Do It for Charlie

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

Unless I missed something, Wednesday’s prediction turned out to be correct. We didn’t hear anything at this week’s Republican convention about the ruling party’s plans to keep artificial intelligence from going full Skynet.

 

The president did address it in an interview. A few hours after Anthropic revealed that it had shut down multiple lines of inquiry this year that may or may not have been aimed at building biological weapons, Donald Trump was asked what sort of “guardrails” are needed to stop AI from turning against humanity.

 

“It’s going to be fine,” he said, struggling to keep a straight face. “We’ll always have something to stop them. We’ll have a little gear. Boom. ‘I really don’t like that robot.’”

 

It will all work out in the end.

 

The second night of the convention was less eventful than the first and will be remembered mostly for its cultish flourishes. A hype video began with these words, a Paul-Harvey-by-way-of-North-Korea melange: “On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump.”

 

Later the star of the show came onstage and half-jokingly goaded the crowd to raise their hands and pledge to “the greatest president in the history of the United States” that they’ll do whatever it takes to maximize GOP turnout in November, even “cheating like hell” as the Democrats supposedly do. It was peak Trump, the authoritarian menace safely diluted by Borscht Belt humor.

 

The closest thing to actual news was made by the vice president.

 

It felt significant that J.D. Vance was tapped to be the headline speaker for the convention’s final night rather than its first, as if the Trumpist torch were formally being passed. At points during his speech, the audience even interrupted with chants of “48! 48!”

 

And no wonder. The president reportedly has stopped quizzing confidants on whether they prefer the VP to Marco Rubio and now asserts that Vance will be the nominee. Rubio himself has supposedly said privately that he isn’t planning a presidential campaign, seeing no point to doing so. And Turning Point USA, the most influential activist group in right-wing politics, “intends to play a key part in getting [founder Charlie] Kirk’s close friend, Vice President J.D. Vance, elected president,” according to the Washington Post.

 

Ted Cruz’s presidential pipe dream will need to wait another four years, it seems. In 2028, it’s going to be J.D.

 

The newsy part of Vance’s remarks came when he dared to address the subject of the Iran war, a bitter point of contention between Trump and another prominent friend of the vice president’s, Tucker Carlson. Referring to the martyred Kirk, on the anniversary of his assassination, Vance said this:

 

He did not always agree with us. Let me just give you one example. Charlie hated war. Whether it was Europe or Africa, the Middle East, he didn’t care. He just hated war. That was his view.

 

Now, of course, there are people who love what we’ve done and people who don’t. I’m not here to litigate the disagreements between Charlie and some of the people that he disagreed with. But what I’m asking you to do is do what Charlie did. Do not throw the baby out with the bath water. Don’t give the country over to a bunch of crazy people because you happen to disagree with us on a policy issue here or there.

 

Look, I’m not asking anybody to agree with me on every single issue. I’m not asking anybody to agree on every single policy of the administration. What I am asking you to do is to recognize the contrast with the radicals and recognize the achievements of the last 18 months. We have done a lot, my friends, and we can do a lot more if we fight together.

 

So that’s how he’s going to make the case to the anti-war right to stick with Team GOP in 2028, is it? Do it for Charlie.

 

‘Hating’ war.

 

Let’s get something straight. Charlie Kirk didn’t “hate war.”

 

Vance is lying about that because he hopes to convert the right’s sympathy and admiration for Kirk into sympathy and admiration for his own isolationist preferences. Opposing war yet blindly supporting the GOP anyway was St. Charlie’s position, he’d have you believe—and therefore, conveniently for Vance and his party, should also be the presumptively correct moral position for any Kirk-loving anti-war Republican in 2028.

 

It’s nonsense on stilts. An example: Less than three months after he became president in 2017, Trump surprised everyone by bombing a Syrian airfield to punish Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons. He had run and won by promising to end America’s “stupid wars” in the Middle East, yet here he was immediately thrusting the U.S. into military conflict with another Arab nation that most voters can’t find on a map. Surely the war-hating Charlie Kirk must have been incensed at that betrayal.

 

He was not. “I hope the rest of the world is watching. War is a terrible thing, but allowing maniacs to go unchallenged is unacceptable,” he tweeted on the day of the airstrikes. The next day he doubled down: “Oh Assad’s regime is upset we didn’t notify them before we sent missiles? Maybe they should stop using chemical weapons.”

 

Three years later, Trump ordered the most dangerous military action of his first term when he had the head of Iran’s Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani, assassinated. Suleimani was immensely powerful and a national hero to the regime and its loyalists; the risk of Iranian retaliation followed by all-out war was real enough that Carlson used his primetime gig at Fox News to criticize the attack, albeit in more restrained terms than he’s come to be known for.

