A far-right ideologue picked by Donald Trump for a senior diplomatic role has been forced to drop out because of incendiary past comments, including claims that white people are the victims of widespread racism.
Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank the Claremont Institute, was nominated by the president to serve as assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs.
The role would oversee U.S. policy towards bodies such as the United Nations. He previously served as deputy assistant secretary of the interior during Trump’s first term.
But the presidential pick became unstuck after Republican Sen. John Curtis of Utah declared in December he planned to vote against Carl’s nomination.
At the time, Curtis said he believed Carl was not “the right person” to represent America’s best interests at international forums after controversial statements on topics including race.
Carl has championed the “Great Replacement” theory, which posits that Jews and other “elites” are plotting to replace white Americans with immigrants. He has also spoken about a “cultural genocide” against white people in the U.S.
At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee in December, Carl said he would not rein in his social media posts and comments while he waited for congressional confirmation.
“I find his anti-Israel views and insensitive remarks about the Jewish people unbecoming of the position for which he has been nominated,” Curtis said.
Carl announced his withdrawal on social media on Tuesday, thanking Trump and also Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He said their nomination of him proved “this is an administration that was not satisfied to simply do business as usual nor to simply pick nominees from the same stable of ‘business as usual’ possibilities.“
He admitted that for “senior positions” the support of Trump and Rubio was “very important but not sufficient.” Carl noted that “given the unanimous opposition” of Senate Democrats to his candidacy, he needed every GOP senator on the Committee of Foreign Relations to vote for him.
“Unfortunately, at this time this unanimous support was not forthcoming,” he posted. Carl added he accepted his “political reality” and noted he did not want Trump and Rubio to “waste valuable time and energy attempting to change that decision.”
His lack of support from the GOP is a rare failure for Trump in a Republican-controlled Senate.
Carl also claimed in a separate post that he had multiple senators “and not just ‘based’ ones” reach out to him to let him know how disappointed they were with his withdrawal.
The MAGA community uses ‘based’ as a term of approval for someone who stays true to their conservative or controversial beliefs, even when that bangs up against ‘woke’ culture.
Carl said, “Our voters need to pay attention in primaries and if you have a good Senator, make sure that Senator is holding his weaker colleagues’ feet to the fire.”
He went on: “Politics can be a messy, brutal business, but I went in with my eyes open, so I have no regrets.”
In his 2024 book The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, Carl claimed that white people have faced persistent discrimination and said that their identity has been “erased” from American history.
In September last year, CNN reported Carl had deleted at least 5,000 posts from his X account at some point before he received his nomination.
They included inflammatory posts claiming there was no such thing as a “peaceful coexistence” with Democrats, calling it the “treason party” and saying its members were “evil.”
Responding to a 2023 post about the COVID-19 pandemic from Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Carl wrote, “If the U.S. were a serious nation, Weingarten would be tried for crimes against America’s children and would get the death penalty.”
“Dems R the real fascists,” he wrote in another post, while he also called the Jan. 6 rioters “political prisoners” and called the late George Floyd a “violent felon” and a “thug” who was “looking up from hell.”
Carl’s primary focus at the Claremont Institute is immigration, multiculturalism, and nationalism in America.
The Daily Beast has contacted Carl and the White House for comment.
