Vice President JD Vance described the “very tough moment” he delivered the news to President Trump in the Oval Office that Charlie Kirk was assassinated, as he comforted White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
“I was the person who walked into the Oval Office and said, ‘Mr. President, I’m sorry but Charlie’s passed,” Vance recalled to Fox News’ Jesse Watters on Wednesday. “That was a very tough moment.
“We supported each other in that moment as you do with your friends, but man, that was a bad, bad day,” he expressed.
The 41-year-old veep said he had just finished a meeting in his West Wing office when his phone began blowing up with messages at around 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 10.
“I looked at my phone and there were a bunch of group chats — frankly, a lot of them that Charlie was in — where they said ‘Charlie, praying for you, brother. Hope you’re doing OK,’” Vance said. “I opened up my door and someone said ‘Charlie’s been shot’ and it hit me like, ‘this is very real, this is very serious.’”
Vance remembered the tense moments after finding out the 31-year-old was shot by alleged assassin Tyler Robinson while the Turning Point USA founder and dad of two held an event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.
The VP and his team spent the “next hour” working to get confirmation on Kirk’s condition.
“We called Mike and said, ‘hey, what’s going on?’” Vance said, seemingly referencing Kirk’s chief of staff Mikey McCoy.
“The news was discombobulated. Nobody knew what was happening. It was a very chaotic moment. There was a brief period where we were getting good reports from the hospital.”
Vance said he and the rest of his staff learned about Kirk’s death a short time later, approximately an hour before the news was made public.
The former senator from Ohio rushed down the hall to the Oval Office to update Trump, where he embraced Wiles, who had broken into tears.
“She doesn’t show emotion. She’s even keeled the whole way. I just gave Susie a hug and I guess all of us kind of lost it,” Vance said.
Stay up to date on the shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk
Trump, for his part, remained “very stoic” after being told the news of Kirk’s death.
“The president is very stoic. He was clearly upset. He just went quiet and let it absorb a little bit. And then just shook his head and said, ‘Man, he was a good guy and we really loved him.’”
Vance says he watched one video of the assassination but refused to watch it again.
“I don’t want to see that happen to my friend ever again,” he told Watters.
Vance shared a tribute to his “dear friend” Kirk hours after his death, where he revealed the conservative influencer was one of the reasons he started running for office.
The “Hillbilly Elegy” author detailed the budding friendship the two formed when they met before 2018 that led them all the way to Vance being named Trump’s VP pick.
“It felt like we were all mourning our friend before any of the politics or the thought about what a Titan he was, how influential he was to the movement, how could we possibly replace him, we were all just sad because our friend had died,” Vance said.
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