 

Here again was a chance for Kirk to follow Tucker’s lead and flash his war-hating bona fides. Instead he was exultant. “Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s most revered military figure has been killed in an airstrike in Baghdad. Don’t mess with America under [President Trump],” Charlie crowed. “Obama & Hillary are gone. We fight back now. America is back.”

 

Okay, you might say, but the Suleimani strike and the Syria bombing were small operations, not “wars.” Kirk would have opposed a more ambitious U.S. attack in the Middle East. Oh? A few months before he was murdered, he watched Donald Trump order an air campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities that “obliterated” (supposedly) the country’s bomb program. That was an act of war any way you slice it. Finally, Kirk could let his inner dove take flight.

 

He chose to keep it locked in its cage. “Iran gave President Trump no choice,” he assured his fans. “For a decade he has been adamant that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon. Iran decided to forego diplomacy in pursuit of a bomb. This is a surgical strike, operated perfectly. President Trump acted with prudence and decisiveness.”

 

Charlie Kirk didn’t hate war. What he hated was the thought of losing influence and market share, the same as every other MAGA-pandering hack in populist media. He recognized that most of his audience worshiped Trump, so he made sure that his opinions about the president’s actions, including his warmaking, remained agreeable to them. There’s no contradiction between believing that his murder was a horror and a horrendous human tragedy and understanding that he was a ratings chaser who helped accelerate the intellectual collapse of the American right.

 

If there’s any grain of truth in what Vance said about him hating war, it’s that Kirk might have ended up as a (measured) critic of the current conflict—not because it offended his supposedly dovish sensibilities but because it would have made him nervous to be out of step on the issue with ascendant postliberal demagogues like Carlson and Nick Fuentes. Kirk was obviously anxious about losing influence over young Republicans as they gradually became groyper-ized, enough so to have begun resorting to light groyper-ism himself to try to meet audience demand.

 

Had he lived and seen the litmus test for angry right-wing populism devolve into hating “Israel’s war,” my guess is that he would have grasped toward whichever position on Iran ended up costing him the least amount of influence with the president on the one hand and the grassroots right on the other. Which, ironically, in a way does make him a good example for Vance to cite to anti-war Republicans: Just as Kirk was seemingly able to subordinate his opinions about war to some grander priority (i.e., his own power), the vice president is asking Tuckerites to subordinate their own opinions about it to a different grand priority. That is, J.D. Vance’s and the Republican Party’s power.

 

War without end.

 

The other standout aspect of the “do it for Charlie” pitch for ignoring Iran, as The Bulwark’s Tim Miller noted, was that Vance chose to make it in lieu of defending the case for war on the merits.

 

Instead of using his star turn on primetime television to try to convince Americans that the conflict was warranted, the VP made a pure “Flight 93 election” argument for not letting one’s opinion of it affect one’s vote: Even if you dislike how this plane is being flown, it will crash unless the GOP remains at the controls.

 

One reason for opting not to make the hard sell for war is obvious. Vance is understandably jittery about voters taking their opposition to it out on him in 2028 and doesn’t want his fingerprints on it any more than they already are.

 

If anything, he’s trying to scrub them off. Presumably that explains how the New York Times came to know that Vance spoke to various military commanders about the conflict earlier this year and “came away from some of his conversations with deep concerns about the overall strategy and the prospects for success. … The assessments made clear the extraordinary amount of pain the Iranian government was prepared to endure in its fight for survival, and the limited supply of U.S. defensive weapons available to block Iran’s retaliatory strikes, or to deal with threats elsewhere.”

 

Donald Trump’s heir apparent can’t go around saying that he always thought his boss’s war was stupid and reckless—but he can have his allies in the administration whisper it to the Times on his behalf. And he can certainly avoid arguing otherwise in a televised forum that would make life easy for Democratic admakers in 2028.

 

Vance also can’t argue the case for war without antagonizing his friend Tucker and the untold number of “America First” Republican primary voters who might prefer a more charismatic and demagogic critic of the war as their leader in 2028. At the moment, the Carlson wing of the right seems prepared to tolerate Vance as the GOP nominee, if only as a far superior alternative to lapsed Reaganite Marco Rubio. The vice president’s efforts to signal to them that he privately shares their opinion about the war but is obliged by his position to bite his tongue is working.

 

If and when he lets his “good soldier” obligations to Trump lead him to become a public proponent of the conflict, though, that might change. “Vote Republican because righteous war-hater Charlie Kirk would want you to” is a much safer play for him with the right’s Lindberghians than “ackshually, the war is good.”

