Donald Trump has made it clear he is “not gonna condemn Nazis” and he’s “not going to condemn those who platform them,” Jake Tapper said Monday night on “The Lead,” hours after Heritage Foundation board member Robert P. George resigned following the organization’s president Kevin Roberts’ defense of Tucker Carlson.
Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and his ilk have become a “festering issue that has caused something of a civil war within the Republican Party,” Tapper told viewers. At the center of the debate is whether it’s appropriate for “prominent conservative media figures such as Tucker Carlson to platform Fuentes without seriously challenging his false and heinous views.”
George, the McCormick professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, left the Heritage Foundation following Roberts’ October video in which he defended Carlson for choosing to interview Fuentes.
Roberts later apologized for his defense of Carlson. “I made a mistake and I let you down and I let down this institution. Period. Full Stop,” Roberts said in a video first obtained by The Washington Beacon.
He added: “You can say you’re not going to participate in canceling someone … while also being clear you’re not endorsing everything they’ve said, you’re not endorsing softball interviews, you’re not endorsing putting people on shows, and I should’ve made that clear.”
The topic has been one of great debate within the GOP, and Trump weighed in on the issue Sunday night.
While traveling to the White House from Mar-a-Lago, Trump told reporters, “We’ve had some great interviews with Tucker Carlson, but you can’t tell him who to interview. I mean if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes — I don’t know much about him — but if he wants to do it get the word out, let him. You know, people have to decide, ultimately people have to decide.”
The comment prompted Fuentes to write, “Thank you, Mr. President,” on X.
“So there we have it,” Tapper said, “President Trump expressing no issues with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, who has expressed an affinity for Adolf Hitler and regularly traffics in racist and sexist antisemitic filth.”
Some conservative leaders, including Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell, have spoken out against Carlson, Tapper noted.
“My colleagues, almost to a person, think what is happening is horrible, but a great many of them are frightened because he has one hell of a big megaphone,” Cruz said on Nov. 5 while speaking at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention in Washington, D.C. Fuentes was interviewed by Carlson at the end of October.
“If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool, and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing, then you are [a] coward, and you are complicit in that evil,” Cruz also said.
There are others in the Trump administration who should be concerned about the threat posed by Fuentes, but seemingly are not, Tapper continued. “Vice President JD Vance is considered the next leader in the MAGA line of succession,” he explained. “He’s no stranger to questions about Republicans espousing antisemitism in the last few months. Following the Young Republicans texting scandal, which was first reported by Politico, which included one message where one of the young Republicans said, quote, ‘I love Hitler,’ Vice President Vance characterized those expressing outrage as quote ‘pearl clutching.’”
Vance further referred to the group as “kids” despite the fact that “the ages of the people in the group range from 18 to 40,” Tapper continued.
Fuentes, who Tapper described as “a Nazi of a more loathsome order than those on that text chain,” has a long history of “going after not just Jews, but Vice President Vance … he said a number of nasty things about his wife. Vance himself called Fuentes a total loser in a 2024 CBS interview before the election, after Fuentes attacked his wife Usha Vance and her Indian heritage.”
Tapper noted he has “repeatedly asked Vance’s office for any comment about this internal war about Fuentes” and “specifically about Tucker Carlson platforming Fuentes,” but the vice president did not respond.
“This weekend, Vance did weigh in on something related to this issue,” Tapper added. “It had to do with another member of the Carlson family, Tucker’s son Buckley, who works for Vance. Vice President Vance attacked just some rando on Twitter as a quote ‘scumbag’ because this woman claimed that Tucker’s brother idolized Nick Fuentes, and questioned whether Tucker’s son Buckley who works for Vance is a bigot, too.”
“We here at CNN have absolutely no idea if Tucker’s relatives feel any way about Fuentes, but it is clear from recent Twitter posts that his brother also named Buckley supports Tucker’s platforming of Fuentes,” Tapper pointed out.
Though Vance condemned Fuentes in 2024, “since the inauguration, Vice President Vance has weighed in on these issues only to defend people using antisemitic or racist language,” Tapper pointed out. “He certainly hasn’t called any of them scumbags.”
Trump is “clearly leaning on the idea of free speech to make his point, yet at the same time, Trump, of course, has no problem trying to get comedians who make fun of him fired,” Tapper also said, a reference to the president’s apparent attempts to influence media networks to fire Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers.
“Clearly neither President Trump nor Vice President Vance are shy about attacking or insulting anyone they don’t like,” he said. “They have opted to not do so when it comes to Nazis like Nick Fuentes, at a time when hate crimes against Jewish Americans are only rising in the United States. When it comes to this Civil War they’ve made their views clear: they’re not going to condemn Nazis, [and] they’re not going to condemn those who platform them.”
You can watch “The Lead” video in the clip above.
