• Dual Support Strain: Representative Ro Khanna’s simultaneous backing of Silicon Valley and Sanders-style progressivism now facing new pressure.
• Wealth Tax Backing: Khanna’s defense of a proposed California one-time billionaire wealth tax angered wealthy executives and spurred threats of departures.
• Tech Mobilization: Silicon Valley executives have begun private discussions via WhatsApp and calls to mount a long-shot effort to unseat Khanna.
• Khanna’s Strengths: Despite opposition, he remains well-funded with almost $15 million, enjoys South Asian district support, and won re-election easily in 2024.
• Agarwal Consideration: Ethan Agarwal, a little-known start-up founder, is “seriously considering” challenging Khanna due to the wealth tax proposal.
• Tax Rationale: Khanna argues the measure is needed to fund health care, seeking a balance between taxing the very wealthy and sustaining Silicon Valley vibrancy.
• Tech Pushback: Leaders like Garry Tan and Sheel Mohnot are encouraging challengers, planning outside spending, while other prospects such as Matt Mahan and Eric Jones decline interest.
• Political Upside: Khanna frames the conflict as billionaire-backed threats to attract small-dollar donors, and allies believe a prolonged fight could rally left-wing voters despite critics like Paul Graham warning of missteps.

Representative Ro Khanna has long managed to pull off a seemingly impossible task in his Silicon Valley district: backing the tech industry and Bernie Sanders progressivism at the same time.

But now he is starting to feel the squeeze.

Mr. Khanna, an ambitious 49-year-old Democrat seen as a possible 2028 presidential candidate, has publicly defended a proposed one-time wealth tax in California that has angered some of the state’s richest executives and prompted threats that they will flee.

Some of those wealthy Californians are now quietly mobilizing on WhatsApp chats and conference calls to try to put together a well-funded but long-shot bid to oust Mr. Khanna, according to half a dozen people close to the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.

The effort is unlikely to succeed: Mr. Khanna, whose profile rose as he helped lead the push for the release of the Epstein files, easily won re-election in 2024 and has loyal support from his district’s South Asian community. He sits on almost $15 million in campaign cash that even a candidate backed by wealthy tech donors would struggle to compete against.

But the anger toward him — ignited mainly by a social media post mocking billionaires who are planning to leave the state over the wealth tax proposal — reflects the tense relationship between Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party, particularly its progressive wing.

Some tech leaders believe they may have found an anti-Khanna candidate in Ethan Agarwal, a Democrat and little-known start-up founder who has been waging a bid for governor that has failed to gain traction.

Mr. Agarwal confirmed to The New York Times that he was “seriously considering challenging” Mr. Khanna, largely because of the proposed wealth tax ballot measure, which would require California residents worth more than $1 billion to pay a 5 percent tax on their assets over five years. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, opposes the measure.

Warning that the measure “would end up destroying jobs and opportunity,” Mr. Agarwal said of Mr. Khanna, “The people of his district, Silicon Valley and California need someone working for them full time, not working to win over the Democratic Socialist vote in a future presidential primary.”

Mr. Khanna has suggested that the tax measure, which labor unions are trying to place on the ballot in November, is needed to fund health care programs in the state.

In his now-viral post from late last month, he mocked Peter Thiel and other billionaires who are angry about the tax proposal, writing, “I echo what FDR said with sarcasm of economic royalists when they threatened to leave, ‘I will miss them very much.’”

In an interview, he said the post had come off the cuff as he read a Times article during a holiday celebration at a family member’s home. “I’m surprised that one tweet did touch a nerve,” he said. (He later posted a lengthier explanation of why he supports the tax measure.)

“I’ve had constructive conversations since, with many technology leaders, explaining my view that there has to be a balance between asking people who have done extraordinarily well to pay more and making sure that the Silicon Valley ecosystem remains vibrant,” he added.

Mr. Khanna said he had not heard of Mr. Agarwal. “It’s a democracy,” he said. “It’s rare that I don’t have competition.”

Mr. Khanna’s rift with some tech leaders is striking given how he rose to Congress. A lawyer in the Bay Area for tech companies, he was the favorite of industry heavyweights, such as Sheryl Sandberg and Marc Benioff, as he made an unsuccessful bid for the House in 2014 and then ousted an incumbent Democrat in 2016.

Now, as the tech industry veers to the right, some of its leaders are publicly raging against him.

A loose constellation of Silicon Valley executives have held conversations with associates in recent days about how to best challenge him, people briefed on the talks said. Those executives include Garry Tan, the head of the influential start-up accelerator Y Combinator and the investor Sheel Mohnot.

Those efforts by Silicon Valley leaders and allied interest groups have included encouraging potential challengers to run and sketching out plans for a new outside spending effort to oppose Mr. Khanna, the people said.