 

There’s a third reason for Vance to avoid making the case for attacking Iran, though, and it’s a doozy: All signs point to the war intensifying, possibly significantly, and sooner rather than later.

 

The good news is that the U.S. naval blockade is working, leaving Iran’s oil-dependent economy in a shambles. There’s also good news in the Strait of Hormuz, where American ships have quietly restored transit for a meaningful percentage of tankers. As of late last month, by one government estimate, roughly half the prewar volume of oil was now moving through the strait.

 

Economically and militarily, Iran is under immense pressure. That could lead it to capitulate—or it could lead it to do the opposite. The more desperate the regime becomes to regain leverage, the greater the risk that it will escalate, possibly in reckless ways.

 

In fact, reports have been circulating for more than a month that it’s planning to escalate in order to complicate life for Trump before November’s midterm election. Among the options being considered, according to a story published in August by the Wall Street Journal, are “sabotaging Internet cables in the Persian Gulf, creating political unrest in countries with Shia communities such as Kuwait and Bahrain, and potentially even ground operations in Kuwait.” Iran’s military is also hastily rebuilding its arsenal of ballistic missiles from components on hand.

 

“Some Iranian leaders … believe now is a good moment to act because Mr. Trump will return to war after the midterms anyway,” the Times reported on Wednesday. “The president will either feel vindicated by an unexpected electoral victory or feel that he has nothing more to lose by pursuing his own strategy, several of the analysts said.” That calculus is well founded: When Trump was asked yesterday why he hasn’t hit Iran hard lately, he answered, “Well, maybe I don’t do that because of the election.” It sounds like escalation is coming after November no matter what, in which case the Iranians would be foolish not to get a jump on it.

 

Maybe they already have. Yesterday Iran’s proxy in Yemen, the Houthis, captured a key port city near the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which Saudi Arabia uses for some of its oil exports. The prospect of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab being cut off generated multiple emergency phone calls to Trump by the Saudi crown prince, but the president declined to open a new front by ordering U.S. strikes on the Houthis. News of the crisis caused Brent crude oil prices to jump above $108 per barrel on Thursday for the first time since May and sent the price of diesel fuel in the U.S. on Friday past $6 per gallon, an all-time high.

 

Imagine being J.D. Vance and trying to defend the Iran war at a moment like this, with hostilities, gas prices, and inflation all set to spiral. Imagine assuring Americans that starting that war was a good idea when Pentagon officials are now admitting that Iran successfully “blew the hell out of” our base in Bahrain and will doubtless have an easier time targeting other American bases in the region going forward because of our munitions shortage.

 

And now imagine doing all of that amid headlines that the war could plausibly go on in fits and starts for the rest of Trump’s presidency, scrambling oil markets for years to come and sucking U.S. military personnel out of other theaters and into the region indefinitely. When Vance addressed the conflict last night, he did so knowing that it could still be a live issue when he accepts his party’s nomination in 2028. Defending it on camera would have been political suicide.

 

Under the circumstances, pointing to the spirit of Charlie Kirk as if he’s Yoda at the end of Return of the Jedi and insisting that he wants you to go on voting GOP in spite of everything was the least bad argument available to him.

 

Rigged or unrigged?

 

J.D. Vance sold his soul to Trumpism hoping to establish himself as a “serious” postliberal populist and instead finds himself saddled with Bushian Middle Eastern misadventures on the one hand and grotesquely unserious MAGA slopulism on the other.

 

That probably explains why he also didn’t waste time in his speech last night defending his boss’ inane plan for a $5,000 “dividend” for American adults if the GOP holds the House and Senate in November. The idea is so half-baked (“incredibly desperate” with “zero chance” of passing, even according to Republicans) that Trump resorted to arguing in an interview on Thursday that he doesn’t need congressional action to issue that “dividend.”

 

If he doesn’t need Congress, what the hell was the point of this bribe in the first place? There’s no need to vote Republican this fall if the president can cut a check on his own authority.

 

Of all the slopulism Trump has pushed on Americans, little of it has been as sloppy as that. “This entire incident exposes how completely out of ideas the entire Trump political project is,” Reason’s Eric Boehm wrote of the “dividend” proposal. “This is the inevitable end of all populist movements, which begin by promising easy solutions to complex problems and eventually collapse when those ‘solutions’ are revealed to be grifts or oversimplifications.”

