The vice president’s words come after several weeks in which GOP arguments over Israel and anti-Semitism have come to the fore
Vice President J.D. Vance addressed the ongoing fights within the Republican Party in an interview on Thursday, giving his lengthiest answer to date on the debates raging on the right about whether to welcome racists and anti-Semites traditionally marginalized by the GOP into the coalition. While Vance encouraged debate, he also urged the GOP to focus on unity against opponents on the left.
“The disagreements that animate the Republican Party, while they matter and they’re important—I think these debates should happen,” Vance said during a “fireside chat” in Washington, D.C., with Breitbart News‘s Matthew Boyle. “They should happen in podcasts and they should happen in the media, they should happen on the op-ed pages, it’s totally reasonable for the people who make up this coalition to argue about what our foreign policy should be, what our specific tax policy should be, what our housing policy should be.”
The vice president also warned the audience that the GOP is better off focusing on fighting the left.
“So, I think my attitude is let these debates play out, but don’t let the debates that we’re having internally blind us to the fact that we are up against a radical leftist movement that murdered my friend a couple of months ago and that would throw many people in the Trump administration in prison, not for doing anything illegal, but for not following the far left’s agenda,” Vance said, adding that the right should “focus on the enemy—have our debates—but focus on the enemy so that we can win victories that matter for the American people.”
Vance’s comments on internal fights come amid vociferous debates on issues like anti-Semitism. Former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes, an avowed neo-Nazi and admirer of Joseph Stalin, on his podcast in what was a far friendlier conversation than Carlson has had with the likes of Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas).
The issue metastasized further after Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts defended the Carlson interview and accused Carlson’s critics of being part of a “venomous coalition.” His video led to multiple departures from the think tank’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism—which eventually cut ties with Heritage altogether.
Vance has disavowed Fuentes in the past, calling the neo-Nazi a “total loser,” but has said little since Fuentes’s interview with Carlson. In a post on X in the midst of the Heritage fracas, Vance called on Republicans to look past their differences and “work together.”
“The infighting is stupid,” Vance wrote. “I care about my fellow citizens—particularly young Americans—being able to afford a decent life, I care about immigration and our sovereignty, and I care about establishing peace overseas so our resources can be focused at home. If you care about those things too, let’s work together.”
Vance in the interview also addressed the realignment of the Republican Party into President Donald Trump’s coalition and urged the GOP to stay the course. He called many of the current divisions within the party “the natural outgrowth of the fact that we’ve got a lot of working-class voters who frankly don’t care what was Republican orthodoxy 25 years ago, and so they’re pushing the party in a different direction.”
Vance warned his fellow Republicans several times during the interview not to return to a previous version of the party.
“I do think that some of our folks in Congress, they want to go back to the Republican Party of 20 years ago,” he said. “That Republican Party was a Republican Party that lost and that couldn’t successfully govern the country.”
Later, he stated that “there is an effort to try to wrest control of the Republican Party away from the voters and away from the coalition that really delivered the big victory in 2024,” adding that he thinks it would be “a huge mistake.”
Vance also addressed the Russia-Ukraine war, another spot of division within the GOP.
“Why don’t you stop killing each other and start trading with one another?” he asked. “Why don’t they actually engage in some commerce with one another, travel between the two countries, engage in some sort of cultural exchange?”
JD Vance on Russia-Ukraine:
Why don’t you stop killing each other and start trading with one another?
Why don’t they actually engage in some commerce, travel between the two countries, engage in some sort of cultural exchange? pic.twitter.com/DV0lLJqRWj
— Clash Report (@clashreport) November 20, 2025
