At
the September 3 White House briefing, Kerry Picket of the Washington Times
asked JD Vance about his friendship with Tucker Carlson, who has called for the
president’s impeachment and uses his platform to spread vile smears against the
Jewish people and hateful rhetoric about Israel. Instead of disavowing that
friendship—which the Jews and most of the GOP keep hoping he’ll do—he doubled
down. Friendships (apparently even with despicable antisemites), the VP says,
shouldn’t bend to politics.
“I’m
not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus because I have
political disagreements with them.”
Because
loyalty, Vance says, is what holds the republic together.
It
sounds good: loyalty and friendships binding the nation together. But let’s run
a thought experiment with the briefing transcript. Let’s qualify the kind of
company this man Vance keeps and swap the name “Adolf Hitler” for “Tucker
Carlson.”
Would
JD’s loyalty to a friend with that name help America, or hurt it?
And
if JD Vance becomes president, will his friendship with an antisemite make
things better for Americans—or worse?
What
do you think?
***
Kerry Picket: Vice President, Adolf Hitler has called for the president's impeachment, and many accuse him of trying to jeopardize U.S.-Israel relations. What do you say to those who are uneasy with your close relationship with Hitler and claim that you're avoiding addressing a lot of these issues, which may be causing divisions within the GOP?
JD Vance: Well, look, I'm not avoiding addressing anything. Everybody knows that Adolf Hitler and I are friends. And I think it's very obvious that Hitler has said some things that I disagree with. He said some things about the president of the United States that I think are just wrong . . .
. . . And I remember when I became the vice presidential nominee, one of the hardest things for me personally is not when people attacked me, but when people attacked my wife, including friends of hers who knew her heart, who knew what a good person she was. And I remember thinking to myself, what a travesty it is that in the United States of America, we let political disagreements define who our friends are going to be and not going to be. So yeah, Hitler is a friend of mine.
Hitler is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things. And I'm not going to play the game where I throw Nazi friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with them. I think that is a terrible place for the United States to go. And if you have a disagreement with a Nazi friend politically, even over a deeply held issue, you should still be friends with that Nazi person, because the whole republic depends on people of different perspectives being able to talk to one another.
That's how I try to live my life, and I encourage everybody else to do the same. All right. Let's -- let's go -- let's go to, um --
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Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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