 

That’s true, and it’s equally true of the Iran war. The White House promised an overly simple four- or five-week conflict after which the regime would capitulate à la Venezuela—despite many warnings to the contrary beforehand—and ran out of ideas almost immediately after “bomb harder” didn’t work. Vance will inherit a populist movement whose credibility will be completely shot by 2028, insofar as it isn’t already. Just deserts have rarely been so just.

 

I’ll leave you with this happy thought: Try as he might, the vice president won’t be able to avoid a conflict with his friend Tucker Carlson forever. Carlson is already signaling that he expects Republicans to lose in November, and that when they do he’ll blame—what else?—Trump’s alliance with Israel as the cause. The “rigged election” nonsense won’t fly with the far right this time, in other words. They’re keen to make the point that Americans hate war and so they’ll insist that the GOP lost fairly, and deservedly.

 

Vance won’t have that luxury. He’ll need to humor Trump’s conspiracy theories about Democratic cheating (Charlie would want him to!), which will pit him against Tucker in the crucial foreign policy debate over whether interventionism is an electoral loser for the GOP. Maybe their “friendship” can survive that, or maybe it can’t. Before they know it, they might be arguing about all sorts of things that are important to postliberals—whether the election was rigged, whether Israel controls the U.S. government, whether algebra is “fake math” that only “good little goy slaves” take seriously.

 

I didn’t enjoy the first iteration of “Stop the Steal” but the second promises to be much more entertaining. Bring on the blue wave.

Lone Star Turn

By Michael Warren

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

This week’s midterm convention in Dallas may have been conceived by and centered around Donald Trump, but Thursday night belonged to J.D. Vance. There were all kinds of indications that the 42-year-old vice president has reached a new level of popularity among the most faithful within his party.

 

It seemed that way when, during Vance’s keynote address, the crowd several times burst into chants of “J.D.”, which at one point shifted to chants of “48” (America’s next president will be the 48^th). “We’ve got to take care of business this November, then we’ll worry about what comes next,” Vance responded with a chuckle.

 

Vance’s stage presence felt markedly improved from when I saw him two years ago at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee after he got the vice presidential nomination. He now looks more confident and comfortable, suggesting that Trump’s own charisma may be rubbing off on his VP. (The president’s caustic style certainly has; in his speech, Vance adopted Trump’s insulting name for Senate candidate James Talarico, “Talafreako,” and suggested that the Texas Democrat had unsavory or even illegal web-browsing habits because Talarico is “obsessed” with “trans kids.”)

 

But there was one particular moment, about 15 minutes into his address, that appeared to elevate Vance’s position in real time. A protester began to walk down the aisle stairs, shouting and unfurling a Mexican flag and then a Palestinian flag. Vance paused his speech amid the commotion, and after the protester was quickly removed from the arena, he turned back to the crowd. “Well, my friend, if you love Mexico so much, get your ass over there. I’ll buy you the plane ticket,” he said as the crowd burst into the most deafening roar of the night. (A cynic might wonder whether the scene and Vance’s response were choreographed, given how perfectly it played in the room.)

 

If in two years Vance is back at a Republican convention accepting his party’s nomination, Dallas may be remembered as his true debut, his coming-out party as the next leader of the GOP and the MAGA movement. Indeed, the honorary delegates and superfans at the 2026 convention appeared quite willing to pass the torch to Vance and let him lead the party in its next evolution.

 

The week began with discussion of a New York Times report that the administration was considering adopting one of Vance’s top policy priorities, a change in how the federal childcare subsidy designed for single-parent households is administered. “Under the draft new rule, parents who stay home with their children could benefit from the program, which typically provides about $9,000 per child each year, potentially reshaping which families get federal child care money,” reported the Times, which also notes that Vance has “championed” the idea internally.

 

The idea to provide tax subsidies to stay-at-home moms isn’t inherently Trumpy, and it fits much more with the family-oriented welfare policy that Vance and his many acolytes are pushing their party to adopt. It’s also antithetical to the small-government approach that old-school conservative movement types would like to see reasserted in Republican policy priorities. But that’s a point in the proposal’s favor for Team Vance, since there’s nothing that pleases the party’s postliberals more than to see the zombie Reaganites hem and haw about right-wing big government proposals that the Vanceguard believe would be popular with a significant part of the GOP coalition.

 

The cadre of intellectuals, writers, and activists who make up the new right has greeted Vance’s subsidy idea with enthusiasm. In fact, many of them gathered on Wednesday in Irving, about 12 miles from the convention arena, at an event put on by Forum, a new group that organizes policy debates on the right. Forum was founded by Matthew J. Peterson, a longtime affiliate of the Claremont Institute, one of the leading institutions of the new right.

