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- [00:02]
A
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I'm Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week's podcast is about splits in Donald Trump's support base, the MAGA movement. My guest is Jacob Heilbron, editor of the National Interest magazine and a historian.
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Of the American right.
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A
The issues that are splitting the Make America Great Again movement are many and varied. There's the Jeffrey Epstein case, there's America's relationship with Israel, and there are accusations that parts of the MAGA movement have embraced anti Semitism. So is Trump's support base splintering?
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When I went to the Republican Party convention in the summer of 2024, one of the prime speaking slots was reserved for the media personality Tucker Carlson.
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C
Tucker, Carl.
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A
So fun.
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B
Thank you.
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A
But over the last year, Carlson's taken some decisions that have embarrassed the Trump administration. He was very critical of the decision to bomb Iran. And then last month, he interviewed a man named Nick Fuentes, who's widely regarded as a white nationalist and open anti Semite. Here's Fuente speaking on a podcast earlier this year. Ten years ago, when I went to Charlottesville and we said Jews will not replace us, that sort of encapsulates both of the problems, right, which is replacement migration. And if Jews run society, are they not responsible? Carlson's decision to give a platform to Fuentes caused a row, but it was also defended by some of the most important people in the conservative movement. Here's Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation.
- [01:55]
D
Some of the criticism about him, as I understand it, also went into the realm of saying, in order to continue the criticism, he shouldn't have any platform. And that's precisely the kind of thing that, while I understand that on the substance of the arguments of what he's saying tactically, deeply worries me, because then the audience grows. And obviously, as conservatives who have the courage of our convictions and at Heritage, I think we have all the right policy answers to these problems, we ought to have the confidence to go engage those issues and hopefully begin to appeal that audience. That's ultimately the point.
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A
Robert's defense of Carlson caused a further furore, and that's not surprising because as Jacob Halbrand explained to me, the Heritage foundation has been crucial to the alliance between Trump and the American conservative movement.
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C
Under the leadership of its president, Kevin Roberts, Heritage has moved in the past several years to jettison the Reagan era legacy that it had embodied, which was free trade and open borders, essentially. So he was an internationalist Republican. President Trump has repudiated all of that. He is in Essence, the anti Reagan. And that's what the MAGA movement is centered around. America first, the idea being that the allies are predators, that in fact these alliances are benefiting them and not the United States. And Kevin Roberts reengineered Heritage in the image of Trump. He exiled scholars who believed in this Reagan era ethos and replace them with Trumpers. For him, I think it was a no brainer then when Tucker Carlson, whom the Heritage foundation has worked with and I believe supported financially, when Carlson came under withering criticism, Roberts then followed the no enemies to the right policy and defended Tucker and by implication Fuentes. He said, it's fine to have anyone on the show that you like. What's the big deal?
- [04:11]
B
So what was the big deal? Why was Fuentes so toxic?
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C
The reason that Fuentes is so controversial is because he has said that Hitler was, quote, awesome, unquote, and referred to the 6 million Jews that were murdered during the Holocaust as, quote, cookies, unquote, in an oven. So that is the kind of language that makes it impossible for the right to obfuscate what is taking place. They can't just say that Fuentes is, as they often like to say about controversial people asking questions. He's not asking questions. He's an explicit admirer of Third Reich that struck a nerve with establishment Republicans and neoconservatives who have long been allied with the Republican Party. And let's be frank with any sentient human being who has a shred of morality left.
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B
So why did Carlson have him on the show? What's in Carlson's interest to have somebody.
- [05:15]
C
Like that on the show speaking just tactically? It was a smart decision. I'm sure that the show got huge hits. And Tucker is constantly looking to provoke. If you listen to some of the people that he's had on before, he's had on dubious figures who have, for example, said that the United States should have allied itself with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union and that Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the true villain of World War II. Now, Tucker doesn't embrace or explicitly endorse these views. He'll say, wow, that's really compelling, or that's really interesting. You're opening up, you know, new avenues of inquiry that have been suppressed by the dominant liberal hegemony. And I think what Tucker really likes to say is like, beginning of his show, you know, he'll say, like, you're going to hear that everything you've been told is not true. And that is of course, where the beginning of the conspiracy theory goes. And you start Jumping down rabbit holes.
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B
Right. So he may have just pure sort of ratings interests, although he may also have political ambitions, which we will return to. But it would seem very obvious for the Trump, Vance administration, radical administration though, it is, to distance themselves from Fuentes, not just because of what he said about the Nazis, but also what he said about them. I mean, he has called Vance a fat race traitor because he married an Indian woman, Usha Vance. How have they handled it?
- [06:44]
C
Trump has explicitly endorsed Carlson and said that it was not a problem that he had Fuentes on. He said that to reporters. And I completely understand why he did that, because Trump said that there were good people on both sides of Charlottesville.
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This was the sort of neo Nazi rally.
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C
Right.
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In the first term.
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C
Right. Which caused widespread consternation. The David Duke controversy erupted. Duke was a neo Nazi from Louisiana who had, I think, embraced Trump. And Trump resisted pressure to repudiate Duke. And remember his famous line, He. He finally said, I disavow. I disavow. He never said what he was disavowing.
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B
Right.
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Now, why does Trump do that? Well, because it's in his interest not to jettison the hardcore white nationalists who have helped propel him to victory in elections. The thing that Trump has been able to do, which other Republicans have not, is to flush out new voters in rural areas of the United States. Those are the people that helped carry him to victory repeatedly. They form an essential part of his base. They came out on January 6th to storm Congress on his behalf. Why would he listen to the liberal elites who he calls communists almost every day and turn his back on these white nationalists? He has zero incentive to do so.
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B
So he has zero incentive to do so. But Vance. And interestingly, why would Fuente go after Vance and why would Vance not retaliate?
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C
Fuentes is a shock jock. And if you look on X, there are a number of these right wingers urging Vance to divorce Usha and marry a white woman. So much for family values. But why would he separate himself? He wants to inherit what Trump created. It is not in his interest to dismantle it. So he needs to appeal on one hand to what people call the techno fascists, Peter Thiel and others. And he needs to maintain the hardcore of the Trump base. That's why he hasn't endorsed Carlson or Fuentes. But he hasn't disavowed. He's kept his mouth shut.
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B
Yes. Do you think that's tenable for him?
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C
We're going to find out. I mean, I think it's the only strategy that he can pursue. The real difficulty that would emerge for him is if Tucker Carlson were to challenge him for the nomination in a Republican primary.
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B
And is that really feasible? I mean, Carlson is a very articulate guy. He, in the way of politicians, looks unfeasibly young for somebody of his age. But does he have that kind of political ambition to actually go for the presidency? And do you think he'd be a feasible candidate?
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I do, because I think nothing is off limits in America. Now you can be a sports star and run for the presidency after Trump, who had no credentials for this position, managed to capture the Republican Party. All bets are off right now.
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B
Right. In fact, Carlson is more intellectual than Trump, more policy oriented, all of that.
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C
I would say Tucker is actually quite brilliant. During the first Trump presidency, we talked for hours about Trump.
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B
Well, you and Carlson.
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C
Yes, privately. And his insights were incisive. And he had a jaundiced view of Trump. He understands his limitations perfectly well. Tucker is very clever. Also, when I saw him address the National Conservatism Conference here in Washington, D.C. several years ago, I covered that for the New York Review Books. And there I said that this guy is a potential presidential candidate. He walked into a room of several hundred conservatives and just lit up the place. I mean, he has the rhetorical abilities of a Ronald Reagan or better.
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B
Sounds like you rather admire him. Would you be endorsing him?
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C
I would not endorse Tucker, alas, because it will make a great headline for you. But I think you have to approach this analytically and you have to be fair. And Tucker is clearly very gifted. His popularity is not an accident.
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B
But you portrayed when we were talking earlier, his decision to have Fuentes on is kind of ratings driven.
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C
Well, there's another reason, and this gets to the core, the heart of the issue, which is that there is a movement among younger conservatives to detach the United States from what they see as the insidious influence of Israel over American politics and foreign policy. And Tucker has gone firmly on that wavelength. That's the principal reason, I suspect that he brought on Fuentes because he believes that the United States should pursue a foreign policy of America first, and there should be no exception for Israel, and that in fact, Israel is distorting American foreign policy.
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B
So in that sense, he has quite a lot in common with the left.
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C
He does. There is a horseshoe effect.
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B
And indeed, Fuentes. I didn't watch the whole Carlson Fuentes show, but he tidied himself up a bit for that and majored, really on this idea of excessive Israeli influence on American foreign policy, which, as you say, is an idea that's now popular on both the left and the right.
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C
And to spell this out a little bit further, which may be interesting for the listeners, Tucker used to work for the Weekly Standard for Bill Kristol. That's where his career really began.
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And that was.
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That was a neocon outlet that promoted the second Iraq War during the George W. Bush administration. And the Weekly Standard was a big deal back then. So Tucker's post Weekly Standard career is an attempt to repudiate all of that, and that includes repudiating Israel.
