Vice President J.D. Vance has made his decision.
On September 3, he stood in the White House briefing room and refused to cut Tucker Carlson loose. He said everyone knows they are friends. He said Carlson has declared things he disagrees with. He said Carlson has uttered things about President Donald J. Trump that are just wrong.
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Vance then claimed he would not throw a friend under the bus over political disagreements, because that would be a terrible place for the country to go.
That is not statesmanship. That is evasion.
Carlson is not a restless ally with one bad week. On June 18, he announced he would not support the Republican Party. He asked how any American could back a party he called disloyal to the United States. He said it is not possible to vote for Republicans. He branded the GOP immoral. He said he is out, and he expects others to follow.
Carlson accused the White House and Republicans of putting Israel and big donors ahead of American citizens. He called that the opposite of what the GOP should be, alleging it treasonous. He claimed that America First had been dumped for what helps Israel and campaign contributors, instead of U.S. families.
Trump rebuked that garbage.
In April, the president denounced Carlson as a clueless, broken, low-I.Q. person who never finished college and was fired by Fox News. Trump said Carlson, and others like him, are lunatics and losers who push the opposite of MAGA. They do this by fighting strong action against the Iranian Islamist theocracy, our world’s top sponsor of terror.
Vance nonetheless treats Carlson as an ally.
That loyalty has a history. Carlson mentored Vance. In the 2022 Ohio U.S. Senate race, he gave Vance more airtime on his top-rated Fox News show than any other candidate. Carlson sold Vance as the working-class American voice against endless wars and corrosive elites. Carlson called Trump to vouch for Vance. Trump subsequently gave Vance his endorsement. In 2024, Carlson pushed Vance for the GOP vice presidential nomination.
All in all, Carlson helped turn a memoirist into a senator and then vice president.
Two days before Carlson denounced Republicans, Vance listed him, alongside Joe Rogan and Mark Levin, as part of the coalition that elected Trump. Vance said the party should welcome disagreement. He compared Carlson’s disappointment to sour grapes from other coalition members.
Vance could not have been more wrong.
On August 10, Carlson sat with Hunter Biden and called Trump flamboyantly corrupt. He described himself as on the warpath over the Iranian conflict, which he treats as a betrayal of Trump’s pledge to avoid destabilizing Middle East wars. Carlson said he overstated his own influence in an embarrassing way and was mad at Trump, as well as at himself.
On August 28, Carlson said Trump should be removed from office immediately, over the theoretical use of nuclear weapons against Iran. Carlson noted that he had opposed earlier impeachment efforts as absurd. He then asked why there was not already an attempt to remove Trump. He emphasized his conviction that Trump’s presidency must end at once.
On September 3, the same day Vance defended his friendship with Carlson, the latter praised Michigan Democrat senatorial nominee Abdul El-Sayed. Carlson said he would not vote for Republican Mike Rogers at gunpoint. He called Rogers, whom Trump endorsed, a tool of Israel and the intelligence agencies, purporting that no one should be farther from power.
El-Sayed has said that when he dies and stands before God, he does not want to say he took the easy path instead of the sharia-compliant route. A documentary of El-Sayed’s failed 2018 gubernatorial bid showed him telling filmmakers not to record his own shelf. Among other things, it held a book arguing that suicidal terrorism is not driven by Islamism. It also featured commentary from a Muslim Brotherhood figure who called refusal to implement sharia apostasy.
El-Sayed wanted to keep the video secular. He has not said whether he would expect his daughters to follow sharia rules on courtship, marriage, and modesty. He has been invested in sharia-compliant funds tied to a man who was identified by the FBI as a Muslim Brotherhood leader.
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Carlson still called El-Sayed’s campaign “Trumpian.” Vance still considers Carlson a friend.
In a closed-door July speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition, Vance denounced antisemitism but refused to disavow Carlson, whose hatred of Israel did not begin with Iran.
Watchdog groups documented it long before 2026. He has interviewed voices who painted Israel as hostile to Christianity, blowing up churches and targeting Christians. He has claimed Israel steers American policy through donors and AIPAC. He has revived USS Liberty conspiracies. He has suggested that Israel withheld 9/11 warnings. He has pushed the idea that Israel starts wars to flood the West with refugees while guarding itself as an ethnostate.
He has called Christian Zionists victims of a brain virus and platformed a Holocaust denier. Republicans have rejected this poison. Gallup polling in February found that 69 percent of GOP voters view Israel favorably. Seventy percent sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians. Republicans remain the most pro-Israel group in the country.
Donors have been clearer still.
In his 2026 Kentucky U.S. House primary, pro-Israel groups and major Republican donors spent more than $32 million to beat Thomas Massie. The rabidly anti-Israel congressman is Carlson’s favorite. AIPAC’s political arm, the Republican Jewish Coalition, Paul Singer, Miriam Adelson, and many others put up millions of dollars. They showed that contempt for Israel is political suicide in the GOP.
A Harvard University survey, conducted August 28–30, found Republicans ahead of Democrats 51 percent to 49 percent on the generic congressional ballot, among likely voters. If Harvard is accurate, as it was in 2018, then Democrats are in serious midterm trouble. Indeed, the ballot moved from D+4 in March to D+2 in July and then, of course, to R+2 in August.
Carlson transparently wants this progress thwarted. In June, he said he feels sorry for Vance every day. In his telling, Trump has completely betrayed GOP voters and put Vance in an impossible spot. Carlson’s advice for Vance: March into the Oval Office, tell Trump to change course, and threaten daily subversive press conferences if the president refuses.
Vance’s answer to Carlson: declaring him a friend, while audaciously standing inside the White House.
A former Marine is supposed to know honor. Honor is not publicly announcing friendship with a man who calls the president’s defense of the country treasonous. Honor is telling that man he is finished not only in Republican politics, but across every facet of polite society.
Vance adamantly refuses to take the honorable course. That makes him look weak at best. At worst, it makes him appear like a covert fellow traveler of Carlson’s degenerate, deranged, and destructive ideas. It also raises the question of whether Vance needs Carlson more than he needs the Trumpian coalition that made him vice president.
Tucker Carlson declared war on the GOP and on President Trump. Vance stands by him. Accordingly, Republican voters and politicos should stand with someone other than Vice President Vance in the 2028 presidential cycle.
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