For much of President Trump’s second term, the political heirs of his “America First” agenda have tried to form an intellectual framework for their movement that embraces nationalism while keeping overt bigotry out of the coalition.
With the rise of Nick Fuentes, a 27-year-old white nationalist, and his young, racist and antisemitic “Groyper” movement, some fear the exercise has failed.
The struggle and its stakes for the nation burst into view after the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson last week offered a friendly interview to Mr. Fuentes, an avowedly racist antisemite. The interview triggered rounds of acrimony and recriminations on the American right.
Mainstream Republicans have described Mr. Fuentes’s ascendence as a sudden surprise. But others — including some on the right — see it as a natural evolution within the movement that has come to be known as “national conservatism,” whose adherents embrace an American identity based not on the ideals of the nation’s founders but on the centrality of Christianity and familial ties to the land.
National conservatism adheres to a belief that American society lost its moorings when it drifted from a core power structure centered on the Christian white men who founded the nation and instead embraced diversity, multiculturalism and feminism. The movement’s statement of principles eschews the racist ideology espoused by Mr. Fuentes. It also rejects “globalism” and believes immigration has weakened the country.
“The distance between Fuentes and the mainstream Republican Party isn’t really that large,” said Richard Hanania, a conservative writer who once posted under a pseudonym in white supremacist forums. (He has since denounced his past writings.)
The interview on “The Tucker Carlson Show,” in which Mr. Fuentes called for an exclusive, “pro-white,” Christian movement and said that “organized Jewry” undermines American cohesion, was denounced by prominent Republicans including Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, the House speaker.
But while prominent voices in the national conservatism orbit, such as Vice President JD Vance, have never embraced Mr. Fuentes, some of the ideas they have espoused have similarities to Mr. Fuentes’s ruminations on splintering societal cohesion.
Mr. Vance has fretted about what he has called “social solidarity.” In an interview in May with the New York Times Opinion columnist Ross Douthat, he said, “I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation, and I don’t think that can happen if you have too much immigration too quickly.”
This summer, he gave a speech at the Trump-aligned Claremont Institute, in which he worried that if being an American means simply adhering to an ideal, “let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence,” American identity “would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreign citizens.”
“At the same time,” the vice president continued, defining citizenship purely as adhering to the principles of the nation’s founding documents would exclude many on the right who don’t subscribe to those principles and whose “own ancestors were here at the time of the Revolutionary War.”
A few months later, Senator Eric Schmitt, Republican of Missouri, was more explicit in a speech before the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, where he lamented that a “few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence” led to unfettered immigration and multiculturalism.
“We Americans,” he said, “are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.”
Mr. Fuentes and his explicit bigotry have been causing the Republican Party heartburn for years, including when Mr. Trump dined with him and the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, at Mar-a-Lago in 2022. Now, as Mr. Cruz put it, the G.O.P. faces a time of choosing.
“This is a poison, and I believe we are facing an existential crisis in our party and in our country,” Mr. Cruz said at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual summit last week.
Matt Brooks, the Republican Jewish Coalition’s chief executive, said Mr. Carlson gave “a fawning interview” that failed to hold Mr. Fuentes accountable for his “virulently antisemitic and racist comments” and his “adulation of Adolf Hitler and denial of the Holocaust.”
Mr. Trump has said nothing publicly about Mr. Fuentes’s interview, nor has Mr. Vance, who is personally close to Mr. Carlson.
The president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, stoked the controversy when he posted a formal video to proclaim, “We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.”
“That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains and, as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation,” he continued. (He followed up with a statement listing a number of disagreements he has with Mr. Fuentes, and then an apology on Wednesday for his initial statement at a forum with Heritage employees that revealed still more divisions. Mr. Roberts’s chief of staff resigned over the flap).
The New York Times reached out to Mr. Carlson for comment but did not receive a response. Mr. Fuentes initially agreed to be interviewed, but he never followed up.