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B
And do you think that is where the majority of the Republican Party is or may soon be? Because if that's the case, that has implications well beyond the United States, because that bedrock commitment to Israel has been there, you know, since at least the late 60s. Is it possible that this could become orthodoxy in the Republican Party?
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C
The Republican Party historically has not been friendly to Israel. It became friendlier once the neoconservatives allied themselves with the Republican Party starting in the 70s. And then really the alliance was cemented in the 1980s under the Reagan presidency. Reagan brought on the evangelicals who are pro Israel, and he brought on the neoconservatives in leading foreign policy positions, in my view, Carlson and the younger generation in the Republican Party that regard the neoconservatives as globalists.
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I think that this new wave of energy in the GOP could break the long standing alliance with Israel that we've experienced since the 1980s.
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B
And I was very struck, actually by an article by a guy called Rod Dreher I've never met. But he's a conservative thinker. I think he lives in Hungary. He's very pro Victor Orban, therefore arguably not that keen on liberal democracy. But he wrote that when he was back in Washington, he was very disturbed because he thought that young Republicans are trending towards Fuenteism. Do you think Dreher's analysis that this is where the young Republicans are going is accurate?
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C
Well, it clearly is because you had this huge scandal that Politico unearthed among these Younger Republicans, which J.D. vance did respond to and tried to dismiss as just youthful excesses. But you had all these young Republicans around the country making jokes about the Holocaust and making anti Semitic remarks.
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B
When you say all these, what was.
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The forum while they were exchanging text messages and emails with them that were then furnished to Politico. They were never supposed to go public. And it was a significant embarrassment for the Republican Party. And Vance did respond to that, but he just Tried to diminish it and belittle it.
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He said it was kind of youthful exuberance.
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C
Right.
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Don't cancel people.
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But in fact, again, it's another sign that these impulses from. From the past were suppressed for a while, but they are reemerging.
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B
Yeah, because you're a historian of conservatism. So you think that if they go into this line of actually explicit anti Semitism, that's not so much an aberration as a return to an older tradition.
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C
Right. I don't mean to sound complacent about it, but I've always been puzzled by how long this pro Israel line could exist under an administration that is constantly bellowing about America first and in a coalition that does contain a number of anti Semites and the Republican Party. Historically, the right has been anti Semitic. 1957, to give you one example. National Review, which became the flagship conservative journal, denounced Israel as a racist state in an editorial, while it praised apartheid in South Africa as a moral beacon for the West.
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B
Right. So that wasn't so long ago. I suppose.
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All I mean to say is that these impulses have manifested themselves repeatedly with Patrick Buchanan, who has called Hitler a great leader in one op ed, admired his military fighting spirit and so forth. This anti Semitism has been their sub rosa. But now it seems as though all bets are off.
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B
So what does the other wing of the party, which is still very powerful, which has not only backed Israel, but accused the Democrats of being anti Semitic and indeed gone after American universities explicitly on the grounds that they had fostered antisemitism. They seem to be coexisting in the same party with the Fuentes crowd. How does that play out? And how are they seeing things? Right now? I'm thinking of people like the journalist Barry Weiss, whose fortunes have been in the ascendancy, you know, the free press. She's just taken over CBS News. What do they make of it?
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I think they're concerned. And if you look what they're writing in places like Commentary magazine, which is also a neoconservative outlet very sympathetic to Bari Weiss. Bari Weiss herself is something of a neoconservative. They are worried about being extruded from the gop. This is a battle for power and influence. And their argument is that, no, you must remain pro Israel. This is a vital part of the Republican coalition and you can capture enough of the Jewish vote in America to make it worth your while.
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Yeah, but the Jewish vote is not that substantial.
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It is important in states like Florida and in New York. And the idea is that if you can peel off enough Jewish voters, you don't have to get a majority. You just take enough to ensure that the Democrats can't win.
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We've been majoring on Fuentes and Carlson, et cetera, et cetera, but the American public hasn't been paying much attention to them. What they're looking at is the Epstein scandal. So let's talk about that. It does look like it's almost the first major scandal that Trump can't somehow control. I mean, he lost a huge vote in Congress and he's going to have to agree to the release of the Epstein files. So what's happening there?
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C
Well, Trump has been taking it on the chin. The only reason to believe that there is something significant in the Epstein files is of course, the fact that Trump has been battling so ardently to try to ensure that they are not released.
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Indeed, I met a Democratic congressman who said to me, there's something in there that he's scared of, but we don't.
