Vance Credits Charlie Kirk’s Assassination for His New Baby
Vice President JD Vance says the assassination of Charlie Kirk is the reason he and First Lady Usha Vance decided to have a fourth child.
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Vance made the revelation in an excerpt from his forthcoming book that was obtained by the Wall Street Journal, in which he referred to the 31-year-old Kirk as his “best friend” in politics.
“As my wife held Charlie Kirk’s widow on the first day of her terrible sorrow, Erika told Usha between sobs that she regretted having only two kids with Charlie,” Vance writes.
“For years, I had asked Usha to have another baby, and for years she had told me she was done—especially now that public service had elevated us into the national spotlight. But something changed for Usha, and not long after we buried my friend, she became pregnant with our fourth child, a boy.”
Kirk was shot dead during a TPUSA event in September. The Vances were among those who appeared to take Kirk’s loss the hardest.
Vance, who is Catholic, now writes that “one life was stolen from us, but another was given.”
“I don’t know why God does things like this,” he continued. “But I am grateful to Him that there will soon be another source of joy in our lives.”
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In the excerpt, Vance reveals that he leaned heavily on Kirk for counsel during the early days of the 2024 election campaign as his family grappled with their rising public profiles. He recounted how his 7-year-old son was taking it particularly hard, telling Kirk that “sometimes I feel like I ruined his life without even asking him.”
Vance said that Kirk then told him, “‘Don’t try to convince your son it’s not a sacrifice. It is. Just try to take some solace in the fact that it’s a worthy sacrifice. I’ll say a prayer for you.’”
The excerpt also reveals that Vance first learned of the assassination through a series of group chats that Kirk was also part of.
“‘Charlie was shot,’ one of the messages read. “‘It doesn’t look good.’”
Vance said it was Erika Kirk’s comments after the killing that made him question his own mortality and what his children—aged nine, six, and four—would remember about him if he suffered a similar fate.
“I realized that in such moments, everything worldly we value fades to nothing,” he wrote. “Erika didn’t care that her husband was politically influential or had the president’s ear. She cared about her babies and the fact that an assassin had stolen Charlie from them—so many memories and moments with their father robbed from them forever.”
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