JD Vance can’t outrun his Tucker Carlson problem

Vice President JD Vance keeps trying to straddle a bright moral line — with predictably disastrous results.

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The veep’s appearance before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas on Monday was highly anticipated because of his increasingly tenuous relationships with both the group’s direct constituency and the pro-Israel, evangelical GOP base.

Vance’s troubles with both these key communities stem from both his seemingly unbreakable bond with Tucker Carlson — the country’s leading antisemitic advocate — and his indulgence of a wide range of injurious conspiracy theories and tropes.

In one particularly notable moment from his December speech before Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference, Vance stuck his neck out for Carlson and rebuked Jewish-American commentator Ben Shapiro for calling him out.

“I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to de-platform,” Vance boasted at the time, repeating Carlson’s mischaracterization of Shapiro’s case for moral clarity.

He doubled down in an eyebrow-raising interview that same week, downplaying the rising tide of antisemitism on the right and submitting that it’s “absurd” to suggest Carlson “has no place in the conservative movement.”

More recently, Vance joined Joe Rogan for a sweeping conversation in which he accused the Israeli government of carrying out a “very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign” to “manipulate American public opinion,” and breathed life into the unfounded idea that Jeffrey Epstein worked for the Mossad.

All this to say: Vance had his work cut out for him on Monday.

It didn’t quite go as he planned.

In a jaw-dropping faux pas, Vance confused blood libels — antisemitic smears, including the medieval lie that Jews used the blood of Christian children in religious rituals — with blood guilt, or “the idea that . . . because of your blood, because of your ancestry, you are guilty of a crime that you never committed.”

The flub not only betrayed a stunning lack of preparation, but revealed Vance’s continued affinity for Carlson, who cites his rejection of blood guilt as proof that he’s innocent of antisemitism — even as he peddles a litany of blood libels.

Vance also rejected antisemitism in theory, but excused its real-life application for profit by Carlson and other click-thirsty grifters.

“I recognize a lot of people in this room might disagree with things that Tucker Carlson or Megyn Kelly or Joe Rogan has said,” he began, before drawing a distinction between Rogan and Nick Fuentes (“who, you know, really does hate Jews”), the Hitler-loving provocateur Carlson hosted in a lovefest last year.

“I think it’s a mistake to sort of say we’re going to write Joe Rogan off because he said something that we don’t like,” Vance declared. “I think the best approach is to actually go in there, and talk to him, and make the arguments as best as you can.”

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That’s all good and well, but when Vance sat down with Rogan, he fed rather than fought the anti-Israel conspiratorial fires.

Moreover, his careful extraction of Carlson from the conversation spoke volumes.

Fuentes is an open bigot, and Rogan is a meathead fond of every tale — no matter how tall — of intrigue he’s ever heard.

Carlson is a hundred times more dangerous than both, because he brings just as much odious hatred to the table as Fuentes but masks it with a gauche, faux-Christian cologne.

A year ago, Vance offered this conniving chameleon a ringing endorsement.

But with his own presidential campaign creeping ever closer, neither dodging the Carlson question, nor implicitly suggesting that he belongs in Rogan’s relatively innocuous camp, will do.

The vice president has obviously calculated that he needs the support of (and shares certain aspects of a worldview with) the vanishingly small Carlson wing of the GOP, and is thus taking pains to mollify it.

To play both sides, though, is both political and moral folly.

Even the little Nazis Vance has disavowed see right through his cynical, ill-advised balancing act.

“JD Vance panders to the far right but simply doesn’t want the baggage of associating with the far right,” Fuentes told The New York Times.

“If he has a problem with ‘antisemites,’ then he should start by disavowing his best friend Tucker Carlson.”

It’s hard to argue.

Vance has deluded himself into believing he can have his foul, soul-sickening cake (courting the dregs of the far right) and eat it, too (retaining the support of traditional conservatives).

His performance on Monday proved that an impossibility.

Come the 2028 election cycle, the vice president will have to pick a side.

He can cease appeasing the fringe, align himself with the righteous right and reap the political rewards.

Or he can choose Carlson, alienate everyone, pay the political price and disgrace himself along the way.

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