FLASHBACK: Listen To How Rush Limbaugh Described Charlie Kirk After First Meeting Him

A clip of conservative radio legend Rush Limbaugh praising Charlie Kirk in 2018 made its way around social media on Wednesday. The clip surfaced after conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck placed Limbaugh’s famous golden microphone next to Kirk’s empty seat while hosting “The Charlie Kirk Show.”

During a radio broadcast on January 11, 2018, Limbaugh said that he’d met Kirk for the first time a month prior, when Kirk was in South Florida for a conference.

“They brought Charlie Kirk to the golf course to meet me about a month ago. He was in town to set up this Turning Point thing, and they brought him to the golf course to meet me,” Limbaugh said on his nationally broadcast radio show. “He told me how he grew up in a home where my program was on all the time. He was just effusively complimentary to me, which I, of course, understood and told him he’s very wise. His family’s very wise. He chuckled; he laughed.”

“This is the kind of guy that you can see really becoming big in politics as he gets older,” Limbaugh added. “He just has the carriage, the personality, the charisma.”

Limbaugh then said that he remembered that when Bill Clinton was in college, people around Clinton were saying that he would become president one day.

“I’m telling you, people are saying the same things about Charlie Kirk,” Limbaugh added.

FLASHBACK: Watch Rush Limbaugh describe meeting Charlie Kirk for the first time.

“I dont want to jinx it… but this is the kind of guy you can see really becoming big in politics as he gets older”

As a huge Rush fan, this made me smile.

Aired January 11th 2018 pic.twitter.com/hdZhmkBrYH

— Charles Weber (@CWBOCA) September 17, 2025

Limbaugh died in February 2021 at 70 years old after a battle with lung cancer. Limbaugh was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Donald Trump at the 2020 State of the Union. After Kirk was assassinated last week, Trump said he would also award Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

While hosting Kirk’s show on Wednesday, a teary-eyed Beck told a story of how Kirk told him when they first met that he wanted to become like The Blaze founder. “Let me translate: ‘I want to be Rush Limbaugh.’ He didn’t want to be me,” Beck said. “He wanted to be Rush Limbaugh. … And I remember thinking, kid, maybe some day because I think you have it.”

Beck added that Kirk “surpassed Rush Limbaugh by miles.”

“I’m a broadcaster, Rush was a broadcaster, but Charlie was a broadcaster and a narrowcaster. Charlie was a pastor and a priest, and listening to the way he could argue and think differently, he was a rabbi as well, and one of the best. He was a political organizer. He was a political think tank himself. He was a compassionate friend. He surpassed Rush Limbaugh by miles.”

Daily Wire host Michael Knowles similarly said that Kirk a “generational voice in politics,” adding that he “would have been president.”

“His friends knew it, his many, many admirers knew it, and his enemies, to whom he was always so gracious, they knew it too,” Knowles added. “Everybody knew it.”