 

During one panel discussion, Terry Schilling—president of the American Principles Project, a pro-family advocacy group, and a leading voice among social conservatives—was effusive in his praise for the Vance-driven proposal, arguing the vice president is “reframing the debate” about the goals of tax policy when it comes to families.

 

“He’s making the argument that we shouldn’t be subsidizing corporations with childcare. We should be giving that money directly to families. Childcare subsidies are a direct subsidy for the biggest corporations in America,” Schilling said, referring to stakes that private equity has in some of the country’s largest daycare chains. “This is going to be a total realignment of the Republican Party and what its economic policies actually geared towards and should be working to support.”

 

In his speech, Vance offered rhetorical hints about how a Vance-led GOP might steer the party toward a more paternalistic conservatism that looks more like the Christian democratic parties of Western Europe. He offered a prescription for the life he would like his newborn son (the Vances’ fourth) to have, from eating “real food” to receiving a “real education” that teaches him to “love his country.” Then, he went a little further.

 

“What I want for my family, I want for your family too. That’s my job,” Vance said. “My job is to fight for every single person in this room, every person watching at home, as if they were my own family, as if they were my own kid.”

 

And a motif of Vance’s address was the “birthright” of every American child. By my count, he used the word eight times, always to describe a broad idea of what was owed to all of this country’s citizens. Americans were born, he said, with “the right to inherit the blessings of the greatest country on earth, not because of who their parents are, not because of what they look like or where they come from, but because they are Americans, and this is our country.”

 

But, he argued, under presidents of the past, rampant immigration, inflation, and misguided policies have wantonly spent down that birthright or worse—denied it to its rightful heirs. “Our nation became a place where you had to be rich to enjoy what used to be the birthright of every ordinary middle-class life,” Vance said. “It wasn’t just that things became more expensive; it’s that our country was stolen from us and then handed out to strangers.”

 

It’s a more sophisticated and more specific version of Trump’s own brand of populist critique of the political class in 2016. The country has been run into the ground not by fools and crooks, as the current president would put it, but by the corporations and libertarians who ran Washington and opened up trade and immigration at the expense of the American worker. Sen. Bernie Sanders might like a word with Vance about cribbing his ideas, but the vice president seems to be betting that this populist sentiment isn’t losing steam with his own side.

 

Among the MAGA loyalists in Dallas this week, that doesn’t seem to be a bad bet. Will the full Republican Party, let alone the country, be ready to double down on right-wing economic populism in two years? That’s a whole different game.

Vance Is Not the Reagan of the New Right

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

 

In a famous Passover joke, a blind man is given matzah, the famously unleavened bread of the Hebrews, runs his fingers over it, and says, “Who writes this stuff?”

 

In the much older parable of the blind men and an elephant, a bunch of blind men encounter a pachyderm and each thinks they’ve encountered something different. One feels the trunk, and thinks it is a snake. Another puts his hands on the side and believes he’s encountered a wall. A third is sure the leg is a pillar.

 

I really didn’t appreciate until this morning when I started reading up on it that there is a diversity of opinion about what the fable is supposed to mean. There’s a Jain tradition that says the moral of the story is that different perspectives can all be true. I don’t think this is right. The different perspectives can all be honest or sincere. But the elephant is not a snake, or a wall, or a pillar. The elephant is an elephant. And in fairness, that’s closer to the most common interpretation: Be careful of thinking you understand something in full when you only have partial knowledge.

 

The Sufi mystic Rumi has a fun variation. In his version, the men aren’t blind—they’re in a dark room. They make the same mistakes blind men would. But Rumi says, “If there had been a candle in each one’s hand, the difference would have gone out of their words.”

 

Interestingly, the Japanese have a proverb about the blind men and the elephant that idiomatically refers to the inability of ordinary men to grasp the actions of a great man.

 

We’ve seen a lot of people try to explain Donald Trump with reference to this idea, if not the proverb. You establishment hacks can’t see the genius behind his moves, but that’s because you can’t appreciate his greatness. We’ll hear versions of this at the Trump-a-palooza in Dallas this week, I am sure.

 

On Vance and the Vanceguard.

 

But I don’t want to explore this. I’d rather look at how something similar is playing out with J.D. Vance.

 

My friend—and despite our disagreements, he really is a friend—Michael Brendan Dougherty offers something of a blind man and the elephant argument about Vance and Ronald Reagan. He runs through myriad factions of the right and their different interpretations of the Gipper. For some, he was an unwavering limited-government, free-trading, classical liberal. For others, he was a pragmatic statesman who favored protectionist policies when necessary. He was for gun rights. No, he signed a gun control bill as governor. He was an uberhawk who defeated the Soviet Union. No, he was an appeaser who got suckered into pointless summitry with the Soviets. “People pick their own Reagan to admire or abominate — and they can make that image one of a compromiser of principles or a fanatic fool devoted to the wrong ideas,” Michael writes.

