Greg Sargent: This is the Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Zack Beauchamp: Hey, Greg. Good to be talking to you again.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): We’ve had some great interviews with Tucker Carlson, but you can’t tell him who to interview. I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it. Get the word out. Let them. You know, people have to decide. Ultimately, people have to decide. So there you have it.
Beauchamp: I don’t find this surprising at all, what Trump just said, to be clear. It’s consistent with his pattern of a very long time. You know, back as far as Charlottesville he said, there are very fine people on both sides. And then he told the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by during the 2020 presidential election and then he went on to defend the January 6 rioters, right? Trump’s attitude towards extremism is very consistently not to condemn and to play this sort of dance around it, where he’ll never say, basically, no, or he will in the most oblique terms. And if he does try to criticize it, he’ll walk that back sometime soon in some other way.
Beauchamp: I mean, the thing about Nick Fuentes is if you actually watch his show as opposed to his more sanitized public appearances on like sort of center-right or more mainstream-right podcasts, he’s not subtle about what he thinks, right?
You maintain boundaries that there are consequences for engaging in particular kinds of behavior. And when you say Nick Fuentes gets a pass, you’re saying there’s no limit. I mean, we’re talking really explicit, violent eliminationist anti-Semitism. At one point, he called for Jews to be forced to convert or leave the country, right? It really is that bad.
Beauchamp: Yeah, here’s the problem. So Fuentes has this very large following among young conservatives. There is a raging debate about how large that following is. It’s not clear. It depends on different ways you look at measuring it. There is an estimate that only 30 to 40 percent of staff in D.C.—Republican staff—are followers of Fuentes. I think that’s overstated. That estimate is not scientific. It’s based on one conservative pundit who has a tendency to exaggerate things. But people who I trust have said that it’s plausible. Right. I don’t know if I’m to go so far as to say it’s likely, but it’s plausible.
So what does that tell us? Well, it tells us that this is a part of the constituency that many, many, many Republicans feel is the future of the party, right? And it’s where they’re going. And there’s a deep fear among more establishment-minded conservatives—even people who were once Tea Party radicals—of being left behind the way they were in 2016, where they all lined up against Trump, thought that the primary voters would reject him for being a fake conservative, thought that he would lose the general election to Clinton. And when none of those things happened, they saw themselves out cold in a MAGAfied party and had to embarrassingly grovel or else self-exile from the party.
Sargent: I think it’s a reasonable fear. I hate to say it. I mean, we saw all this crazy stuff come out from the young Republicans on on listservs and so forth. You wrote about JD Vance’s role in all this. Vance has his eye on the post-Trump MAGA movement and how to harness it for his own purposes.
Vance wants to get away with what you might call a soft or veiled white nationalism. But Fuentes actually mocks Vance and makes racist comments about his wife. He made he makes the white nationalism extremely explicit. As you said, I think Vance would have preferred it if Trump sidelined Fuentes, but Trump basically dumped Fuentes on Vance to have to deal with later. Can you untangle all that for us?
That abdication, though, does put Vance in this position because he wants to—as you say, it’s very clear—be the Republican standard bearer in 2028. He wants to create a sort of very ideological version of MAGA. I think MAGA right now is not ideological beyond a few very specific points that Trump is adamant on, because Trump himself is so protean. He’s willing to take on whatever policy agenda or ideas, except on a few core issues like trade and immigration, he feels like in the moment. Right. So that’s—that’s Trump’s role in this.
So there’s—it’s not just that there are these—there’s these ideological goals that are locked in here. There’s a lot of personal stuff that’s wrapped in here. I suspect—again, speculation, somewhat informed speculation based on knowing some of the people involved—but speculation is that Vance doesn’t want to condemn Tucker because he sees him as an essential ally going forward for the nomination. And if he goes too hard on Fuentes, that can be seen as going after Carlson. So he’s stuck. Right? I think that if Vance were left to his own devices, he probably would try to kick Fuentes out of the coalition. He has said negative things about him before, but at this point it’s like a little bit of a World War One-type situation, right? Where different alliances are being activated by virtue of different people taking actions at different times.
Sargent: So it seems very clear that Fuentes knows that he’s got Vance in a real pickle here. Let’s listen to what Fuentes said about Vance recently.
Sargent: So Zack, what interests me about that is the use of the phrase America First. Fuentes is basically saying, you know what, fat boy, as he put it, you don’t get to get away with soft peddling what America First actually means. You don’t get to do soft or veiled white nationalism anymore. You gotta go all the way. And I think that that is gonna, at some point at least, maybe not as part of this round, but maybe the next round, because it’s all going to come up again, especially when 2028 rolls around—at some point, Vance is going to be cornered into saying whether he finds Fuentes’ view of what constitutes “America First” acceptable or not.
And here I don’t just mean Tucker Carlson, though they’re very close. There’s also Kevin Roberts at the Heritage Foundation—which is, you know, they wrote Project 2025. Roberts is the president, is the most… is the leading, or at least most prominent, think tank on the right. And he’s in a lot of hot water right now based on his defense of Carlson, which he has sort of walked back, but not really.
Roberts has alienated them people just by defending Carlson. Right? And now Roberts is in a lot of trouble. And there’s a lot going on in Heritage. In the piece that you mentioned that I did earlier, I got a Heritage insider to tell me about some of the nastier stuff that’s going on there. And it’s quite bad, right—the internal culture that’s been fostered under Roberts is the sense that I got from that source who would know.
Sargent: Well, I don’t think it’s ever gonna get easy. And I thought your piece really captured the broader crossroads that MAGA is at right now or the bigger civil war that MAGA is devolving into. Let’s just go through some names. Ted Cruz recently slammed Carlson as “complicit in evil” over the Fuentes interview. Ben Shapiro called Carlson dishonest and a coward. But Zack, what happens with all those figures, the broader MAGA world, now that Trump said, what Carlson did is fine. Trump is telling these people in effect that the white nationalists and the white supremacists and the Gropers and the far-right anti-Semites do have their place in the MAGA coalition. It’s all just a big debate is the basic idea. How does MAGA process that from Trump in particular?
Sargent: MAGA is what Trump says it is, as Trump said.
So was Ted Cruz. Remember how viciously Trump went after Cruz, and that Cruz himself declined to endorse Trump during the 2016 Republican National Convention and had been really holding out. Eventually, he caves and starts working the phones for Trump because he wants to stay in the Republican Party. Right. But Cruz and Shapiro are very different kinds of conservatives than Tucker Carlson is now, than J.D. Vance is now, than Kevin Roberts is now—and those are just two factions.
So the point is this is a movement that has tons and tons and tons of different factions. And there’s one guy holding it together to prevent this open civil war from breaking out, and it’s Trump. And the issue on which there was most likely to be pressure on this coalition was anti-Semitism and Jews and Israel. That pressure is now real. Fuentes has kind of forced the issue due to his large following. Trump doesn’t seem interested in weighing in to stop it. And I’m not even sure he could, given that he’s going to pass from the scene at this point.
Sargent: So what happens in the end? JD Vance inherits a movement that is absolutely splintering after Trump, right?
Sargent: Well, you know, I said on the pod a little while ago that they thought the assassination of Charlie Kirk was going to unite the right. It really basically lasted about a week. Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Zack Beauchamp’s work. He has a great book called The Reactionary Spirit. His writing at Vox is essential for understanding all this crazy stuff. Zack, thanks so much for coming on, man.
Beauchamp: Thanks, Greg, man. This has been awesome. As usual, love talking to you on the show.
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