The controversy came just weeks after the leaking of a racist and homophobic group chat among young Republican officials. Mr. Vance dismissed the ensuing outrage as “pearl clutching,” even though the White House would soon pull a nomination from Senate consideration because of similarly incendiary texts. The nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, Paul Ingrassia, had used a racist slur and declared that ethnically Chinese and Indian people could not be trusted.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk also left a power vacuum on the right that has set off a scramble among its more extreme elements. Though Mr. Kirk had made his share of insensitive remarks, he tried to hold the followers of Mr. Fuentes at bay in his own youth organization, Turning Point USA. Mr. Fuentes often antagonized Mr. Kirk, calling him an “idiot” and worse.
With Mr. Kirk gone, intolerance similar to Mr. Fuentes’s has already emerged at Turning Point. At one of the group’s conferences last week at the University of Mississippi, a young man confronted Mr. Vance, questioning his support for Israel and for Jews who “openly support the prosecution” of Christians.
Sam Tanenhaus, a biographer of William F. Buckley Jr., who was the editor of the conservative magazine National Review, called this moment a struggle over legitimacy, identity and cultural power.
Mr. Fuentes often picks fights with the Republican establishment. His interview with Mr. Carlson was actually tame by the standards of his own streaming show. His views on Mr. Vance and his marriage to Usha Vance, a Hindu Indian American, have been incendiary, replete with references to “race mixing,” mockery of their son’s Indian name and even the vice president’s weight.
While he told Mr. Carlson it was important that he reassure Americans that he wants to achieve his pro-white aims through peaceful means, his violent rhetoric and rants about “perfidious Jews” belie that goal.
Of late, however, he has shifted from intolerant provocation to threatening triumphalism.
Mr. Fuentes last week said on his podcast that if Mr. Vance seeks the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, he will put him in what he called the “Groyper squeeze.”
“If Vance condemns the Groypers, we are deploying to Iowa,” Mr. Fuentes said. “I swear I’m going to move to Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada and South Carolina and one primary after the next.”
He told Mr. Carlson, “Now that everyone agrees with me, I will graciously forgive them for being so hostile.”
Many of the ideas that were once considered fringe, such as viewing immigration as a major threat to American society and opposing foreign interventionism, have become mainstream within the Republican Party, said Mr. Hanania, the conservative writer.
According to Mr. Hanania, both Mr. Fuentes and Mr. Carlson are direct intellectual descendants of conservatives such as Patrick J. Buchanan, who saw a corrupt “managerial elite” undermining the interests of the white working and middle classes. Some old-line conservatives argue that view is distinct from any racist or antisemitic opinions people like Mr. Buchanan may have held, but “it’s all wrapped together,” argued Mr. Hanania.
Summarizing their argument, he said: “These elites are bad. They’re disproportionately Jewish. In many cases, they’re the ones pushing ‘anti-white’ policies like affirmative action and D.E.I. and immigration.”
Ironically, the same issue that split much of the far left from the Democratic Party is driving the wedge between the far right and the Republican Party — the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the subsequent destruction of Gaza.
“I’ve been pretty amazed by the depth of the slander of Jews as a people,” said Yoram Hazony, an Israeli-American organizer of the annual national conservatism conference in the United States.
The politician most squeezed at the moment may well be Mr. Vance, said James Patterson, a public affairs professor at the University of Tennessee. Mr. Trump remains a singular and somewhat inaccessible figure. Mr. Vance, however, is viewed as the intellectual heir to the MAGA movement, someone who is actively participating in and shaping the politics of the coalition.
As Republicans jostle for Mr. Trump’s mantle, they may be tempted to court the Groyper fringe to bolster a right-wing coalition that includes the furthest reaches of nationalist populism. Or they could pivot back to a much less ideological middle.
Laura K. Field, author of the forthcoming book “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right,” said already many in the Trump movement have strayed too far from the American mainstream.
“I don’t think the American public, even the voting public in the Republican Party, tends to be nearly as radicalized as some of the people I write about,” she said. “I think the norms against that stuff are still pretty strong.”
Clyde McGrady reports for The Times on how race and identity is shaping American culture. He is based in Washington.
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