By Jonathan Chait
Saturday, September 05, 2026
When J. D. Vance was asked at a press conference on
Thursday about his relationship with Tucker Carlson, the media personality and
ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorist, he displayed a surprising side of
himself: human, vulnerable, almost touchingly naive.
“Tucker is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on
a number of things,” the vice president said. “And I’m not going to play the
game where I throw friends under the bus because I have political disagreements
with them. I think that is a terrible place for the United States to go. And if
you have a disagreement with somebody politically, even over a deeply held
issue, you should still be friends with that person, because the whole republic
depends on people of different perspectives being able to talk to one another.”
This was a matter not of politics, Vance was at pains to
emphasize, but of friendship. If Vance were to renounce Carlson over a
matter as trivial as, say, Carlson’s oddly positive assessment
of Adolf Hitler, what hope is there for society? The bonds of affection between
Vance and Carlson are the very glue holding together the American experiment.
And yet, tempting though it might be to imagine Vance
clasping hands with the children of the world and teaching them to sing in
perfect harmony, some notes of skepticism are warranted. Perhaps Vance’s
affection for Carlson has more to do with holding the loyalty of his friend’s
enormous audience.
For one, Vance is not known for cordially disagreeing
with people. He has accumulated an unusual
number of bitter enemies by flinging insults at people—including Senate
Democrats (“You’re full of shit, and everyone knows it”), reporters
(“scumbags”), and “childless cat ladies.” Last month, Vance hurled himself into
an obscure debate over burrito prices to
make a gratuitous swipe at a conservative Washington Post columnist’s
weight.
At the very same press conference where he waxed so
earnestly about open dialogue, Vance mocked the idea that he would talk to
former President Biden at the 9/11 ceremony (“I’m really looking forward to
hanging out with Joe Biden. I’m sure that we’ll have many, many intense
intellectual conversations, and it’ll be great”) and dismissed the Michigan
Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as “a crazy person.”
Vance’s dig at El-Sayed, and the context in which he made
it, revealed a lot more about his reasons for maintaining the alliance with
Carlson than did his encomium to friendship. Vance was trying to illustrate
that he and Carlson do not agree on everything. Carlson had recently praised
El-Sayed as “America First” and “literally Trumpian,” apparently calculating
that the candidate’s anti-Zionism outweighs his many left-wing positions.
That view was the one Vance chose to highlight as his
point of disagreement, rather than several other controversial remarks Carlson
has made. Examples include but are not limited to his endorsement of “Great
Replacement” and other conspiracy theories, his expressions of sympathy for
Russia and its war against Ukraine, and his sympathetic interviews with figures
such as Nick Fuentes, Alex Jones, and the World War II–revisionist historian
Darryl Cooper, who called Winston Churchill “the chief villain of the Second
World War” and described much of the Holocaust as mistaken deaths resulting
from poor planning.
All of these statements have left Carlson teetering at
the edge of respectability within the Republican Party. He has become one of
the most prominent exponents of a strain of right-wing populism that flirts
with and in some cases embraces isolationism, anti-Semitism, and general
crackpottery. Vance has courted this faction of the right. He and Carlson have
a partnership that has lasted nearly a decade and has yielded dozens
of interviews.
In the course of this partnership, they may well have
formed a genuine friendship. But Vance has discarded plenty
of friends
as he has cycled through various political identities. The difference between
Vance’s ex-friends and Carlson is that Carlson is still a useful ally in a
Republican factional conflict. When Carlson upset
Fox News in 2021 by endorsing the Great Replacement theory, which holds that
Democrats are using illegal immigration to replace the current electorate and
cement power, Vance wrote
on social media, “Tucker Carlson is the only powerful figure who
consistently challenges elite dogma—on both cultural and economic questions.
That is why they try to destroy him. Don’t fall for it this time, or any
other.”
Vance went on to endorse the same theory in advance of
the next midterm elections. “Democrat politicians who have decided that they
can’t win reelection in 2022 unless they bring in a large number of new voters
to replace the voters that are already here” are orchestrating lax border
enforcement, he said
on Carlson’s show that year.
The Carlson-Vance partnership has generated more
conservative blowback over the past few years as Carlson has progressed from
skepticism of Israel into anti-Semitism,
which Carlson denies.
Traditional Republicans who have supported, or at least gone along with, the
party’s attacks on Muslims and immigrants and its rejection of democratic norms
have spoken out against cracking the door open for anti-Semites. Building an
authoritarian, ultranationalist party that marinates in populist conspiracy
theories but that abhors anti-Semitism turns out to be tricky.
Vance, heading into his expected 2028 presidential
campaign, has a strong incentive to try to harness this right-wing energy. His
political interests would be served if Republicans were to stop attacking
Carlson and if Carlson were to tone down his criticism of the GOP. Hence, he
seemed less concerned that Carlson had crossed a moral line than that, in the
Michigan Senate race, he had crossed party lines. Carlson praising a member of
the Democratic Party is more threatening to Vance than Carlson praising an apologist
for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
At this week’s press conference, the reporter asked
Vance, “What do you say to those who are uneasy with your close relationship
with Carlson and claim that you’re avoiding addressing a lot of these issues,
which may be causing divisions within the GOP?”
“What a travesty it is that in the United States of
America, we let political disagreements define who our friends are going to be
and not going to be,” Vance said. “So, yeah, Tucker is a friend of mine.”
Suppose Carlson decided to support someone other than
Vance for president in 2028. Does anybody think their friendship would survive?
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