When the Republican Jewish Coalition gathers this week in Las Vegas for its annual conference, it will honor the legacy of the late South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and hear from many other prominent figures in the pro-Israel community. Doubtless, the proceedings will include the usual celebration of the U.S.-Israel alliance and President Donald Trump’s historic support for the Jewish state and his opposition to Iran and its Islamist terror network.
Equally, if not more important, will be an effort to sound the alarm about the hijacking of the Democratic Party by its intersectional and antisemitic left-wing led by the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA.
That’s exactly what the RJC should be talking about. But participants should also be aware that along with the merits of the current administration and the threat that the Democrats’ increasing assumption of a position as America’s anti-Israel party poses, there’s another just as troubling peril hanging over their party and the country. And his name is Vice President JD Vance.
A big tent that includes groypers
Vance has assumed the role of the leading Israel-basher in the Trump administration, and whether he admits it or not, the advocate for a rerun of President Barack Obama’s disastrous appeasement of the nuclear threat posed by the Islamist regime in Iran. In and of itself, that would be enough to mark him as an outlier in an otherwise overwhelmingly pro-Israel Republican Party.
But the even greater concern about Vance is his belief that a “big tent” philosophy that seeks to include all who might conceivably support the GOP. Unfortunately, in Vance’s view, that includes its antisemitic groyper wing.
We got a reminder of this with the informal start of his 2028 campaign last week with a fundraising event in New York’s swanky Hamptons, where he raised a reported $5 million for the Republican National Committee. He has yet to declare his intentions, and the money will go to the party, rather than to a putative Vance campaign. Still, it’s clear that the vice president is using his side hustle as the RNC’s finance chair to get cozy with the party’s top donors, who paid $100,000 a piece to attend the reception and $250,000 for a seat at the dinner.
That’s political business as usual.
But what didn’t escape notice was an event in the mega-wealthy beachside village of Southampton on the East End of Long Island, N.Y. was held at the home of Omeed Malik, the venture capitalist who heads the 1789 Capital firm among other lucrative holdings. Those sorts of credentials and a net worth estimated at $100 million don’t make Malik anything all that special in that kind of neighborhood. The reason his name may ring a bell is that 1789 Capital, a company in which Donald Trump Jr. is also partner, was the entity that invested the seed money in the amount of $15 million to help establish the Tucker Carlson Network. Malik and Don Jr. are reportedly close friends of Tucker. The same is also true of the vice president.
While no one should be held accountable for the bad behavior of their friends, the Vance-Carlson connection is more than personal.
The Tucker Carlson connection
It was Carlson, along with the president’s namesake, who is believed to have played the decisive role in persuading the elder Trump to help jumpstart Vance’s political career by endorsing him in a tightly contested Republican senatorial primary in Ohio in 2022. And the pair of buddies came through again for him two years later, when Trump tapped Vance to be his running mate in 2024.
The vice president has made it clear that he will always stick with his friends no matter what. As a general principle, that’s an admirable sentiment. But in this case, it involves him being willing to tolerate and tacitly encourage Carlson’s descent down a rabbit hole of antisemitism and obsessive hate for Israel, not to mention a bizarre affinity for the Islamist regime in Qatar—its Iranian ally—and Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia.
In 2022, Vance was still widely considered a tribune of modern conservatism due to his use of his influential perch as the host of a prime-time show on Fox News, where he led the opposition to wokeism, the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, and the authoritarian and ultimately futile COVID-19 pandemic policies of the Biden administration.
By 2023, however, his penchant for promoting conspiracy theories and an increasingly hostile relationship with the Murdoch family that owns the network, along with racist text messages that were made public due to the lawsuit against the channel about claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, led to Carlson’s firing.
Since then—and with the help of Malik and Trump Jr.—Carlson’s podcast has become one of the most watched and listened to political programs on the Internet, claiming nearly 4 million subscribers and tens of millions of views every week. But rather than merely continuing to express the same views he aired on Fox, which could be described as, for the most part, those of a mainstream conservative, he blazed a new trail on his own network. I had noted as early as July 2019 and then again in March 2021 that Carlson was a threat to the U.S.-Israel alliance and American Jews.
Those warnings were vindicated by what happened once the guardrails imposed on him by his bosses at Fox were removed. Since it was launched in December 2023, his podcast has become a regular source of openly antisemitic material. He has hosted and granted friendly interviews to Holocaust denier Daryl Cooper and neo-Nazi groyper Nick Fuentes. Every possible variety of Israel-basher, ranging from those on the far right to those on the left, has also been granted access to his popular platform. Along with them, a wide variety of preposterous anti-Jewish conspiracy theories—claiming that Jews invented pornography to subvert American society to bogus assertions about Jeffrey Epstein being a Mossad agent and the Chabad religious movement being responsible for the war on Iran—have been aired and endorsed on his program.
What’s more, the popularity of his show—at least in terms of Internet clicks, whether they are the work of real people or bots—has encouraged others on the right to join Carlson in venting animus at Israel and Jews, such as podcaster Megyn Kelly, not to mention even more extreme figures like Fuentes and conspiracy theorist Candace Owens.
