Vice President JD Vance put his relationship with Tucker Carlson back in the spotlight this week when he was asked about the right-wing podcaster’s history of promoting antisemites at a meeting of Jewish Republicans and refused to condemn his longtime political ally.

“Vance was asked during the fireside chat about right-wing podcasters who have platformed antisemites, including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson,” The Washington Post reported of his appearance at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s summit on Monday night. “He declined to criticize Carlson specifically, instead training his fire on podcaster Nick Fuentes, who Vance said ‘really does hate Jews.’”

Carlson spent the last decade diving deeper and deeper into the far-right fever swamp, drawing plaudits from white nationalists for bringing their bigoted talking points and conspiracy theories like the “great replacement” to his then-platform at Fox News. (As Andrew Anglin, a neo-Nazi, put it in 2016: “Tucker Carlson is literally our greatest ally. I don’t believe that he doesn’t hate the Jews.”) He also became a GOP kingmaker, helping shape the party’s platform and pick its candidates, and received a plum speaking slot to endorse Donald Trump at the 2024 Republican National Committee.

But Carlson’s star has dimmed somewhat since Trump’s reelection. His rhetoric has become ever more bizarre and bigoted (he said earlier this year that “the defining fact of our lives is that whites around the world are being eliminated” and previously suggested Jewish university donors were behind the “white genocide”). His softball interview with Fuentes last year drew condemnations from fellow right-wingers and drove a media and political firestorm. And he had a falling out with Trump over the Iran war and his sense that the administration has been less fascistic than he expected. Carlson recently called for Trump’s removal from office, while the president posted that the podcaster “is a loser, and always has been!”

Fuentes is, as Vance alluded, a notorious white nationalist whose long trail of noxious commentary includes claiming that “Jews are running society” and “are money changers, bullshit artists, psychopaths, charlatans, grifters, manipulators”; explicitly describing “the Jews” as among “our actual enemies”; saying the Holocaust is “fake”; and proposing the identification and arrest of all members of “American Jewry.” And Vance has been happy to condemn Fuentes in the past, saying during the 2024 presidential campaign, “I think the guy's a total loser. Certainly I disavow him.”

But Fuentes’ star continued to rise after Trump’s reelection in no small part due to the willingness of Carlson to promote him. The former Fox host offered up his platform to Fuentes for an interview that Fuentes himself described as “so friendly” (even as he excoriated the host for being merely “antisemite-light”).

So why did Vance pass — yet again — when the opportunity to condemn Carlson was handed to him on a silver platter? Perhaps because the vice president owes the former Fox host for his political success.

Vance underwent a dramatic transformation as he entered the political arena, using dozens of appearances on Carlson’s show beginning in 2017 to rebrand himself from an elite favorite to a populist culture warrior in the vein of the host himself. Carlson, in turn, lavished Vance with praise, and privately lobbied Trump to endorse Vance’s campaign for the U.S. Senate and, two years later, pick him as his running mate.

It’s unclear, at this point, how close Vance and Carlson remain.

In a May interview with The New York Times, Carlson repeatedly refused to divulge when he last spoke to the vice president, saying, “I don’t want to cause him more problems.”

“I couldn't be a bigger fan of him as a man,” he later added.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters