Maga fractures over far-right interview

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0:34We're going to start today talking about two people. Nick Fuentes, thank you for doing this. Yeah, thank you for having me. I wanted to meet you. I've heard about you. That's Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who now has his own podcast. He was interviewing Nick Fuentes a few weeks ago, a white nationalist and Holocaust denier. And in Trump's inaugural, he says famously, a new vision will govern our land. It's going to be only America first. America first. And I said, that's me. Like, that's what I believe. I'm an American nationalist. Me too. And this interview set off a powder keg in conservative circles.

1:09The fragmentation of the political right. That fragmentation is being caused purposefully by a splinter faction of people led by a young man named Nick Fuentes.

1:23This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the Financial Times, where we talk about all the things happening in U.S. politics, finance, and the economy. I'm Mark Filippino. Hope you like the new artwork, by the way. And this week, we're asking, how are conservatives reckoning with an increasingly powerful wing of their party? Here with me to dive in is Joe Miller. He's the FT's Washington correspondent. Hi, Joe. Hi, Mark. And we've also got Edward Luce, the FT's U.S. national editor and author of the Swamp Notes newsletter. Hi, Ed.

1:49Edward Luce: Hello, Mark. So, Ed, I think we need to have some context here. Who is Nick Fuentes and why has he become this divisive figure on the right? Well, who is Nick Fuentes? He's a 27-year-old college dropout from Chicago, got radicalized very early or even before he went to college, in fact, but then steadily went further to the right, sort of acquired notoriety and shock value by saying really objectionable things on campus, then decided campus, you know, he didn't need it to sustain this burgeoning show that he had on, I think, YouTube. So he's one of these classic sort of young, new right figures to have thrived in this new era of social media, political entrepreneurship, but with a difference in Fuente's case in that he's pushed further to the right, to a sort of Holocaust denying spectrum of the right.

2:44Edward Luce: It's hard to get further right than essentially being a sort of neo-Nazi, which is what he is. So he's become this force that, you know, most right-wing parties in most democracies feel able to ignore because they're tiny splinter fanatics. But the Groypers, as followers of Nick Fuentes are called, are no longer splinter. And there's been estimates recently he's circulated in various places that 30 to 40 percent of Republican staffers under the age of 30 on Capitol Hill are Gripers. If that's anywhere close to being accurate, and anecdotally, I think it is, then we're talking about a really an unprecedented turn in America's what we used to call center-right party that even Trump's lost control of.

3:35Just to add a little bit more about Nick Fuentes' resume. He was at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in 2017. He's called for the repeal of the 19th Amendment, which gives women the right to vote. So much, much farther right than a lot of what we've seen from even Trump's camp. Ed, when did he start getting treated seriously by the right? Because as you've noted, his popularity has skyrocketed.

3:59Edward Luce: I think the moment really to measure is Charlie Kirk's assassination in September, partly because the assassination of Charlie Kirk radicalized MAGA, particularly sort of online Netroots MAGA more than anything else has this year, and partly because it created a vacancy. And it seems like, I mean, here's the ultimate proof. If you're invited onto Tucker Carlson, somebody who butted heads with Fuentes in the past, that's your ticket of respectability. That That means that this is no longer unhygienic, that this is now recognized for the Fuentes, the Groypers, as a legitimate force in the MAGA movement.

4:43And that's why we're talking about it, because it has 23 million views on YouTube. Last time I checked, Joe, tell me about what happened after the interview, what happened after Tucker Carlson spoke with Fuentes just a couple of weeks ago. So we really have to explain what happened in the interview itself to understand what what came after. Tucker Carlson, as Ed mentions there, you know, in his new guise has a very popular interview show podcast that's also streamed on YouTube. And it's very long, the format. He sits down with people for often a couple of hours at a time, and he can be quite adversarial.

5:19You only have to look at an interview he did with Ted Cruz a few weeks ago, where he really skewered him on his foreign policy. With Nick Fuentes, it was really quite friendly, a quite softball, as we would say, in the industry. And he allowed Fuentes, who has previously, on multiple occasions, said he admires Hitler and has deeply anti-Semitic views and never really pushed Fuentes on his blatant anti-Semitism. And this is what set off what you referred to as the, you know, the powder keg in conservatism. Yeah. Why don't we pick that up? Because really, this started to unwind when the Heritage Foundation weighed in on it.

5:58Yes. So the Heritage Foundation was coming under some pressure because after this interview aired, many of those on the right called on the Heritage Foundation, which has previously sponsored Tucker Carlson's podcast, to cut ties with him and to condemn him. And instead of doing that, Kevin Roberts, who is the head of the Heritage Foundation, put out a short video statement in which he not only backed Carlson, but accused those who were asking him to cut ties with Carlson as, quote, a venomous coalition. We will always defend truth. We will always defend America. And we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else's agenda.

