With Friends Like These

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

I can’t believe I wrote an entire newsletter comparing J.D. Vance’s relationship with Tucker Carlson to Abdul El-Sayed’s relationship with Hasan Piker without ever flagging an obvious irony.

 

Namely, that Carlson assuredly prefers the far-left Democrat El-Sayed to the hawkish Republican, Mike Rogers, in this year’s Michigan Senate race.

 

It’s basic horseshoe logic. At both ends of the horseshoe, populists have made Israel an exemplary scapegoat in their case that the U.S. government has been captured by special interests and no longer prioritizes the welfare of Americans. Carlson has been pulling that thread for years, and El-Sayed spun it into a Senate nomination. In a decadent country like ours, their alliance was kismet.

 

I’m kicking myself for having missed my opportunity to make that point in Tuesday’s column because, as chance would have it, it was only a day later that Carlson did, sort of, endorse El-Sayed. Tucker *hearts* Abdul, it turns out—which means, given that Abdul *hearts* Hasan and of course J.D. *hearts* Tucker, we’re now this close to a full-blown postliberal political polycule.

 

The quasi-endorsement came during Carlson’s interview with nationalist podcaster Saagar Enjeti. “I watch his campaign now, it’s America First,” Enjeti said of El-Sayed. “When he talks about Israel, he says, ‘Israel is committing a genocide, but ultimately I want to make sure that you don’t pay more for healthcare. I don’t want your tax dollars going abroad to fund this barbaric military.’ He stands in front of a giant American flag. It’s almost Trumpian in terms of a lot of those problems.”

 

“Well, it is literally Trumpian,” Tucker affirmed. He told his audience that he “wouldn’t vote for Mike Rogers at gunpoint,” alleging that the Republican is “basically a tool of Israel and the intelligence agencies” and declared that “no one … should be farther from a position of power.”

 

No one? It’s true that Rogers is unfit for office, but I can think of a few people whose exclusion from power is more important to America’s civic health.

 

Watching Carlson endorse El-Sayed by implication, I had two thoughts. One was that it’s just deserts for grassroots “America First” suckers, who cheered Donald Trump for wanting to bar Muslims from entering the United States in 2015 and are now asked to cheer an ultra-left Muslim in Michigan because he shares Tucker’s antipathy to Israel. When you organize your politics around tribal prejudices, don’t be surprised by how radically those prejudices might need to shift to accommodate the tribe’s shifting enemy-of-my-enemy alliances.

 

I look forward to the day when we’re told that “making America great again” requires embracing Sharia law. The Trump-loving good ol’ boys in Appalachia already have the beards.

 

My other thought was that Carlson’s fondness for the left’s man in Michigan would complicate his bromance with the vice president, who recently described El-Sayed as nothing less than “very, very evil.” Vance is obliged to support Rogers in that race, if only as a matter of professional duty: You can’t be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee-in-waiting and go around endorsing Democrats.

 

I was half-right, it turns out. The VP delivered the White House press briefing on Thursday and confirmed that he’s backing Rogers—although for the notably lesser-of-two-evils reason that El-Sayed, as he put it, is a “crazy person” and Rogers is not. But when reporters gave him a chance to break up with Carlson, Vance declined.

 

He allowed that some of Tucker’s criticism of the president over the Iran war has been “wrong,” another case of professional duty dictating his response. The polycule, however, remains intact. “Tucker is a friend of mine,” Vance stressed. “Tucker is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things. And I’m not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with them.”

 

“Friend” is an interesting word. “Political” is more interesting.

 

Excuses, excuses.

 

I’ve written before (many times!) about why the vice president will never break with Carlson, no matter how deep into the Coughlin-esque muck Tucker sinks. To understand how reluctant Vance is to do so, consider the variety of excuses he’s used to rationalize sticking by his “friend.”

 

One is ye olde “no enemies to the right” logic. “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests,” the VP said last year at a Turning Point USA event, alluding to Ben Shapiro’s criticism of Tucker at the same conference. “We have far more important work to do than canceling each other,” he stressed later.

 

Whining about “cancellation” is a tactic El-Sayed has also used to deflect criticism of his chumminess with Piker, not coincidentally. And, not coincidentally, Vance has never directed his objection to right-wing infighting at his two patrons, Trump and Carlson, despite the fact that they’re the two most notorious practitioners of right-on-right demagoguery in American politics.

 

Another excuse involves appealing to Tucker’s supposed ideological bona fides. “The idea that Tucker Carlson—who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election—the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd,” Vance declared last year.

 

But that’s begging the question. Without detouring into navel-gazing about what “conservative” means in 2026, the issue isn’t whether Carlson represents a wing of it. The issue is whether J.D. Vance should be using his political influence to marginalize that wing rather than mainstream it.

 

A third excuse is “dialogue,” surely something no reasonable person could oppose. “I recognize a lot of people in this room may disagree with things that Tucker Carlson or Megyn Kelly or Joe Rogan have said,” Vance told a gathering of Jewish Republicans last week. “I think it’s a mistake to sort of say we’re going to write Joe Rogan off because he said something that we don’t like. I think the best approach is to actually go in there and talk to him and make the argument as best as you can.”

 

Okay—but in the same breath, the VP conceded that Rogan and white supremacist livestreamer Nick Fuentes are “two very, very different categories of people,” implying that dialogue with one is appropriate while dialogue with the other wouldn’t be. Why place Carlson with Rogan in the “kooky but well-meaning” category of those worth debating instead of with Fuentes in the “malevolent Jew-baiter” category of those to ignore, particularly given that Carlson platformed Fuentes on his show?

 

Frankly, if dialogue is the “best approach,” why make an exception for Fuentes at all? If anyone on the right urgently needs to hear an argument against antisemitism from J.D. Vance, it’s Fuentes’ groyper base. When should we expect the vice president to sit down with him and make it?

 

Waiting on a ‘friend.’

 

The common thread in all three excuses is the idea that Carlson’s brand of postliberalism is a legitimate strain of right-wing thought that neither can be, nor should be, ghettoized. In the same way that Vance positioned himself as a “reasonable moderate” on U.S. support for Israel earlier this summer, he’s positioned himself as a “reasonable moderate” on whether conspiratorial antisemitism with a side dish of Putin-bootlicking should be welcome in the GOP.

 

He’ll concede that Tucker says things that are “wrong”—while being verrrrry coy about which things, specifically, those might be—but not so wrong that Carlson shouldn’t be welcome inside a Republican tent that’s grown so big that it no longer seems to have a moral perimeter of any kind. Essentially, Vance is offering right-wingers of all stripes a compromise: I won’t endorse Tucker’s ugliest stuff, but neither will I confront him over it.

 

That’s what makes Vance’s use of the term “political disagreements” at yesterday’s White House briefing significant. Political disagreements, traditionally, have involved things like tax rates, not whether the Holocaust happened or whether Israel was responsible for 9/11. The vice president has reframed a moral objection to Carlsonian postliberalism as a mundane policy dispute, normalizing it in the process.

 

And everyone knows why. It was Fuentes, ironically, who put his finger on it in an interview with the New York Times. “J.D. Vance panders to the far right but simply doesn’t want the baggage of associating with the far right,” he told the paper. “If he has a problem with ‘antisemites,’ then he should start by disavowing his best friend Tucker Carlson.”

 

Correct on both counts. The vice president is forever straining to triangulate between being “based” enough to avoid a primary challenge from Tuckerite America First-ers in 2028 and mainstream enough to win over swing voters in that year’s general election. His solution has been to invent some imaginary distinction between Carlson and Fuentes and use it to justify hugging one while stiff-arming the other.

 

The problem is that Tucker’s antisemitism sounds more like Fuentes’ every day. As he grows more morally depraved, Vance’s shtick about a mere “political disagreement” with him will wear thin and start to look even to normie voters like the expedient cynicism that it is.

 

That’s why the VP resorted to citing friendship during yesterday’s briefing to explain why he won’t throw Carlson “under the bus,” I think. Friendship is a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency retort to an accusation of immorality.

 

“Friends will help you move,” as the saying goes, “but true friends will help you move a body.” All of us overlook moral failings in friends that we wouldn’t overlook in strangers, and occasionally even abet those failings out of loyalty and affection. Vance is asking Americans to give him a pass on the obvious question that his relationship with Carlson presents—why do you persist in supporting this cretin?—on those grounds, hoping that they’ll find his friendly loyalty to be virtuous on balance, relatable, and therefore excusable.

 

Heritage Foundation chief Kevin Roberts stooped to the same tactic when he had to answer for his organization’s own alliance with Carlson last year. Like Vance, he drew a vague distinction between Tucker and Fuentes to rationalize supporting the former but not the latter. And like Vance, he broke the proverbial glass to cope with his PR emergency. “We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” he said at the time. “That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains—and, as I have said before, always will be—a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.”

 

An America in which the next leader of the Republican Party is buddies with a guy who perpetually sounds like he’s on the verge of saying “the 14 words” or an America where friends stab each other in the back: Surely the second is worse than the first, no?

 

The price of friendship.

 

The thing about Vance’s friendship with Carlson is that it isn’t really a friendship.

 

They might be friendly. I can imagine them sharing a belly laugh, for instance, at the VP denouncing ethnic tribalism to pander to swing voters after he spent the 2024 campaign pushing thinly veiled racist smears about Haitian migrants kidnapping and eating their neighbors’ pets.

 

But it’s not as if the two met in a fantasy football league. Their “friendship” was born out of postliberal ideological kinship, and so one can’t help but suspect that it’s that kinship, not personal loyalty or affection, that’s led Vance to stick by Tucker. He wants Americans to believe his allegiance to Carlson is in spite of the latter’s demagoguery when the origin of that allegiance suggests it’s because of it.

