told Kirk, “you always make a point of saying to the audience, if you’ve got questions and you disagree with us, come up first. So we always take questions from people who disagree with us first. And we treat them as respectfully as humanly possible, or at least as respectfully as they treat us. But also me and you have some disagreements and we go up there and talk them out. So how is it that so many people on Twitter see you as a fascist?”

Kirk replied: “What a strange concept, to hear the other side, to give people a platform that you totally might fundamentally disagree with, then have a conversation about it, see where you might be able to build consensus, find the disagreements, then find why you disagree, which is super important! Do you disagree because you have different data inputs or because you have different philosophical inputs?”

That is the image he wants to project: calm and cool. Never mind that he is often less charitable in practice and seldom engages the strongest views on the other side.