6:43That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. Which many found a particularly uncomfortable term, given that the discussion was around anti-Semitism. And this led to an enormous backlash within the Heritage Foundation itself. And actually, it led to a very prominent person within Heritage to depart, right? So yes, what we started to see was a string of departures from the Heritage Foundation. First, it was some of the anti-Semitism campaigners who affiliated with the foundation. Then Stephen Moore, who's a very famous right-wing economist, one of the authors of the Project 2025 playbook that underpinned much of Trump's policy platform.

7:27He left. But what there also was, was a big town hall where Kevin Roberts really faced the wrath of his own staff. Several called on him to resign and many said that he was betraying the values of the founders of the foundation and that he was, more broadly speaking, betraying the values of conservatives and the mainstream right. And that only served to sort of exacerbate this divide within the so-called MAGA right, which was a nebulous term to begin with and a very fragile coalition. And we should point out that Donald Trump actually dined with Nick Fuentes in 2022 and has since distanced himself from Fuentes, right?

8:06He said he wasn't aware of Fuentes' views, Trump said at the time. And J.D. Vance has said things like, you know, he denounces Fuentes, but it must be said that neither of them spend too much time denouncing Fuentes. Ed, you linked this moment with Nick Fuentes in a piece you recently wrote to something larger in the conservative movement. I think we've been nudging around that for the past couple of minutes. And one of the examples you cite is the interaction between Vice President J.D. Vance and a college student last month. The student asked him about sending military aid to Israel, and I think we got a clip of that.

8:40Considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution of ours. Yeah, so let me say a few things about this. First of all, when the President of the United States says America first, that means that he pursues the interests of Americans first. Tell me why this stood out to you and how it links back to Fuentes. Well, this question was not only premised on a sort of foundational antisemitism,

9:16Edward Luce: namely the persecution that he said prosecute, but I think he meant the persecution of Christians by Jews. But when he asked it, it got a round of applause, which very much sort of corroborates the sort of idea that young Republicans are drifting in that direction. And then Vance ducked the opportunity to correct the anti-Semitic premise of the question and just went on to answer it, you know, in a fairly banal way. So this was a moment that I picked on. There have been many such moments that show that the Overton window, if you like, what academics call the window of what's possible and acceptable, has shifted dramatically to the right.

9:59Edward Luce: And there's no real bellwether who's really better than J.D. Vance, because he wishes and would be, I think, considered the favorite to be Donald Trump's heir and successor, which could have really, really serious consequences down the line. I do want to get to those consequences. But first, I think it's really important to unpack why so many people are drawn, especially young white men in America, are drawn to Fuentes' message. Do we have a sense of why he's gained so much popularity? Joe, Ed, either one of you can take that one. One of the things I did was watch quite a bit of Nick Fuentes, mostly because I wanted to make sure that when we were calling him a Holocaust denier and an anti-Semite, we were being accurate.

10:44No, we definitely are. We definitely are. And I think the one thing, you know, if you've never watched him and just read about him that you might miss is that he is incredibly charismatic and magnetic. And it's actually quite addictive listening to him or watching him. He's a sort of force of personality. But I also think that what he does is he fills a vacuum, which has not really been filled for a long time, especially among young people. which is to say, you know, there isn't really anyone out there explaining why, for example, the right and many parts of the mainstream left are reflexively pro-Israel.

11:23And Nick Fuentes and people like that can insert themselves into that void incredibly easily and sort of offer these easy solutions. Oh, you know, there's some grand conspiracy going on. That's why your lawmakers are backing this, etc., etc. But I do think that this stuff is, you know, no one is really talking to young people about what these policies were originally based on or what the rationale is for them. But the point is it leaves this enormous void for people like Fuentes to step in. Yeah, and this larger conversation about anti-Semitism, we're talking about it from the vantage point of the right.

11:57There's been a lot of allegations of anti-Semitism directed to people on the left, too. I want to talk about that. There's college students protesting the Israel-Hamas war. New York City mayor-elect Zoran Mamdani's stance on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ed, is this only an issue on the right? Is it fair to equate these two things?

12:16Edward Luce: Well, so what I was arguing in that column you kindly cited was, no, it's not equatable. It's not unfair to point out some anti-Semitism on the left. But to say that anti-Zionism or criticisms of Israel is anti-Semitic is, I think, another sort of defining deviancy downwards thing and a sort of boomerang effect here. So AIPAC, the most powerful pro-Israeli group in Washington, but also the Anti-Defamation League and other groups have been pretty aggressive at branding Netanyahu's critics, not as being wrong or just honorable but incorrect, but as being anti-Semitic. And so that charges also, that gravest of historic charges has also been defined downwards.

13:03Edward Luce: None of which is to say there aren't people on the left on some of the campuses who would like Israel to disappear. And with the implied sort of genocide that would entail. But I don't think they're a serious force in American politics. They're certainly not 30 to 40 percent of Capitol Hill staffers. I just don't think you can equate even some of Mamdani's criticisms with anything Fuentes has said. That's the language you hear on the right. And I do believe you cannot equate them. I think it's really important to talk about the factions of the Republican Party that have existed and exist now. Because if you go back 10 years, around the time that Donald Trump announced that he was for president.