 

It also isn’t a real friendship insofar as real friendships aren’t coerced.

 

If you want to be very charitable to J.D. Vance and assume that he’s privately disgusted by Carlson, you’re left with an uncomfortable question about why he doesn’t speak up and an even more uncomfortable answer—because, if he did, Tucker might retaliate by spoiling Vance’s coronation in 2028. No one feels very confident that the depraved Republican primary electorate would choose the vice president over a much more charismatic demagogue if the two went head to head.

 

The VP needs to stay “friends” with Carlson for the same reason Kevin Roberts does, because Carlson has enough juice with grassroots America First-ers to make both of their lives miserable if he were to become their enemy. “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize,” as the (white nationalist) saying goes: It speaks volumes that Vance behaves as though he’s not “allowed” to criticize Tucker.

 

There’s a third way in which it isn’t a real friendship. Most real friendships aren’t this one-sided, are they?

 

To all appearances, Carlson cares not a whit that his transformation into the Joker of Zionist-obsessed postliberalism might be damaging Vance’s presidential prospects by association. Perhaps that’s by design, as the less viable the vice president becomes as a candidate, the less reason Tucker has not to enter the 2028 primary himself. I think simple callousness is a likelier explanation, though. Probably Carlson believes that, as the partner in this friendship who “rules over” the other, it should be incumbent on Vance to adjust his behavior to accommodate Tucker’s rather than vice versa.

 

But there’s a cost to that, and not just in 2028. If it’s not fair to impute Carlson’s beliefs to Vance because of their ideological kinship-turned-friendship, why is it fair for Mike Rogers and the GOP to try to do the same to Abdul El-Sayed because of his own ideological kinship-turned-friendship with Hasan Piker? How long will it be before El-Sayed starts dismissing questions about Piker with “I’ll disavow him as soon as J.D. disavows Tucker”?

 

Upright, decent, and principled.

 

There’s one more point to be made about the Vance-Carlson friendship. It continues to exist only because the vice president believes it’s a net asset to him in a GOP presidential primary. If Vance thought being associated with modern Coughlin-ism would cost him right-wing votes on balance, he’d have pulled the plug on Tucker already.

 

Their friendship will be used against him in 2028 by one or more Republican challengers, and he knows it. Sen. Ted Cruz has all but declared his candidacy already and sounds poised to make antisemitism, and in particular the VP’s relationship with Carlson, key lines of attack. Not so long ago, a charge as grave as that would have been considered disqualifying if substantiated.

 

But the vice president’s supporters aren’t worried. “Unfortunately for [Cruz], has-beens polling at 1 percent won’t be part of that conversation” in 2028, one chuckled to Semafor.

 

I share that person’s skepticism. It’s not just that Cruz, a famously cynical politician, is poorly positioned to prosecute a case against Vance for political cynicism. It’s that the case against antisemitism is a moral one, and the Republican Party long ago had its moral wiring torn out by the handful.

 

Ten years of Trump has conditioned the grassroots right to believe that any moral critique of populism made from the left—that is, based on traditional liberal political morality—is evidence of weakness and a reluctance to “fight.” It’s not that the right is broadly antisemitic (although part of it sure is) as much as that it resents, and will continue to resent, seeing postliberals like Carlson lectured for falling short of its liberal enemies’ moral expectations. Cruz might very well end up doing himself more harm politically by making the antisemitism charge than he’ll do to Vance, especially as Vance hones his triangulation game.

 

The unhappy truth is that only a moral critique from the right—that is, based on postliberal political morality—stands to gain traction in a Republican primary. Ted Cruz needling Vance for his friendship with an antisemitic podcaster won’t do much. But Tucker Carlson needling Vance over Trump selling out Americans for another Middle Eastern “forever war” supposedly masterminded by Israel might.

 

“Tucker Carlson has become a litmus test of sorts. If you’re a rational, upright, decent, and principled person, you have nothing but contempt for him and what he represents,” Cruz ally Mark Levin tweeted yesterday. That’s true, but it’s precisely that sort of attack on Vance that will fail miserably in the next primary, I expect. “Rational, upright, decent, and principled” have been curse words in a party demented by Trumpism for years now; pro-Israel conservatives like Cruz and Levin who reconciled themselves to a movement of face-eating nihilist leopards, expecting that they understood its appetites, should have worried about that nihilism before their own faces started being gnawed on.

 

The time to care about a rational, upright, decent, and principled right was 10 years ago, then after the 2020 election, then again in 2024. It’s too late now. And because it is, come 2028, Reaganites will almost certainly be forced to choose between quitting the Republican tribe in disgust at its choice of nominee and making “friends” with the many new unsavory figures that now populate it thanks to leaders like Vance and Carlson. Given their track record, I have no doubt what they’ll do.