An aide informed President Trump of Charlie Kirk's shooting about 2:30pm Wednesday, and the "apparently shocked" president spent the next hour asking for updates, reports Maggie Haberman in the New York Times. Trump took a few calls from reporters in the interim and began referring to Kirk, whom he knew personally, in the past tense, having received word of the 31-year-old's death before the rest of the nation did. The story describes how the corridors of the White House were quiet "as staff there absorbed news about a man many of them were either close with or admired." In offices, people were glued to TV coverage, and some had clearly been crying.
A story in the Washington Post echoes that, describing how the "West Wing was a place of wet eyes." The piece notes that most staffers in their 20s and 30s were on a first-name basis with Kirk, having come of "political age" after Trump first took office and crediting Kirk for their entry into conservative politics. An "afternoon packed with policy meetings turned into a vigil, then a wake," per the story.
"Everyone was crushed," is how one adviser puts it to NBC News, whose story describes staffers working through tears as they followed TV coverage. Another emotion soon emerged: anger. "Senior communications officials immediately huddled in an area in the West Wing known as Upper Press, where an expletive could be heard as a door shut behind them," per the NBC account. And Haberman of the Times notes that "Trump's shock had turned to fury" by evening, when he lashed out at the "radical left" in a video and accused it of demonizing Kirk and other conservatives.
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