13:46When you heard the word Republican, you mostly thought Reagan Republicans. Then Trump gets elected and you have this lurch to the right. You have your Ben Shapiros, who we heard from at the top of the show from the Daily Wire, the type of people who are disavowing Nick Fuentes and the type of people like Nick Fuentes. And now you have an even farther lurch to the right with Nick Fuentes. And I'm wondering, whatever happened to these Reagan Republicans, does it even matter? Do they play a part in the Republican Party anymore?

14:18Edward Luce: So I think an easier way of looking at what's happening is that the Republican Party is the MAGA movement. You know, I mean, there might be there are some refugees from the past up there on the Hill, but they're doing their best to pretend they're part of the movement. Right. So if there is a traditional prelapsarian conservative Republican still left, we will find out at some point. but I don't think there are too many of them. And I don't think if there were, they could plausibly claim to hold that torch, having submitted so meekly to the MAGA era. So I'd prefer to think of it as MAGA potentially fragmenting in a post-Trump succession battle.

14:59Do we think that the Republican Party is going to make a real appeal to the Nick Fuentes types in order to win the midterms or 2028?

15:09Edward Luce: So the term, no enemies to the right, What that meant was we will cancel anybody to our right. What we're having here is the exact opposite, although the term no enemies to the right has sort of morphed, which is we just keep moving right to catch up with them. We will not be outflanked. Now, that's going to be a little bit difficult if you get too many more weeks. The last week with the off-year election defeats that Republicans suffered across, certainly across the Northeast. And if you get that repeated in the midterms, radicalization, and I think, you know, the effects of gerrymandering, where really the fights are not between Democrats and Republicans, but between one extreme of the party and the other, that's going to have to be something that maybe true conservatives, to the extent that are any left, are going to have to revisit their view on gerrymandering, because this is bending American democracy out of shape, possibly to snapping point.

16:01In the sense that a Republican in name could win, but it's not the type that traditional conservatives would endorse. And it's more like the Nick Fuentes ultra far right.

16:10Edward Luce: You could get a de facto Nazi. Yeah. All right, guys, I think that's where we're going to wrap up. I want to thank our guest, Joe Miller, as the FT's Washington correspondent. Thanks, Joe. Thank you, Mark. And Edward Luce, he's our U.S. national editor and co-author of the Swamp Notes newsletter. Thanks, Ed. Thank you, Mark. All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to do exit poll. This week, we're tracking down some numbers.

16:59International inertia is an incredibly powerful force. And Varun Chikara at ADP. What we should be teaching the next generation is a swarm of discipline judgment. You can listen to the full episode of The Next Five wherever you get your podcasts.

17:16We are back with Exit Poll where we ask an FT journalist one of your questions. This week we have Claire Jones, the FT's U.S. economics editor. Hi, Claire.

17:25Edward Luce: Hi, Mork. We were chatting about this question last night over Gchat, which I really enjoyed. It's from Rose in the U.S. state of Missouri. Rose wrote in to say, U.S. President Donald Trump keeps touting the revenue that tariffs are bringing in. Where is this revenue going? So it is going into the coffers of the U.S. Treasury. The U.S. Treasury publishes a monthly statement. We can see from the latest edition of that monthly statement, which is from September due to the shutdown, that$195 billion has been collected so far in the form of customs duties, the vast majority of which is going to be from tariffs.

18:10Edward Luce: If you compare that with the final year of the Biden administration, this time last year, customs duties had raised about$77 billion. So we've seen$120 billion extra come in in customs duties this year compared with the previous year. I mean, that's a massive amount. I just want to pause and emphasize that. That's huge. Where's the money going? That's the second part of Rose's question. So at the moment, it's sitting there and it's having a slight impact on the US deficit. Now, I'd say slight because the US deficit is very large indeed. But if we look at what it was again in the final year of the Biden administration in 2024, it was$1.83 trillion at this point last year.

19:03Edward Luce: This year it is$1.76 trillion, so still massive but a little bit less than it was this time last year. However, all of this could change at the moment, as I'm sure a lot of readers are aware. The Supreme Court is considering whether or not Trump's tariffs are legal. so Trump himself has also offered to pay a$2 ,000 dividend to some American households not high income households he has said which he'd generate from the tariff revenue we do not know yet whether or not this will happen but if it did it would change the fiscal dynamics quite a lot yeah I bet thanks for that answer Claire no problem thanks Morg and Rose I hope that answers your question If you, listening right now, have a question like Rose did about U.S.

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20:16This was Swamp Notes, the U.S. politics show from the FT. If you want to sign up for the Swamp Notes newsletter, we've got a link to that in the show notes. You know what else is in the show notes? Those graphs that Claire was talking about from the Treasury Department, if you're a big econ geek like we are over here, you're really going to enjoy them. Check them out. Our show is produced by Henry Larson. It was mixed by Sam Giovinco. We had help this week from Lauren Fidor. Special thanks to Pierre Nicholson. I'm your host, Mark Filippino. Our acting co-head of audio is Topher Forges. Original music by Hannes Brown.

20:44Check back next week for more U.S. political analysis from the Financial Times.

20:54Thank you.

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