Mr. Agarwal has a limited public profile and is a backup choice for some tech leaders only after failed attempts to recruit Mayor Matt Mahan of San Jose, who is a favorite of tech executives like Mr. Tan and who opposes the tax proposal. Mr. Mahan said in an interview that he had recently been approached by several “significant leaders in the tech industry,” whom he declined to name, asking him to consider challenging Mr. Khanna.

“I am not interested in doing that,” Mr. Mahan said. “I’ve been very direct with everyone. I think I have the best job in the world.”

Some tech leaders have also approached Eric Jones, a Democratic congressional candidate in a district north of San Francisco, but he is uninterested, according to a person close to him.

Other tech leaders are instead channeling their energy toward heading off the wealth tax proposal itself. In an email marked “confidential” to Silicon Valley donors and seen by The Times, the tech billionaire Ron Conway said he was helping lead a “serious effort coming together to defeat it.”

“I am confident that with Governor Newsom’s staunch opposition and a robust, well-funded campaign, we can defeat this measure when we inform voters of the true consequences for California,” wrote Mr. Conway, who has given $100,000 to the effort.

Any challenger would need to move quickly in part because of a March 6 paperwork deadline. And Mr. Khanna would not be “primaried” in the traditional sense: In California elections, the top two finishers in a first round of balloting advance to a November runoff.

There could be an upside from the conflict for Mr. Khanna. In a fund-raising email last weekend, he told his small-dollar supporters that he needed money because billionaires “are openly threatening to bankroll a primary challenger against me.”

Allies of Mr. Khanna, who served as co-chair of Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign and wrote a 2022 book titled “Progressive Capitalism: How to Make Tech Work for All of Us,” say that a prolonged fight with tech executives could endear him to left-wing voters who are suspicious of his ties to the industry.

Mr. Khanna’s critics are not having it.

“I feel sorry for him, actually,” said Paul Graham, a leading investor who co-founded Y Combinator and squabbled with Mr. Khanna about the tax over the holidays. “I don’t think he had any idea what a land mine he was stepping on.”

• **Subscription:** Readers invited to opt in for “Roundup” daily summaries about executive power developments.
• **Central Question:** Author repeatedly asked whether the U.S. invasion of Venezuela is lawful and notes few effective legal constraints on presidential uses of force.
• **Domestic Reality:** Congress has granted the president expansive global military authority with minimal oversight, courts decline to review unilateral uses of force, and no state can realistically stop U.S. action.
• **Domestic Legal Framework:** DOJ could rely on executive-branch precedents—especially Barr’s 1989 opinion on extraterritorial arrests—to justify the Venezuela operation.
• **Justifications:** Administration officials frame the action as arresting indicted fugitives, with kinetic force defended as unit self-defense supporting the raid.
• **Additional Precedents:** DOJ could invoke other executive-force precedents (national interest justifications, historical interventions) though prolonged engagements might trigger congressional authorization requirements.
• **War Powers Law:** The 1973 War Powers Resolution imposes reporting and termination deadlines that could become relevant if U.S. military presence persists in Venezuela.
• **International Law:** The invasion contravenes the U.N. Charter and places the U.S. under occupation law obligations, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, once it “runs the country.”

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Operation Absolute Resolve. (White House Photo.)

I’ve been bombarded today with the question: Is the U.S. invasion of Venezuela lawful?

As I have argued before, there are few if any effective legal constraints on unilateral presidential uses of force. Everyone has an opinion about what those limits should be. Academics and politicians regularly maintain that this and that presidential use of force is unlawful, even though the legal framework for analysis, especially under domestic law, is contested.

But here is the reality. Congress has given the president a gargantuan global military force with few constraints and is AWOL in overseeing what the president does with it. Courts won’t get involved in reviewing unilateral presidential uses of force. And no country plausibly could stop the U.S. action in Venezuela.

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That means that in practice the only normative legal framework for presidential war powers that matters derives from executive branch precedents and legal opinions. The Justice Department, if asked, easily could have drafted an opinion based on these precedents and opinions to justify the invasion of Venezuela.

Below is my quickly written explanation for this conclusion, but of course the analysis is preliminary since there is much we do not yet know.

Domestic Law

The main precedent DOJ could cite is President George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama in 1989 to arrest and bring strongman General Manuel Noriega to justice in the United States, in part for drug trafficking. Some will seek to distinguish the Noriega matter from the Venezuela invasion on the grounds that Panama Defense Forces had recently killed a U.S. Marine and the Panamanian National Assembly had declared that a state of war existed between the Republic of Panama and the United States.

