Dave Portnoy said Donald Trump played a ‘huge part’ in Charlie Kirk’s death and MAGA is raging

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy had a rough Thursday across social media after clips from one of his broadcasts caught him saying that Donald Trump played a “huge part” in the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Portnoy has been a Trump backer, and the clip from the show had MAGA raging.

But, should that have been the case?

It appears context was lacking. Yes, Portnoy said the words, but the whole of his message appeared to have a much different intention than actually implicating Trump.

Instead, Portnoy appeared to be using Trump to pivot to an attack on liberals.

“I do think social media plays a gigantic part,” Portnoy said in an extended clip from the show.“It amplifies everything, and every yahoo has a voice, and when things like yesterday happen, you see it all.

“I mean … how about MSNBC, and that guy got fired, but to publicly say, ‘Maybe he got shot by one of his own fans,’ who like in the old west was shooting his gun in the air and then to be like, maybe (Kirk) deserved it because he spews hate. Which, by the way, a lot of people agree with what he says, and he says those things and lets people disagree with him like you were saying. Come up and debate him.”

Portnoy and his co-hosts then discussed whether or not the current climate can ever be changed before he got into his controversial Trump take.

“Trump … and when I say Trump has a huge part in it, I don’t mean that he is necessarily to blame for it,” Portnoy said. “But he’s so divisive without really even … he’s face is divisive, right? People hate him so much, and the Left and the Right the rhetoric, especially to me the Left, is insane and it just boils, boils, boils. And this happened with Trump. His assassination attempt, there’s like a three-hour period of, ‘Oh, let’s tone down the rhetoric,’ and then we are right back to it.”

So, it appears that Portnoy was not saying that it was Trump’s fault that Kirk got shot but instead trying to say that the divisiveness of his existence may have played a part in that.

Plenty of MAGA folks apparently did not stick around for for the full context of what Portnoy was saying. So, the attacks came fast and often from the MAGA crowd on social media.

Portnoy had enough of it all by Thursday evening when he posted the extended clip on his X page and addressed the onslaught while taking on an The Tarabull account on X after it shared a shorter clip and asked, “Did Dave Portnoy just blame President Trump for Charlie Kirk’s death?”

“This is why I despise politics and both extremes,” Portnoy wrote. “This Tarabull bot should be ashamed. Here is the full clip. Go (expletive) yourself using my name for clicks you loser. If anybody disagrees what what I said you have cement in your brain.”