The Funeral That Wasn’t: A Horst Wessel Moment for MAGA

It was billed as a memorial. It functioned as a rally. It felt like a cult convocation. But in its choreography, its iconography, and its raw emotional manipulation, lay something far darker: a prototype for post-democratic pageantry. This was a funeral not for a man, but for the very idea of dissent. And more.

Interred also with Kirk were core beliefs of the republic: ”… that all people are created equal, whether European, Native American, or African American, and that these people have fundamental rights, such as liberty, free speech, freedom of religion, due process of law, and freedom of assembly.”

Trump is happy to trash 249 years of tradition. Some people may be happy to have a dictator, he babbles, as if they will be left any choice. Charlie Kirk’s send-off at State Farm Stadium was less a requiem than a recruitment drive. Ninety-five thousand souls packed into an Arizona cathedral of sport, to transmute grief into spectacle and death into a branding opportunity. Kirk’s widow, Erika, trembling, clutched her president like a lifeline; her hand wandering, at one awkward moment, to Trump’s waistband. A gesture so bizarrely intimate it felt like a glitch in the simulation.

And Trump? He stood there like a tourist in his own emotions, face cycling through expressions he’d googled beforehand. It wasn’t sorrow; it was grief by committee, focus-grouped and bloodless. Then came the hate speech. Fulsome as ever, he invented and praised an imaginary non-racist, Kirk.
“He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose. He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them,” Trump said of Kirk; then turned to the crowd and added, “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie.” He continued,

“I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry, Erika.”

Trump’s oration at Kirk’s funeral was not a eulogy but a desecration: an orgy of grievance and mendacity masquerading as tribute. Instead of honouring the dead, Trump ransacked the silence of mourning to seed division, peddle falsehoods and remind the nation, his only liturgy is self. It was an act less of remembrance than of vandalism, a hijacking of grief in service of ego, where the mask of empathy slipped to reveal the rancid theatre of hate, performed on a stage draped in opportunism.

Only Trump could weaponise a funeral, turning mourning into a masterclass in resentment, complete with his casual admission of hatred; because why pretend to be human when fascism pays better?

Let’s call it what it is. The cynical exploitation of Kirk’s death is not grief; it’s theatre. And Trump, ever the impresario of outrage, knows exactly how to cast his players. Kirk is the Horst Wessel of MAGA politics: young, photogenic, ideologically pure, and now, conveniently, dead. A martyr with marketing potential. The kind of figure who can galvanise the base, silence dissent, and justify whatever comes next.

The flags, the fog machines, the LED screens pulsing with Kirk’s greatest hits; every prop in the fascist playbook, dusted off and draped in the Stars and Stripes. This was kitsch weaponized: Leni Riefenstahl meets QVC. Wagnerian opera rewritten by reality TV producers. The emotional register, however, was pure Las Vegas: death as entertainment, martyrdom as merchandise.

The crowd itself felt fake. Who paid for the buses streaming in from across the Southwest? For the matching red caps and the choreographed chants? This wasn’t natural grief; it was a mobilisation. A crowd that cheers when a death is declared a “martyrdom for American freedom” is not mourning.

It is being weaponised.

This spectacle finds its echo in the teenagers across the country doing the “Trump dance” to YMCA, chanting slogans they can’t understand. Hitler Youth had uniforms and discipline; this is fascism in activewear; a youth movement built on memes, manufactured grievance, and now, martyrdom.

Stephen Miller, the High Priest of Hate, gives a “eulogy” that is pure propaganda. His words echo Goebbels’ 1932 speech canonising Horst Wessel, the Nazi stormtrooper. “We are the storm,” Miller intones, wild-eyed with borrowed righteousness. Echo? It’s verbatim. The parallel isn’t subtle or accidental. It is the latest chapter in Trump’s long-running production: Democracy, Derailed.

The hypocrisy is gob-smacking. Kirk was a staunch Second Amendment absolutist who framed mass shootings as the cost of freedom; a “freedom” that looks a lot like licensed psychopathy. That the very violence he defended has now claimed him is a dark, bitter irony. Yet it hasn’t stopped his allies from weaponising his corpse. Those who cheered the violence of January 6th now shriek about the “violent left.” As if you can decry political violence while defending the tools designed to enable it.

The shooter remains a cipher in an implausible FBI story, but facts are irrelevant to the propaganda machine. Millions will fit up the left. Musk calls Democrats “the party of killers.” Trump declares “the left is at war with me.” Never mind that right-wing extremists commit the vast majority of political violence, or that Kirk had made enemies across the MAGA spectrum. Truth is just another casualty.

The double standard, however, is devastating in its clarity. Compare the response to the murder of a Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband in Minnesota just two months ago. For them, there was no presidential tweet, no funeral attendance, no flags at half-mast. They were expendable extras in Trump’s narrative. For Kirk? Full canonization. The message is clear: oppose Trump, and you are not merely an opponent; you are subhuman, unworthy of mourning, exiled from the nation.

The Kirk rally will help shatter what remains of civil discourse. Hyperpartisanship and hatred have long taken its place in US politics. When one side’s dead merit national mourning and the other’s are memory-holed, you are not witnessing politics. You are watching ethnic cleansing with a better marketing team.

Some will call this a turning point. It is not. It is a numbered road marker on a descent that began years ago. It is another body, another excuse, another step toward the abyss.

So, picture the stadium one last time: the screens glowing like stained glass, Kirk’s face beatific in loop, the crowd swaying to a demagogue’s cadence. Smoke machines hiss like censers; the chants rise like hymns. It looks like a funeral, but it is a coronation; a Horst Wessel moment for the American right.

This is not mourning. It is myth-making. And unless it is named, resisted, and stripped of its glamour, it will not stop. It will replicate and march forward, one funeral-rally at a time. Our choice is simple: recognise this theatre of fascism for what it is, or become the silent audience in its next act, mistaking the funeral for a requiem when it only ever was a full stage rehearsal for tyranny.