But the Panama precedent will nonetheless matter to the Venezuela attack due to this 1989 opinion by then-Assistant Attorney General Bill Barr, issued six months before the invasion. That opinion justified FBI arrests in foreign countries under domestic law even if doing so violated international law. It specifically concluded:

1. The FBI’s statutory arrest authority “authorize[s] extraterritorial investigations and arrests.”

2. The President could lawfully order an extraterritorial arrest pursuant to the FBI’s statutory arrest authority even if it violated customary international law in impinging “on the sovereignty of other countries.”

3. Even if those FBI authorizing statutes were limited by customary international law, the Constitution’s “take Care” Clause empowered the president to authorize federal agents to make arrests abroad that violate customary international law. (The opinion here relied on In re Neagle, the main Supreme Court precedent for the president’s “protective power” that has been invoked in recent domestic deployments.)

4. Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter, which prohibits the “use of force against the territorial integrity” of any state, does not “prohibit the Executive as a matter of domestic law from authorizing forcible abductions” abroad. Put another way, “as a matter of domestic law, the Executive has the power to authorize actions inconsistent with Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter.”

5. The president has authority to delegate these powers to violate international law in extraterritorial enforcement actions to the Attorney General.

6. A U.S. arrest abroad “in violation of foreign law does not violate the Fourth Amendment.”

President Trump in his press conference today did not provide a legal justification for the invasion. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio represented to Senator Mike Lee that the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife for violating U.S. law was the primary justification for the Venezuela action. And at today’s press conference Rubio said that “at its core, this was an arrest of two indicted fugitives of American justice, and the Department of War supported the Department of Justice in that job.” This rationale is consistent with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s claim that it was a “joint military and law enforcement raid” and General Dan Caine’s claim that it was an “apprehension mission.”

Given these explanations, the Barr opinion justifying extraterritorial law enforcement actions will likely be presented as the main domestic legal foundation for the action.

As for the boots on the ground and the kinetic uses of force, those appear to have been justified “to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant.” This is a form of Article II self-defense argument with a long lineage. It is most akin to the “unit self-defense” that is often invoked when U.S. troops deployed abroad in violation of foreign sovereignty face “a hostile act or demonstrated hostile intent.”

Yes, it seems like bootstrapping, or worse, to say that the United States can arrest a foreign dictator on foreign soil in violation of foreign sovereignty and then invoke the self-defense of the arresting forces to bomb the country. But this is where the logic of the executive branch precedents leads. As Rebecca Ingber has explained, unit self-defense could justify “the United States using force against non-state actors who do not even have the capacity to threaten U.S. territory, in a state that has not attacked the United States, providing the groundwork for a future escalation with either that non-state actor or the state itself—and all without authorization from Congress.”

These are not the only precedents the Justice Department opinion could invoke. There is another line of precedent, summarized here, that justifies unilateral uses of presidential force in the “national interest.” Recognized national interests include the protection of U.S. persons and property, promotion of regional stability, and humanitarian concerns, all three of which could conceivably be invoked in the Venezuela context.

The DOJ opinion could also cite dozens of specific instances of past unilateral presidential uses of force stretching back at least to President Thomas Jefferson’s authorization to attack the Barbary pirates. Most on point, perhaps, are the numerous U.S. interventions in the southern hemisphere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As one outstanding recent study concluded about multiple American interventions in (among other nations) Cuba, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico, and the Danish West Indies:

Over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States went on a regional rampage of staggering scope and scale. There were coups and counter-coups, protectorates and annexations. Invasions were followed by occupations, and occupations by insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. Foreign capitals grew used to American marines policing their streets and American warships patrolling their waters. American policy became practically synonymous with intervention, the use or threat of force to coerce a state into exercising its sovereign functions in a particular way.

An important possible limit on the president’s unilateral power recognized in the DOJ opinions is that congressional authorization might be needed for “prolonged and substantial military engagements, typically involving exposure of U.S. military personnel to significant risk over a substantial period.” This limit could become relevant since President Trump announced today that the United States is going “to run the country until such time that we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.” It is unclear at this point what the U.S. military role will be in Venezuela or whether the military will be involved in “prolonged and substantial military engagements” that expose U.S. military personnel “to significant risk over a substantial period.”

Also potentially relevant is the 1973 War Powers Resolution matter. That law requires the president to notify lawmakers within 48 hours of the introduction of U.S. forces into hostilities. It also requires the president (with loopholes) to “terminate any use of United States Armed Forces with respect to which such report was submitted” within 60 or (with an extension) 90 days.

This deadline might in 90 days be implicated by a continued U.S. military presence in Venezuela. Depending on what that military presence looks like, the Trump administration could invoke a variation of the Obama administration gambit in Libya to blow through the statutory time limits because the United States is not engaged in “hostilities” in Venezuela. Or it could simply disregard the WPR time limits on the ground, expressed by many administrations starting with Richard Nixon’s, that they are unconstitutional intrusions on the president’s war powers.