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Know what it is. Is it Russia? Russian money ties? Is he trying to protect the Saudis? Is he personally incriminated? That seems to me the least likely.
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Although you go around town and everybody's speculating about that.
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We just don't know. Trump, though, has single handedly fed the Epstein frenzy. And I think it's in the Democratic Party's interest for him to continue to stonewall the actual release of the files. They're probably more mysterious if they're not released than if they are.
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B
Right? You mean so there'll always be some great hidden secret, et cetera, et cetera.
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Now he can suppress it because the Department of Justice will not release documents if there's an ongoing investigation. That's the escape patch that Trump has concocted. He's told the Department of Justice that they must target Democrats, leading Democrats.
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B
But at this stage, I wonder whether that kind of stratagem would have worked for him in a slightly less heated situation. Once the House is voted unanimously to release them, while Senate's voted to release them. I don't know whether he'll even get away with that. What do you think?
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C
No, I think his popularity is tanking, frankly. And his power has been based on his ability to cow the Republican Congress into submission. And that power seems to be fading now, particularly with this vote. He's also been rebuffed on redistricting in Texas. A federal court has now rescinded the Republican plan, or if you prefer, plot to seize five additional congressional seats. So Trump is on the back foot right now very much.
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B
And indeed, there was a poll, I think, saying The Democrats are 14 points ahead. You don't get those kinds of margins for a long time.
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C
No, my belief is that we've already hit peak Trump and it goes nowhere but further down because every enterprise that he has run has ended in shambles. Yeah.
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B
And now I don't want to minimize what Epstein was accused of, but Trump has got away with a great deal. You know, he's been accused personally of sexual misdemeanors, Indeed, convicted in court in New York. Obviously, there was the January 6 thing. There are various corruption allegations. Just accepted a gold bar in the Oval Office from the Swiss. So why is Epstein, the thing that the Republicans said, okay, no more, we can't tolerate this?
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I think much of the MAGA movement has been based around the belief that the Clintons were running a pedophile ring.
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B
People really believe that?
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Well, certainly the QAnon, which is what Marjorie Taylor Greene comes out of, the congresswoman who defied Trump and insisted on the release of the files and has spearheaded that. She believes that. And then you had the Pizzagate scandal, you know, actually had a shooter came into my neighborhood and went into a local pizza joint convinced that Hillary was running a pedophile ring in the basement.
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She wasn't.
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Who?
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C
No. But when you have someone marching in with an automatic rifle, that's cause for perturbation.
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B
Yeah.
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So part of the movement has been based around this conspiracy. And for Trump then to suddenly announce that, oh, no, we're not going to release what Epstein was up to.
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B
And indeed, Vance was calling for the release of the Epstein files in the.
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C
Yeah.
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Isn't it a bit weird the Democrats haven't released these files and then suddenly they flip.
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Well, they're hoist by their own petard. The Democrats, of course, are being opportunistic.
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No.
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But again, it gets back to what on earth is in those files. I still think we may be disappointed if they're actually released. Yeah.
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B
And to close this rather sort of poisonous circle. Of course, the Fuentes crowd and the conspiracy theorists there are Sort of making a link between Epstein and Israel.
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C
Right? Well, because Epstein is Jewish and some of them apparently believe that the Mossad killed Charlie Kirk.
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B
Explain. Charlie Kirk was.
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Was a huge magnet for young conservatives and he helped Trump win election. You know, he was another one of these podcasters and influencers who traveled around the country preaching the conservative. So why would.
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Why allegedly would.
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Because allegedly Charlie Kirk was starting to have doubts about the relationship with Israel. That's the conspiracy theory. Then you add in, of course, Jeffrey Epstein is Jewish himself and had a.
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Relationship with the Israeli prime minister. Former Israeli prime Minister, mind you. He seems to have known everybody.
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C
It's quite incredible. And maybe that's the ultimate story is the web of influence that Epstein did enjoy around the world. And to what extent did he deploy it on Trump's behalf?
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It is curiously fascinating. I mean, Epstein was connected with the British royal family. Prince Andrew's been destroyed by him, with a former president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, who's been destroyed by him, Peter Mandelson, a former British ambassador whose association with him has destroyed him. So how many more people do you think will be taken down by this association with Jeffrey Epstein?
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C
Well, this gets to the heart of the Make America Great Again movement because its fundamental precept is that the elites are corrupt and sexually corrupt as well. And what if, as crazy as the MAGA movement is, what if they were right about this?
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A
That was Jacob Heilbron, editor of the national interest magazine, speaking to me in Washington and ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening and please join me again next week.
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