 

He implies there’s something similar going on with Vance, a politician he admires greatly. I can hardly disagree, to the extent that people—people I admire and people I don’t—see different things in Vance. And how could they not? I don’t just mean his story arc from harsh critic of the dysfunction of lower-class white culture to defender of a new class of victims. Nor do I mean his transformation from Never Trumper golden boy to Robin to Trump’s Batman. (Holy metamorphoses …!).

 

Michael is very frustrated with the way people use terms like postliberal, nationalist, integralist, etc., in disparaging ways about Vance and his faction of the GOP. I can understand his frustration to some extent. Though louche and invidious terminological promiscuity is hardly exclusively a sin among critics of the new right. I’ve spent 30 years railing against people weaponizing the term “neoconservative,” with exactly zero success. Indeed, Vance himself has a long record of malicious misuse of the term to delegitimize or diminish the supposed  neocon influence on the party.

 

More to the point, it’s not the fault of Vance’s critics that people call him a postliberal. Vance has said he considers himself part of the “postliberal right.” When he was a senator, he told fellow postliberals that he was “explicitly anti-regime.” Now, I will give Vance the benefit of the doubt that he meant the Biden administration. But since we’re dinging the misuse of terms, it’s worth noting that in America the “regime,” as committed postliberals will acknowledge, is not a presidential administration but the constitutional order, or republican system of government. Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, surely knows this. Though his defenses of Donald Trump’s attempt to steal an election  suggest perhaps a more troubling understanding of the American regime. Vance’s association with “nationalism” isn’t as strong, but reasonable people can look at his speeches to Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatives as evidence that he sees himself as a nationalist as well. Hazony himself certainly thinks that’s the case.

 

Never mind that nationalism and (serious) postliberalism have some profoundly irreconcilable propositions at their core. Certainly, Catholic integralist postliberalism is one of the oldest and most coherent forms of “globalism” ever put forward.

 

But that’s okay. Michael’s whole point is that politicians can contain contradictions and people can glom onto the facets they want to see.

 

I think the reason Michael’s comparison of Vance to Reagan largely fails is that, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see a lot more consistency in Reagan than can be gleaned in the career of Vance. Yes, Reagan tactically zigged and zagged in his dealings with the Soviets, but no one doubts that his fundamental strategic goal was “We win, they lose.” Yes, he compromised with political realities on trade, but rhetorically and, again, strategically, he was a free trader. His protections for Harley-Davidson—the Reagan-was-a-protectionist crowd’s favorite example—were temporary by design. “It was like giving a boxer a few extra weeks of training before a fight,” he later explained. Indeed, his tactical concessions to a Democratic-majority Congress laid the “groundwork for a long-term free-trade legacy,” as Colin Grabow and Scott Lincicome explained in National Review.

 

“Contemporaneous critics of Reagan’s trade policies might be excused for failing to see the long game he played, but contemporary observers’ similar bouts of myopia deserve no such forgiveness,” they write.

 

Hindsight is never actually 20/20, but there are things we can see clearly about Reagan now that make a lot of Michael’s blind men and the elephant version of Reagan much less persuasive. And there were things we could see at the time, too. Reagan was a kind and congenial president. His detractors often struggled to see it, but voters saw it fairly plainly. His sunny disposition and fundamental decency played a big part in how he earned the “Teflon president” nickname. Reagan very occasionally had sharp elbows, but he didn’t believe in demonizing enemies or immigrants for political gain.

 

Whether you think Vance is a postliberal, a nationalist, or simply a more mainstream principled conservative political pragmatist, one thing you can’t persuade me—or many others—of is that he’s a Reaganesque politician in this regard. His big tent has a large and welcoming opening for edgelord Twitter addicts, traffickers in antisemitic bilge, and other fever-swampers, not to mention the aforementioned postliberals and nationalists who applaud “anti-regime” red meat. He encouraged the demonization of Haitian immigrants: “don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing.” He rhetorically tilts to a form of nationalism that ranks heritage Americans and descendants of combatants—on either side!—of the Civil War above more recent arrivals. That is not how Reagan talked—or thought—about America.