International Law

I noted above that DOJ has concluded that the U.N. Charter’s prohibition on the use of force does not constrain the executive branch’s domestic legal authority to invade another country to make an arrest. But the Venezuelan intervention pretty clearly violates the Charter, even if there are no domestic legal implications from that violation and even if international law here lacks any enforcement mechanism.

It will be interesting to see if the Trump administration tries to claim that it acted consistently with the Charter. Perhaps it will say, as it was said of the 1999 Kosovo intervention, that the action was “illegal but legitimate.” Or perhaps it will argue, as the United States did in the 1983 invasion of Grenada and the 1989 invasion of Panama, that the United States was defending U.S. persons there. Or perhaps it will, as it so often has in other contexts, simply blow off international law.

Since the United States plans (as President Trump said) to “run the country” for an indefinite period, it will be an occupying power and that occupation will be governed by international law—primarily the Fourth Geneva Convention. As the DOD Law of War Manual explains: “Military occupation is a temporary measure for administering territory under the control of invading forces, and involves a complicated, trilateral set of legal relations between the Occupying Power, the temporarily ousted sovereign authority, and the inhabitants of occupied territory.”

There are a lot of international law rules and restrictions that purport to govern what the United States can do as an occupying power. They are well explained in Part XI of the Law of War Manual. I don’t have space here to review them, but suffice it to say that these rules will touch on President Trump’s stated aim of “tak[ing] back the oil” and “get[ting] reimbursed.” We will see if the administration takes these rules seriously.

Conclusion

In sum, it would not be terribly hard for the Justice Department to write an opinion in support of the Venezuela invasion even if the military action violates the U.N. Charter.

To repeat, that does not mean that the action is in fact lawful—and it pretty clearly isn’t under the U.N. Charter. It only means that the long line of unilateral executive branch actions, supported by promiscuously generous executive branch legal opinions, support it. As I wrote in connection with the Soleimani strike: “our country has—through presidential aggrandizement accompanied by congressional authorization, delegation, and acquiescence—given one person, the president, a sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war. That is our system: One person decides.”

This is not the system the framers had in mind, and it is a dangerous system for all the reasons the framers worried about. But that is where we are—and indeed, it is where we have been for a while.

Thanks to Ema Rose Schumer and Tia Sewell for editorial assistance

• Trump’s 2024 Coalition: Unified multi-faith conservatives including evangelicals, Orthodox Jews, Catholics, and some Muslim voters around opposition to Progressive social changes.
• Domestic vs Foreign Power: Trump wields dominance in headlines and global affairs while facing internal movement instability from ideological factions.
• New Right Divide: A younger, digital-first generation claims “MAGA” no longer aligns with “America First,” elevating figures like Nick Fuentes beyond Trump’s control.
• Ideological Drift: Online influencers have co-opted populist discontent toward anti-establishment narratives that reject alliances and liberal internationalism.
• Strategic Tensions: Trump’s nationalism and China containment clash with Elon Musk’s global tech vision, especially through X’s amplification of anti-coalition signals.
• Tucker Carlson’s Role: Once a loyal amplifier, Carlson now promotes anti-Israel, anti-neocon narratives that threaten evangelical and Jewish support within Trump’s base.
• JD Vance Alignment: The vice president’s ties to Carlson and postliberal intellectuals blur the ideological boundary between Trump’s coalition and the emerging anti-alliance right.
• Coalition Fragility: Loss of evangelical-Zionist support due to antisemitic and anti-Israel currents imperils the broad majority Trump needs to sustain a China strategy.

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Giant Abroad, Midget at Home

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](https://archive.is/o/7bOzT/https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news)

JANUARY 2026 PRINT EDITION

Giant Abroad, Midget at Home

Why the Trump coalition is cracking up

by[

Michael Doran

](https://archive.is/o/7bOzT/https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/michael-doran)

January 05, 2026

ILLUSTRATIONS BY VICTOR JUHASZ

ILLUSTRATIONS BY VICTOR JUHASZ

At the start of 2026, Donald Trump should have the wind at his back as he sets out to assure America’s future.

For his recent election, he assembled the broadest multi-faith conservative coalition in modern American politics. A twice-divorced casino magnate who bragged about his sexual exploits to interviewers, rarely attended church, and once identified as pro-choice hardly embodied the “family values” that had defined the Religious Right since the late 1970s. Yet despite violating the moral norms religious voters championed, he drew more unified, enthusiastic support from them than any Republican in the modern era. Church-going white evangelicals gave him historic margins, but so did Orthodox and observant Jews. Traditionally Democratic Catholics swung hard to the GOP. And in a twist almost no one predicted, in 2024 thousands of Muslim voters in Michigan—long considered a Democratic lock—crossed over to vote for him.

