David French: Erika Kirk’s Eulogy Was One of the Most Beautiful, Heartbreaking Things I Have Seen

SCARBOROUGH: “David French, you and I actually grew up in this sort of cultural background. We attended — I don’t know exactly what church services you attended, but I suspect they were a lot like mine. And so None of this sounded foreign to us. It was certainly interesting though, the mix of religion, politics, and as Donald Trump himself said, sort of this old time Kent revival feel. I was curious and been curious, what were your thoughts of course, moving beyond just the absolute horrible human tragedy of all of this? And still, I must say all these weeks later, it’s still so extraordinarily hard to come to terms with that somebody going around talking to college students would be assassinated this way.”
French: “Yeah, when you saw Erika Kirk speak, one of the first things that I thought was, this is one of the most beautiful things that I’ve seen, heartbreaking, heart-rending. And that’s what Christianity is, is what she did right there in front of all of those people, actually forgiving Charlie Kirk’s killer, talking about the sacrifice of Jesus and Jesus forgiving his killers. And this is the heart and the core of what Christianity is. And to see it right there in that way. And I think it also helped bring home to people that we’re having political arguments and political fights surrounding all of this. But at the end of the day, she lost a husband, her kids lost a father, people lost a friend. I mean, this was a horrific, horrific event. And so I think that that moment was singularly powerful in communicating the gravity of the loss and also what Christianity is. But then you had all of this complexity of Trump getting up there and behaving in a very, very, very different way also to cheers. And so what you saw here in a lot of ways was this complexity of this MAGA world and the complexity of this MAGA movement, that there are people within it and people who express ideas within it, who — they’re beautiful, wonderful people who are caught up in this movement. And then there is this also this other side that is so directly contradictory of the message that Erika Kirk shared. And so that’s one thing that struck me. You know, when I watch this, I know from my own — you know, my own home in Tennessee where people have just been cut to the core by Charlie Kirk’s loss. And I think you —“
SCARBOROUGH: “Right.”
French: “— could see that, you could see that in the memorial. And then you could also see this other side of it all when Donald Trump got up to speak, when Donald Trump started to address the issue. And, you know, that is in many ways the complexity of all this that we saw in front of our eyes.”