 

Whether it’s just the need to impress his boss, or a sign of his online addictions, or pure pragmatic surrender to the nastiness of our politics, or the epiphenomena of some deeper phenomenological grievances and resentments, Vance embraces the idea that politics is mean and that meanness is self-justifying. Some of his fans can’t see it because fish don’t know they’re wet. Some do see it, but write it off as the price of politics in pursuit of the noble and necessary goal of purging what Michael describes as “an excess of liberal ideology in our ruling class and their institutions.” And some just love the meanness on its own terms.

 

(Intriguingly, Michael says that “it’s precisely Vance’s commitment to [a Christian] orthodoxy in its appropriate sphere that prevents him from embracing the regnant asphyxiating and false political dogmatism” of our age. Maybe. But, from where I sit, Vance’s orthodoxy has some things to say about bearing false witness, kindness to strangers—including immigrants—and just wars that Vance doesn’t necessarily listen to when inconvenient.)

 

What’s interesting to me is that Marco Rubio doesn’t seem to see politics the same way as Vance does. Some observers have noted that Rubio is a convert to the same policy prescriptions as Vance and yet doesn’t attract nearly the same vitriol. Michael is right when he says that some of Rubio’s “most fervent supporters think he’s lying about all this.” When I took notice that Rubio had hired Nate Hochman, a very smart and talented young man sadly ensorcelled by new right ideas, Hazony commented that people like me were missing the point. “Vance, Rubio, and [Sen. Eric] Schmitt are on the same team. They share a generally nationalist conservative worldview and so draw staffers from the same ecosystem in DC. The big ideological gap is between these NatCons and the Ted Cruz - Nikki Haley wing,” Hazony wrote.

 

More’s the pity. But the interesting thing is that, as far as I can tell, very few people in the nationalist/postliberal world are clamoring for Rubio, but lots of rank-and-file Republicans are. Rubio is preferred by Republicans in head-to-head matchups and he’s generally more popular inside and outside the party. Maybe some of this can be attributed to the fact that Vance is more closely tied to a blisteringly unpopular president. Maybe it’s because Rubio, partly thanks to his portfolio and partly thanks to his manifest competence, has a more obvious record of success, while Vance has to take blame for everything thanks to the thanklessness of the vice presidency itself. And maybe it’s because Rubio doesn’t come across as someone who relishes being mean and doesn’t come across as angry, which may be why he’s not participating in Trump-a-palooza this week.

 

Michael and Hazony’s argument that Rubio is on their team is meaningful, but I’m not entirely sure the full meaning is to their liking. Vance is the chosen candidate of the very online, very angry, and very hostile factions of the right. He’s the choice of Kevin Roberts, Turning Point USA, and, at least until recently, Tucker Carlson—the same Carlson who Vance can’t bring himself to meaningfully criticize, even as Carlson seeps ever deeper into the antisemitic and paranoid swamp.

 

This is the same Carlson who told Donald Trump not to pick Rubio as a running mate because Rubio was a “neocon” and therefore America’s intelligence community would assassinate Trump to get a President Rubio. He also told Trump that Rubio would undermine Trump so that Rubio could navigate us into a nuclear war. Finally, he told Trump he had to pick Vance.

 

It may be true, sadly, that Rubio completely agrees with Vance on trade, industrial policy, and the like. I don’t think they see eye to eye on foreign policy. But I could be wrong about that. My point is that Vance represents a faction and a theory of politics that Rubio does not, and they attract different factions because of it. And that difference matters a lot, however they might fill out some policy questionnaires.

 

We’re all in the dark about what these men actually believe, Michael included. But we don’t need a candle to see that they represent very different approaches to politics—and the regime.

Calling a War a War

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, September 07, 2026

 

Epidemic math gets pretty complicated pretty fast if you’re really thinking through the issues, because you have to consider geometric growth, but if you happen to be both a mental defective incapable of complex thought and, simultaneously, a moral defective incapable of caring about anything beyond your own immediate comfort—and if you happen to be president of these United States when a disruptive epidemic emerges—then the math is pretty simple:

 

“Public Fear” + “Stock Market Contraction” = “I don’t get reelected.”

 

“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” Donald Trump wrote in the early days of the COVID-19 epidemic. “We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” By all reports—including Trump’s own—he spent most of the early part of the COVID outbreak watching stock market news on television. COVID was, from his point of view, less of a public health issue than a political issue—a political issue relating to his own self-interest. The stock markets go up and down, but it is difficult to run for reelection during a sharp market downturn while claiming that the U.S. economy is performing better than it ever has thanks to the unique economic insights of Donald J. Trump, a half-literate gargoyle. Preposterous as the claim would be at the best of times, it would be preposterous enough to register in the minds of American voters—perhaps even Trump voters—during a crash.