While he was attracting religious voters, he was also pulling in millions of secular or nominally Christian Americans who never open a Bible. What unified these constituencies was a shared belief that the Progressive assault on traditional norms had spun out of control. By driving anything sacred out of public life, Progressivism had robbed the country of its moral north star.

This appeal to disaffected religious voters gave Trump his sharpest weapon against the Left’s identity politics. Democrats assumed Black, Hispanic, and female voters would always vote their race or gender rather than their religious convictions. Trump’s “God bless America” populism broke that logic. By casting himself as the defender of embattled believers against secular elites rewriting biology and dismantling traditional family life, he spoke directly to socially conservative Black churchgoers, evangelical and Pentecostal Latinos, and even some traditionalist Muslims who cared more about faith and family than progressive orthodoxies. His message crossed ethnic lines and peeled off voters the Left assumed it owned forever.

This coalition was Trump’s breakthrough. For all its novelty, it stood in a recognizable Republican lineage. Eisenhower and Reagan had both shown that a broad, nonsectarian language of faith could bind religiously and racially diverse Americans into a single political community. Trump replayed that winning tune in a populist key—offering not theological precision but an expansive moral vocabulary in which disparate groups could locate their place in the national story. It made him electorally viable and gave him the possibility of building a durable governing majority.

Now, as the first year of his new term draws to a close, Trump stands at the height of his formal power. Abroad, he has smashed Iran’s nuclear sites; forced a ceasefire in Gaza; hit China with tariffs; wrung major new defense-spending commitments out of Europe; and inserted Washington into the Ukraine war in ways that are drastically altering the geometry of the conflict. Friends and adversaries alike track his moods by the hour. At home, he dominates the headlines, bends government agencies to his will, puts previously impervious elite institutions onto the defensive, and more.

And yet, at just this moment of triumph, Trump seems to be losing control of his own movement. The challenges—some around foreign policy, some around domestic issues, some related to messaging in general—at first seemed disconnected. But on closer inspection, one can see a common thread running through them—a line of attack aimed squarely at the heart of his legacy.

“MAGA” and “America First” once functioned as synonyms—two labels for the same revolt against the Progressive orthodoxy of an entrenched elite that was unresponsive to the voters. But inside Trump’s base, a rising faction now insists the two are diverging. In their telling, Trump’s second-term agenda has drifted from first principles.

They frame this drift as the betrayal of a younger, angrier, and more ideologically committed generation. Trump’s instincts still belong to the media world of the early 2000s—broadcast TV, cable warriors, mass audiences. The insurgents come from an entirely different universe: livestreamers, meme ecosystems, encrypted apps, and anonymous digital tribes that define themselves against every establishment, including the Republican one Trump reshaped in his own image.

The cleanest measure of this distance is the figure they have elevated as a kind of mascot: Nick Fuentes. A racist, antisemitic, misogynistic admirer of Hitler and Stalin, Fuentes should be untouchable in any serious political movement—yet within the Gen Z New Right he is wildly popular, a totem of defiance for young men who think the system has written them off. Trump has no direct connection to him and no desire for one; the two occupy entirely different cognitive worlds.

“Behind a facade of loyalty, Carlson has called Trump ‘a demonic force, a destroyer’ and admitted, ‘I hate him passionately’”

But Fuentes’s star is rising in the ecosystem orbiting MAGA. Tucker Carlson hosted him. Other major online personalities rallied to his defense. And when Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, initially intervened to defend Carlson’s interview with Fuentes rather than recoil from it, he signaled that the contamination had spread far deeper into the institutional right than anyone imagined. When asked to comment on Carlson’s interview with Fuentes, Trump declined to take a position—an omission that underscored how far this milieu sits from his instincts and how little control he exerts over it.

Many observers still imagine this “America First” revolt as a spontaneous, bottom-up development—young men, alienated by economic and cultural collapse, simply “discovering” isolationism and conspiratorial politics on their own. That story is half-true—at best.

What actually happened is simpler and more deliberate. For two decades, progressive institutions racialized every public discourse, taught an entire generation of boys that their skin color made them inherently suspect, and demonized the traditional markers of male identity—strength, duty, family, faith, nation—as forms of toxic oppression. The result was not a political movement but a widespread, inchoate mood of distrust:

Nothing works anymore.
The system is rigged.
The people in charge hate us and always will.
Everything they tell us to care about—democracy abroad, allies, global leadership—is just another way to bleed the country dry.

That mood is real. It is raw. But it is also politically malleable.

