The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 18 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is the Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
A civil war has erupted inside the MAGA movement over Nick Fuentes, the neo-Nazi and white supremacist, and President Donald Trump just made it worse. In an interview, Trump defended Fuentes in a way that will boost his standing inside MAGA in a big way. Yet it occurs to us that this is terrible news for JD Vance. The Vice President has tried to avoid taking sides on Fuentes, but it’s now clear that Fuentes represents a big constituency inside MAGA. Vance and everyone else who’s thinking about what MAGA will look like after Trump will have to take this very seriously. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp has a really good piece digging into the developing MAGA civil war about all this, so we’re talking to him about where the American right is going in the wake of it. Zack, great to have you on.
Zack Beauchamp: Hey, Greg. Good to be talking to you again.
Sargent: So to quickly recap, Tucker Carlson recently gave Nick Fuentes as a long, largely fawning interview. That caused some on the right to lash out at Carlson for platforming a “well-known Nazi sympathizer,” as one put it. Another called it “sick and despicable.” Trump finally broke his silence on all this. Here’s what Trump said about Tucker’s interview with Fuentes.
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.
Sargent: Trump is just fine with platforming Nick Fuentes. Your response to all that, Zack?
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.
Sargent: So in addition to that, Zack, I want to flag something else because Trump in that exchange sort of tried to say, I don’t really know what Nick Fuentes stands for, but Axios just asked the White House if Trump condemns Fuentes’ racism and anti-Semitism, and the White House pointed Axios back to Trump’s remarks, which didn’t criticize Fuentes. So Trump and the White House can’t even claim ignorance anymore. They were given the explicit opportunity to condemn Fuentes’ racism and anti-Semitism and declined to do so. Zack, can you talk about what that means and what Fuentes really believes and who the Gropers are?
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?
This is a man who says that he admires and loves Hitler. He said at one point the Holocaust has never happened and made fun of it. And while at the same time, calling for the execution of “perfidious Jews,” that’s his term. This is as explicit anti-Semitism as you could imagine. This isn’t any of this coded stuff that you’ve gotten in the past. And so when the White House is refusing to condemn that, they’re not, it’s not just like refusing to condemn it, right? It’s saying it’s an acceptable part of our discourse, that this man should be somebody that Tucker Carlson can be friendly with without suffering social consequences or professional consequences, which is like how you maintain norms in a society, 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.
Sargent: Well, in your piece, you dug into how there’s a genuine fear among some on the right that Fuentes has become, I guess, too big to exile might be the way to put it. His constituency is too large at this point for him to be marginalized. And of course, some of the institutional players inside MAGA agree with that constituency anyway, to some degree or other, and want to embrace and utilize it. Can you take us inside that dimension of it?
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.
And so let’s say, like, that’s the upper bound. That’s a huge percentage of young Republican staffers in Washington, D.C., right? And then extrapolate that out to the broader world of young conservatives—whose survey data shows, by the way, are the single most anti-semitic group in the United States. Right. There’s a very good study on this by two professors, Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden. They’ve done this very clearly and shown that the epicenter of anti-semitism in the modern United States specifically is among young conservatives.
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.
So nobody wants to do that again. And there’s a lot of fear that if they vocally condemn Fuentes or vocally try to marginalize him, that they’ll end up on the losing side of another one of these factional fights.
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.
He’s gonna be the presumed nominee, I guess, but it’s not necessarily a lock. It occurs to me that Trump really, whether intentionally or not, shivved Vance in the back in a way here. So Vance has an Indian American wife. He’s gonna want a free hand to do his anti-immigrant appeals while also presenting himself as non-bigoted.
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?
Beauchamp: It’s hard to know what’s going on without really knowing the interior mental states of any of these people, right? I’ve got a personal theory that Trump has mostly checked out of the succession fight at this particular moment in time. There’s a lot going on with him, a lot of things to wrangle. And the question of, like, how to deal with someone like Nick Fuentes is just not at the top of his agenda. He’s just answering it the way he would any other question. I don’t know him. I’m not involved in this, I don’t know, Tucker’s business is Tucker’s business.
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.
But Vance is trying to turn it into a disciplined ideological cadre. But then you have to answer questions, right? Questions: if you really stand for something, what do you do about this guy who’s gaining popularity? Who hates you, right? Who will demean you in the grossest of possible terms—and your family—and you’re supposed to have honor, and you’re supposed to stand there and say, look, I can be a leader, and you’re gonna let this guy take pot shots and be a platform by your friend, like Carlson. And Vance and Carlson are friends. But, like, Carlson pushed very hard to get Vance nominated and was reportedly instrumental in securing that role. Right.
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.