 

Trump insisted on many, many occasions that the COVID epidemic would simply “go away”—it would go away in the spring with the warm weather, it would go away because the Chinese were so effective at dealing with that sort of thing, etc. At the end of March 2020, Trump said of the epidemic: “It’s going to go away, hopefully at the end of the month.” He said that while there were on average nearly 20,000 new infections daily. On April 3, he said: “It is going away” while there were nearly 27,000 new infections daily. By April 7 there were nearly 32,000 new infections daily, and Trump said: “It did go. It will go away.” Did, will, whatever.

 

With diesel just under $6 a gallon around the country, Vice President J.D. Vance has a message about the Iran war: It did go. It will go away.

 

“I wouldn’t call it a war right now,” insisted the dead-eyed Damien Thorn of American politics. There is, he claimed, “no active shooting”—words spoken in the very echo of Iranian attacks on U.S. assets through the region and a U.S. strike on what was, apparently, a wedding party. I suppose it is possible that there was no active shooting at the wedding until U.S. bombs started falling, but that would be an overly generous interpretation of the remarks of the sniveling and insipid little sycophant who currently serves as vice president of these United States. And Vance sounded precisely like COVID-era Trump when he insisted: “When will the Iranians shooting at ships stop having an effect on world energy markets? The answer is it has less effect day by day.”

 

Trump is moving rhetorically in the same direction: The Iran war, he now insists, is no big deal, “small potatoes.” Trump has declared victory over the Iranians a half a dozen times and has insisted that the Strait of Hormuz is open almost as many times as he has driven his businesses into bankruptcy, but happy talk don’t make it so. Trump’s base is not made up of very bright people, but even the most cretinous Trumpkins in the coalition know, as they drag their bloody knuckles across the asphalt to the fuel island at Buc-ee’s, that it now costs $270 to fill up an F-250. As a friend of mine says: Stupid should hurt. And it does hurt, though not apparently enough to have kept Americans from electing Donald Trump president, the second time after he had attempted to stage a coup d’état.

 

“A lot of people don’t call it a war,” the president said. “I call it a military conflict." Helpfully, Trump—whose poker face is so bad that he managed to bankrupt his own casinos in Atlantic City—has explained before why he does not call the Iran war a war. “I won’t use the word ‘war’ because they say, if you use the word war, that’s maybe not a good thing to do,” he said at a GOP fundraising event in March. “They don’t like the word ‘war,’ because you’re supposed to get approval, so I’ll use the word ‘military operation.’” I must admit that I am less scandalized by the fact that Trump is a moron than by how obviously—insultingly—transparent he is in his belief that he is supported by morons. The notion that a war isn’t a war if you don’t call it a war is on par with the notion that a Ford becomes a rutabaga if you pry the blue oval off the thing—without quite appreciating that it’ll still cost you the better part of $300 to fill ’er up.

 

Maybe Trump and Vance believe that horsepucky. Without question, they believe that they can convince you to believe that horsepucky.

 

In the Analects, Confucius speaks famously of the “rectification of names.”

 

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.

 

When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot.

 

Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.

 

And so:

 

If a superior man love propriety, the people will not dare be irreverent. If he love righteousness, the people will not dare not to defy his example. If he love good faith, the people will not dare to be insincere.

 

... Though a man may be able to recite the 300 odes, yet if, when entrusted with a governmental charge, he knows not how to act, or if, when sent to any quarter on a mission, he cannot give his replies unassisted, notwithstanding the extent of his learning, of what practical use is he?

 

J.D. Vance and Donald Trump both are expensively educated men, men of the Ivy League. Of what real use is either of them? Confucius himself might have a tough time answering that question.

 

It is important to call things what they are: What is happening in Iran is a war—an illegal war, imbecilically conceived and incompetently executed. Trump’s “bluster” and “salesmanship” and “passion” are none of those things—they are lies, and Trump is a habitual liar who has made his political career on the support of people, often dumb and mostly angry, who enjoy being lied to. J.D. Vance is a schmuck, a spineless yes-man without honor or integrity who will do and say whatever shameful and humiliating thing must be done or said in the moment as he inches, wormlike, toward what he imagines to be real power. Trump is surrounded by a team of cretins, incompetents, nepotism beneficiaries, drunks, degenerates, and sundry clueless clowns. Their political goal is tyranny and the displacement of the American constitutional order by a Trump-fronted mafia state.

 

It is not only the names that need rectifying, but speaking good plain English about this mess would be a good start.  

J. D. Vance’s Disingenuous Defense of Tucker Carlson

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?

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.