It could, in principle, be channeled toward Trump’s renewal project—toward a restoration of American vitality sustained by a broad, multi-faith coalition and a repurposed alliance structure aimed at containing China. Instead, an entire pyramid of online influencers—podcasters, meme-lords, streamers, and anonymous posters—has spent Trump’s first year pushing it in the most destructive possible direction.

At the very top of that pyramid sits Tucker Carlson. Show after show, he takes that mood and harnesses it to a comprehensive indictment: not just of the progressive elite, but of the entire postwar order, of alliances themselves, of the very idea that America should remain strong abroad in order to remain free at home. This broader New Right is not uniformly racist or antisemitic, but it is now uniformly shaped by the story these people tell: the system cannot be fixed; it must be razed.

Let’s start with an obvious question: Why is Trump missing in action in the ideological debate? His critics reflexively chalk every chink in his armor up to personal traits—vanity, impulsiveness, thin skin. But in this case the danger is far more structural than characterological.

Still, if some characterological factors do help to explain Trump’s absence, perhaps three are worthy of note. First, Trump is instinctual, not intellectual. His grand speeches often feel as though they were written by someone else and never quite capture what he truly believes. Creating a lasting movement requires articulating ideological principles that can live on after the founder leaves the scene, but Trump focuses more on branding and marketing than ideological coherence.

Second, he prizes loyalty to a fault. In his search for a loyal team, he has surrounded himself with enforcers like Sergio Gor: a cherubic, 39-year-old libertarian who once served as Rand Paul’s communications director and who was confirmed in October as the new United States ambassador to India. During the first nine months of the second term, Gor ran the Presidential Personnel Office, the crucial gatekeeping operation that placed thousands of political appointees across the government. Gor himself had long moved in the orbit of the Koch network—the sprawling libertarian donor consortium built by the billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and his late brother David, which for decades has funded everything from deregulation think tanks to an uncompromisingly restraint-oriented foreign policy that treats most American military commitments abroad with deep suspicion—especially the commitment to Israel.

That same network had spent years opposing Trump himself, bankrolling his primary rivals and denouncing his tariffs and immigration restrictions. Trump issued a blunt directive upon his return to power: no one affiliated with the Kochs was to be hired. Yet Koch-aligned officials—many of them Gor’s former colleagues or ideological fellow-travelers—quietly took up desks at the Pentagon and State Department. They did not sneak in; the network had simply rebranded its old non-interventionist gospel as the most authentic expression of anti-neocon, anti-deep-state revenge.

Scarred by the traditional foreign-policy establishment of both parties that he believes stabbed him in the back during his first term, Trump overlooked the Koch résumés, recognizing instead the shared enemies. The Koch Libertarians resented the foreign policy establishment as much as he did. To him they were just more knives aimed at the people who had betrayed him. Consequently, only a few people around Trump are actually in full support of his ideological vision. He lacks a reliable team committed to the longer, lonelier task of patrolling the ideological boundaries of the movement he built.

Third, his approach to politics is transactional and personal. He makes deals with individual people, grounded in an understanding of shared interests. Trump himself is the only one who can define what “America First” means, and he likes it that way. Adherence to rigid doctrines obstructs deal-making. When crisis hits, he reaches for the phone. He looks for a fixer, a broker, a loyalist who can cut a deal and smooth the rough edges. But an ideological challenge cannot be solved that way. There is no single person he can call who shares his long-term interest in keeping his coalition intact.

The full dimensions of the challenge become clearest when framed through the question Trump always asks in a crisis: Who do I call? Consider three figures whose responses now shape the future of his movement—Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and JD Vance. Each exposes a different structural weakness inside Trump’s coalition. Taken together, they explain why the coalition Trump built is fraying—and why his absence from the debate is less a matter of personality than a sign of deeper trouble ahead.

When Trump asks, “Who do I call?” the first answer is obvious: not Rupert Murdoch. The line is dead—killed the moment Trump hit News Corp with a $10 billion defamation suit in 2025. Even if Murdoch answered, the call would be pointless. The old kingmaker of American conservatism now presides over a shrinking archipelago—Fox, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post—that the New Right treats like a distant province. But America Firsters live inside a sealed media world of their own: podcasts, YouTube and Rumble feeds, Telegram channels, Gab, and above all X, where attitudes harden long before they ever surface on Fox Primetime. Trump still takes his movement’s temperature by watching Hannity and Ingraham. But the real fights over the future of MAGA are happening in digital spaces that neither he nor Murdoch command.