Left-wing Jew-hatred has gained increasing influence over the Democratic Party and now threatens to dominate it as the DSA movement of Marxists and Islamists win primary after primary. But while the groyper wing of the GOP has flopped in the 2026 primaries, there is no denying that Carlson has become one of the most dangerous antisemites in American history.
That makes his close connection to Vance a significant concern.
What drives the ‘woke right’
Operating by the conventional rules of presidential politics, a potential 2028 contender like Vance would have ditched Carlson long ago, notwithstanding the favors he owes him. But that hasn’t happened.
More than that, when offered a perfect opportunity to establish a firewall between himself and Carlson last December at the Turning Point USA AmericaFest, Vance didn’t just pass on it. In his speech at the event, he did more than declare his neutrality in the argument between Ben Shapiro and Carlson about the latter’s antisemitism, both of whom also addressed the same forum. He said his vision of the Republican Party obliged him not to turn his back on Carlson and those who subscribed to his hateful stands, whether or not he agreed with them.
Vance had sung a very different tune during both his 2022 Senate run and the 2024 race, when he did well as Trump’s running mate (especially when compared to Democratic vice-presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz). In an address to the anti-Israel Quincy Institute, he made a case for the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship as the ideal “America First” alliance because of the threat from Iran and other Islamists, as well as the fact that, unlike the Europeans, Israel is always prepared to fight for itself and alongside the United States. Since then, whether due to the influence of Carlson or not, he seems to have extended his neo-isolationist philosophy to ties with Israel.
Contrary to the brickbats thrown at him by his detractors, the vice president is neither shallow nor uninformed. He’s a genuine intellectual who, unlike many in the party establishment, moved from a stand in favor of pure free-market conservatism and hostility to Trump to one that rightly espoused a more common-good philosophy. Like Trump, he came to understand the way the Bush-era GOP had failed America’s working class. His critique of the European Union and its anti-democratic tendencies delivered in a speech in Munich in February 2025 may have scared globalist elites, but they were very much on target and in keeping with American values.
Yet his tolerance for the groypers—indeed, his seeming belief that they are an essential part of the Republican coalition if it is to preserve the gains it made under Trump once he leaves the stage in 2028—isn’t just wrongheaded. It is a reflection of a desire among some on the right to treat the post-Oct. 7, 2023 surge of antisemitism as something to be tolerated and even exploited, rather than to be condemned.
The so-called “woke right” that is merely a variation on the same theme of Jew-hatred that has become the new orthodoxy on the left. But it has far fewer adherents than those turning out to decide Democratic primary candidates like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, and many other DSA members and “progressives.” But if someone like Vance, who is unwilling to draw a line in the sand between them and the party of Lincoln and Reagan, becomes its leader, that distinction will no longer be of any importance.
Unless and until Vance reverses his stand on Carlson and a big GOP tent that includes the groypers, his 2028 presidential ambitions must be regarded as a genuine threat not just to American Jews and the alliance with Israel, but to the values of Western civilization that are the foundation of American democracy.
The 2028 GOP lineup
There are some obvious alternatives to Vance for Republicans.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the runner-up to Trump in 2016, has made no secret of the fact that he still wants to be president. He’s also eager to make it clear that no consensus has been reached about the inevitability of Vance, despite the fact that the vice president has a big lead in far-too-early polls measuring the popularity of the 2028 GOP contenders. Moreover, Cruz has taken up the cause of fighting the growth of antisemitism with the sort of dedication and fervor few leading politicians have shown in recent years. But lingering doubts about his personal appeal and hold on the affection of Trump loyalists mark him as a longshot to win the nomination.
The most logical and potentially successful option for those who want to stop Vance is U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The competence and eloquence the former Florida senator has demonstrated as Trump’s second-term foreign-policy chief show how he has grown as a leader since his first disastrous run for president in 2016. And, like Cruz, his geopolitical views and consistent opposition to any hint of Jew-hatred make him especially appealing when compared to Vance’s affinity for Carlson and the groypers.
We don’t know whether he considers his pledge not to challenge Vance for president to be binding. If he doesn’t run—and if Trump doesn’t intervene in the contest to determine his successor—then, for the moment, the odds are that the vice president will win the nomination.
That ought to scare more than the people who attend the RJC event in Las Vegas. The prospect of a 2028 presidential race pitting an ally of the “woke right” against a representative of the antisemitic wing of the Democratic Party and the DSA like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) or some other Israel-hating progressive is a daunting one for everyone who understands the stakes for all Americans of such a dismal choice.
Pro-Israel Democrats may have already lost the battle for their party’s soul. Republicans who want to avoid that dilemma should be getting to work now to coalesce behind an alternative to Vance, not to mention doing everything possible to persuade Rubio to save his party and the country, and join the race. If they don’t, they’ll find themselves not just politically homeless in two years, but facing the likelihood of the election of someone comfortable with antisemitism being sworn into the presidency in January 2029.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
