At around 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, White House aides brought a message to President Trump.
Charlie Kirk, the conservative influencer and close Trump ally, had been shot while speaking at a Utah college campus. They briefed the president on the initial reports about Mr. Kirk, who had been struck in the neck.
In the hour that followed, the apparently shocked president asked for updates and took calls from a few reporters on his cellphone. Mr. Kirk, the president said, was a terrific man.
He was already speaking of Mr. Kirk in the past tense.
By then, Mr. Trump and White House aides knew that Mr. Kirk had not survived the shooting, according to two people familiar with the situation. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Mr. Kirk’s death would be confirmed publicly a short time later.
Mr. Trump had a close relationship with Mr. Kirk, whose ability to galvanize young conservatives with his criticisms of the left had been crucial to rallying support among a new generation of voters. Mr. Kirk was also close friends with several people in the president’s orbit, including his eldest son, Donald Jr.
But by Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump’s shock had turned to fury. In a video address from the Oval Office, Mr. Trump declared it a “dark moment for America” and faulted the media and the “radical left” for language used to describe people like Mr. Kirk.
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” said Mr. Trump, who one day earlier had been face-to-face with protesters in Washington who called him Hitler. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.”
The fact that Mr. Trump faced two assassination attempts in 2024 — one of them a near miss at a rally in Butler, Pa. — is never far from the minds of his team, and Mr. Trump referenced the Butler shooting in his video. A handmade portrait hanging in the White House shows Mr. Trump being lifted to his feet on the rally stage in Butler, blood streaming from his ear as he pumped his fist.
Earlier at the White House, the corridors of the press offices — an area where reporters are able to move with relative ease — were quiet, as staff there absorbed news about a man many of them were either close with or admired.
Televisions affixed to walls in different rooms blared minute-to-minute coverage of Mr. Kirk’s shooting and then his death, as well as the ongoing search for the killer. Some staff members appeared to have been crying.
In the late afternoon, Mr. Trump signed a proclamation lowering the flags to half-staff in Mr. Kirk’s honor through Sunday. At around 5:30 p.m., a worker in black pants and a black shirt walked to the giant flagpole that Mr. Trump had installed on the North Lawn and cranked the flag down; he repeated the same move with the flag on top of the White House minutes later.
The president was still on track for a visit to New York on the anniversary of the last significant event to unite nearly all Americans across parties: the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.