This is the world Elon Musk now shapes. Trump spent five years trying to construct a counter-media empire: he launched Truth Social (which plateaued at under 10 million monthly actives), turned One America News Network and Newsmax into semi-official house organs, handed press credentials to RSBN and Gateway Pundit, and elevated a rotating cast of loyal amplifiers—Bannon from the War Room, Dan Bongino in his radio heyday, Charlie Kirk before the assassination, even Candace Owens until she broke with him. He urged the base to migrate, floated the possibility of a “Trump TV” network that never materialized, and watched most of his followers drift right back to the big platforms. Nothing cohered. The person who finally built a real, scalable information infrastructure for populism was not Trump but Musk. By transforming X into the central nervous system of the movement—and propelling its loudest voices to unprecedented prominence—Musk succeeded where Trump’s own efforts had stalled.

Musk’s role in Trump’s orbit began as early as November 2022, when he reinstated Trump’s suspended account and then, starting that December, released the Twitter Files—internal documents exposing how the old regime had suppressed conservative voices at the behest of government agencies. That sequence set the stage for the 2024 campaign, where Musk functioned as Trump’s digital field marshal. He poured more than $277 million into swing-state ads and turnout operations through America PAC and, according to multiple independent studies, the platform’s algorithm began delivering dramatically higher visibility to pro-Trump and right-wing accounts after Musk’s public endorsement of Trump in July 2024.

But the intersection of Musk’s interests with Trump’s did not last long. The break that matters most is not over tax rates or H-1B visas. It is over China. Trump’s second-term strategy rests on a single organizing principle: the United States must reorient its alliances, industrial capacity, and military posture to contain a rising China before Beijing overtakes it. Everything he is doing—tariffs, critical-mineral partnerships in Africa and Central Asia, equity stakes in chips and rare-earth supply chains—is designed to make that containment credible abroad and sustainable at home.

Musk is moving in the opposite direction. He has spent a decade cultivating a public posture of admiration toward Beijing. He praises its infrastructure as “100 times faster” than America’s, has called himself “pro-China” on stage in Shanghai, gushes over Chinese “positive energy,” and in late 2022 echoed the CCP line by suggesting Taiwan should become a “special administrative region.”

When Trump reinstated sweeping tariffs in 2025, Musk launched a public war on Peter Navarro—the hard-line trade advisor and chief architect of the new tariff regime—calling him a “moron” and warning that broad decoupling would trigger recession. According to multiple reports, Musk and Tesla opposed Trump’s tariffs. Tesla’s Shanghai gigafactory still produces nearly half the company’s global output and an even larger share of the low-cost batteries that keep the company profitable. Musk’s robotics ambitions—Optimus and the broader humanoid push—depend on Chinese supply chains and manufacturing scale no other country can match on his timetable.

The contradiction is structural. Trump’s MAGA is a nationalist restoration, aimed at reversing the offshoring that hollowed out the middle class and supercharged a hostile competitor. Musk’s world is post-national and accelerationist: Mars colonies, brain–machine interfaces, Artificial General Intelligence. The fastest route to that future runs through frictionless global capital flows, open supply chains, and easy access to the world’s largest single market—China. Trump wants to sever the economic dependence on Beijing. Musk wants to secure his companies inside it. One man is trying to rebuild the American heartland; the other is trying to escape the nation-state entirely.

X is where the divergence becomes dangerous. The platform feeds on engagement—outrage, speed, spectacle. It rewards whatever travels farthest, not whatever stabilizes Trump’s coalition. Since the October 27 Carlson–Fuentes interview exploded across Rumble and flooded onto X, posts branding Trump a “Zionist puppet” or recasting Ukraine aid as “globalist war funding” have racked up millions of impressions, often outpacing sober defenses of Trump’s big-tent project. Holocaust-denying memes outrun statements by government officials.

“Carlson’s fury at the American establishment runs deeper than the fury of the Jan. 6 demonstrators”

Musk’s new location-tagging features have already exposed a swath of “America First” accounts as foreign operators—Pakistanis, Indians, Nigerians—posing as domestic populists. It was a brief reminder that a trend line on X is not the voice of the American electorate. But the platform still remains wide open to manipulation. And whether Musk likes it or not, the same engagement incentives that once pushed Trump’s message to the top now amplify the voices that cast any confrontation with China as a “globalist” trap. Curbing those currents would spark user flight and crater subscriptions.

That leaves a structural tension Musk cannot resolve and Trump cannot ignore: Trump needs a coherent, broad-based coalition to sustain a China strategy; Musk needs maximal engagement to sustain X’s valuation. The vectors run against each other. The result is a platform indispensable to Trump’s movement but increasingly powered by forces working against his strategic aims.