And Vance is part of the Carlson alliance network. And now him staying silent is de facto an endorsement of what Tucker is doing. And that’s where he’s stuck at this moment. And that’s bad for him. That’s not where he wants to be in a world where he’s trying to sort of consolidate across the conservative movement core support ahead of people who are going to try to outflank him on the we-don’t-like-Nazis side, which is still popular even among some mainstream conservatives who have MAGAfied themselves.
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.
Nick Fuentes (voiceover): He’s getting squeezed. Because the Groypers are on the one hand saying, ‘hey, listen, fat boy, we want America First.’ You want to run for president? We want to hear you say ‘America First.’ And on the other side, he’s got his donors and they’re saying, ‘they’re horrible antisemites. You have to disavow them. You have to forcefully condemn them. Condemn Tucker, condemn the Groypers.’ Now, if Vance condemns the Groypers, We are deploying to Iowa. Raise your right hand. I swear I’m going to move to Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada and South Carolina. People will drive there for free and they will follow Vance around and ask him, ‘When will you put America First? Why would you condemn the young white men of America and sell out to our elites?’
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.
Beauchamp: Yeah, look, I think the strategy right now from Vance—again, speculation, right, based on his public presentation—is that he’s trying to ride it out. I think he does have to at one point try to push back against Fuentes. I don’t think there’s an alternative here. He really does need to do that because of the vitriolic and personal way in which Fuentes attacks him. Plus he’s just electoral poison with those positions. But he can’t do it too aggressively now without getting roped into shooting at his own allies.
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.
You know, there was recently a leaked staff meeting at Heritage where some of his own senior scholars—very, very right-wing people—are screaming at him because there is, again, this faction of the Republican Party that’s MAGAfied but not okay with open Nazism. They’re willing to deal with the sort of veiled white nationalism of someone like Vance, not, like, straight-up eliminationist Nazism. The sort of thing that Fuentes does is a red line for them. And Vance doesn’t want to alienate those people.
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.
But all that being said, the point is that Vance is in a position where his own allies are at risk if he shoots at Fuentes. So my guess is he wants to take that shot but wants to do it at a better time. Not right now, because right now in doing so he’d be stabbing people who he’s close to personally and who he needs politically in the back.
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?
Beauchamp: So look, I think that what we’re seeing, and I referenced this a little earlier, is that MAGA is kind of an empty signifier, right? Like what it stood for was a broadly populist nationalist far-right reorientation of the Republican Party around the personal figure of Donald Trump. Right? That’s it. I’ve maintained consistently throughout this and I think the evidence is bore it out that the policy commitments of MAGA are very, very loose. And it’s ideological orientation, very flexible.
Sargent: MAGA is what Trump says it is, as Trump said.
Beauchamp: Yeah, and he’s not wrong. I mean, there are some bounds here, and he could run into conflict from his own movement, as we’ve seen during this whole Epstein saga. But the point is that it’s not really about ideology so much as it is this kind of broad orientation against the Republican establishment, towards a certain level of extremism, and certainly towards a kind of nationalist reorientation of what the party is about—with an intense focus on immigration, culture war, and hostility to foreigners. But there’s so much room within those broad confines. And it’s included all sorts of different kinds of conservatives, people like Ben Shapiro, who were initially very appalled. Right.
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.
I happen to think that Shapiro and Cruz are sort of more closely aligned, but they’re one kind of sort of nationalist, post–Tea Party but still interventionist-on-foreign-policy strain of republicanism. There’s others, right? There’s hardline libertarians who are sort of also cultural warriors. Those are the kinds that are left there. There’s Trumpy nationalists. There’s these kind of trade, economic-populist types oriented around Oren Cass and the American Compass think tank. All sorts of different broad strains of the American right. We haven’t even gotten into some of the more abstract intellectual subtypes, of which there are many.
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.
Maybe if it seemed like he really was going to be a dictator, he would be able to override a third-term limit—as he suggested he wants to be—he’d be able to stick the movement together. But the fact of the matter is right now that seems unlikely. And with his political fortunes in the toilet at this moment, there are some rats who are starting to flee the sinking ship, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, that indicate some real discontent.
Sargent: So what happens in the end? JD Vance inherits a movement that is absolutely splintering after Trump, right?
Beauchamp: Yeah, I think Vance may or may not win the Republican nomination coming forward. do think is that the movement is going to be at each other’s throats. Now maybe a hatred of liberals and whoever the Democratic nominee is in 2028 will be able to unify these people again. That’s possible, right? That is the core unifying force aside from Trump, right? And sort of this broad nationalism. The third critical prong has been shared horror, anger, and distaste at the Democratic party and sort of the broader left in the United States. Maybe that’ll work. If there’s anything that can save them from their pickle, it’s that. And it’s the power of partisanship and ideological polarization. But that’s the thing, right? That is the only thing at this point, aside from Trump turning around his political fortunes.
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.