J.D. Vance Can’t Admit the Obvious: The GOP Has Antisemites

In what has become a regular ritual for him, Vice President J.D. Vance is again dismissing concerns about antisemitism in the Republican Party and the MAGA movement, this time in an interview with NBC News:

“Do I think that the Republican Party is substantially more antisemitic than it was 10 or 15 years ago? Absolutely not,” Vance said. “In any bunch of apples, you have bad people. But my attitude on this is we should be firm in saying antisemitism and racism is wrong … I think it’s kind of slanderous to say that the Republican Party, the conservative movement, is extremely antisemitic.”

He is obviously choosing his words carefully, but the message is pretty clear: “Slandering” Republicans with warnings about rising antisemitism is a bigger problem than GOP antisemitism itself, so people like Ted Cruz, who has been issuing such warnings, should put a sock in it. This follows Vance’s earlier “boys will be boys” dismissal of concerns stemming from a tranche of Young Republican text chains loaded with antisemitic tropes and outright admiration for Adolf Hitler.

The question Vance posed to himself is interesting, however: Is the Republican Party “substantially more antisemitic” than it was 10 or 15 years ago? Hmm, what else has happened to the GOP over the last decade or so? It was conquered and eventually swallowed by Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, which provides the real answer to Vance’s question. Your average Republican may not have become more prone to antisemitism during the party’s transformation into a vehicle for Trump’s distinctive brand of right-wing politics. But MAGA has built a big new tent in which, for the first time in many decades, antisemites and their fellow travelers are welcome. It’s Vance’s refusal to definitively withdraw that implicit welcome mat that’s a problem.

The personification of his problem is Tucker Carlson, the highly influential extremist who was an important early backer of Vance’s political career and is perpetually at the center of fears about creeping antisemitism in MAGA and the GOP. Indeed, it was Carlson’s decision to offer a friendly interview to the notorious white supremacist and antisemite Nick Fuentes that led to a lot of the recent talk about Jew-baiting becoming acceptable on the contemporary right. Kevin Roberts’s determination to defend Carlson in this instance is what has largely blown up the venerable Heritage Foundation. Beyond this incident, Carlson has, for years, flirted with embracing the “great replacement theory.” According to that durable right-wing conspiracy narrative, shadowy elites (code in some circles for “Jews”) are destroying America’s white Christian character by importing tens of millions of swarthy criminals and heathens who will literally replace the descendants of the Founders. When torch-carrying neo-Nazis chanted, “The Jews will not replace us,” during the murderous 2017 Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, this is exactly what they were talking about.

But the irrepressible existence of antisemitic sentiments on the right is a much larger phenomenon than can be attributed to any one influence. It’s no accident antisemitism in Europe was not only associated with, but became an integral part of, right-wing authoritarianism — and hardly just in Germany. There are a few fundamental reasons why reactionaries on both sides of the Atlantic have perpetually flirted with antisemitism. First, they are typically Christians of a distinctly anti-Enlightenment bent, who maintain the church’s ancient “blood libel” accusations of Jewish collective guilt for the crucifixion and associate Jews with secular developments they view as anti-Christian. Second, they are nationalists suspicious of the “rootless cosmopolitan” nature of Jewry (at least before and alongside the establishment of the state of Israel), which they blame for Marxism and other internationalist doctrines that obliterate blood-and-soil national communities. And third, they are populists in as much as they identify with mass prejudices against Jews as elitists, libertines, and parasitical profiteers.

But there’s a distinctively American twist on right-wing politics that complicates the picture: the tilt of contemporary conservatives toward strong identification with Israel, or at least its recent right-wing leaders. Partly out of Islamophobic motives, partly to torment a global left that has expressed increasing solidarity with occupied Palestinians, and partly because many evangelical conservatives believe Israel will play a key role in the Final Judgment, Trump’s MAGA and the GOP have strongly backed Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies. More to the point, they have used charges of antisemitism as a cudgel against those on the left who disagree with Israel’s conduct in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, to the point where anything that looks like anti-Zionism is treated as antisemitism. The problem is that once conservatives abandon zealous support for Israel — as any conscientious America First ideologue is likely to at least think about and some, like Carlson, MTG, and a host of online “influencers,” have already done — then becoming bedfellows with actual antisemites isn’t much of a jump.

So some residual antisemitism is built into the Republican infrastructure and the MAGA worldview, and it’s likely to get worse. Donald Trump, that great scourge of anti-Zionists, himself bared his teeth at American Jews in September of 2024 when he harshly criticized them for their ungrateful habit of voting Democratic despite everything he’d done for Israel. He held Jews collectively responsible for his own political peril, just like an old-school antisemite might do. So you know that his understudy, J.D. Vance, understands antisemitism is an abiding problem worth worrying about. Unfortunately, Vance may also have learned from Trump the value of never ever seeing any enemies to his right and never ever discouraging “the base,” no matter how many unsavory prejudices it harbors. That, too, is a problem for the GOP that will outlive Trump’s political career.