Trump can call Elon—the line still works. But on the central strategic problem of his presidency, their vectors run in opposite directions: Trump toward a fortified nationalism capable of sustaining confrontation with Beijing; Musk toward a globalized tech frontier that requires ongoing access to it. X, the town square of the New Right, has become the amplifier of insurgent voices—some foreign, many disaffected—that are eroding the multi-faith coalition Trump needs to confront China. The man who handed Trump the digital battlefield in 2024 has built an arena whose logic now pulls in the opposite direction—not toward Beijing’s victory, but toward the slow unraveling of the only domestic coalition capable of preventing it.

Trump’s populism has prompted endless comparisons to that of Andrew Jackson—and not without reason. But Jackson could not have won his war on the Bank of the United States without The Globe, edited by Francis Preston Blair—a press sword in the president’s hand. Blair lived one minute’s walk from the White House. The government eventually purchased his home and absorbed it into what is now Blair House, the official presidential guest residence. Jackson understood that reforming the country requires a media lieutenant who will bleed for the cause.

For Trump, the closest approximation to Blair was Tucker Carlson. In 2014–2015, Carlson was a libertarian contrarian—mocking political correctness, indulging in culture-war irritations, questioning foreign adventurism—yet still coloring inside the lines of movement conservatism. The trumpet of Trumpism had not yet sounded. When it did, Carlson was among the first to sense the opportunity. He shed the libertarian skin, dropped the wonk talk, and began preaching nightly about a ruling class that despised its own citizens and was importing a replacement population.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Trump heard what he took to be loyalty and reciprocated. He called Carlson to praise segments. Carlson asked for nothing in return; he simply amplified Trump louder and cleaner than anyone else. From the Mueller probe through the impeachments, through COVID and the electoral battles of 2020, Carlson cast every assault on Trump as proof that the ruling elite would never forgive Trump’s surprise victory in 2016. Even January 6 he framed as the righteous frustration of the forgotten.

Carlson’s firing from Fox liberated him. Freed from Rupert Murdoch’s constraints, he moved to X and built a media machine that collapsed the distance between broadcaster and audience. The August 2023 interview with Trump—timed to kneecap the GOP primary debate—looked like the consummation of their symbiosis.

But behind the facade of loyalty lurked something much colder. In private text messages later made public in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation case against Fox News, Carlson called Trump “a demonic force, a destroyer” and admitted, “I hate him passionately.” If Trump believed he had finally found his Blair, he was mistaken. In January 2021, as the first Trump era was collapsing, Carlson texted a producer: “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.” Tucker had been harvesting Trump’s audience, not fortifying him.

But for what purpose?

Much has been made of the MAGA generation as a generation without fathers. But Carlson’s story begins with an absent mother. She abandoned Tucker, his father, and his younger brother when he was still a child. By the time his father married Patricia Swanson in 1979, 10-year-old Tucker was already accustomed to privilege—La Jolla, private schools, the early signals of elite upbringing. But marriage into the Swanson family elevated him to a different plane entirely. He entered a world of even greater privilege: legacy wealth, and family trusts. Yet that ascent carried its own shadow. He joined a patrician clan warmed by the afterglow of lost power.

This is the key to his political psychology: Carlson was adopted into an aristocratic line in decline, a family that retains the names, memories, and manners of a ruling class that no longer rules. Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson and his brother, Buckley Swanson Peck Carlson, were raised on the remains of someone else’s fortune—the Swanson frozen-food empire, sold long before either brother was born. “I’ve lived in this world [of affluence] my whole life,” Carlson told a Swiss interviewer in 2018. “I’ve always lived around the ruling class.”

Around them, yes—but not fully of them. Carlson saw enough of elite life to absorb its codes, but enough of its decline to resent its successors. Abandoned by his mother, he was always an outsider. He attended a Swiss boarding school but was expelled; he straightened out later, but his early bowtie persona was a kind of costume, announcing his insider-outsider status.

His fury at the American establishment runs deeper than the fury of the January 6 demonstrators, but unlike theirs it comes from wounds that have no name. When Trump appeared on the scene, Carlson saw in him the tangerine wrecking ball of his dream, the instrument of destruction that he had always dreamed of directing at the American elite.

Carlson harbors nostalgia for an era that vanished decades before he was born. He longs for the old Protestant elite that governed with the surety of inherited authority. “I’m not against an aristocratic system,” he told the Swiss interviewer, but today’s ruling class “doesn’t have the self-awareness you need to be wise.” Nor does Trump’s populism appeal to him. “Populism is what you get when your leaders fail,” he said. When that happens, “the population says this is terrible and they elect someone like Trump.” That nostalgia ensures he cannot support any foreign-policy framework that depends on the very postwar institutions he despises.

This framing reveals the heart of Carlson’s contempt. Trump is, to him, evidence of elite failure—not the solution to it. Trump’s role, Carlson explained in a 2018 interview, was merely to “begin the conversation about what actually matters,” to force the country to ask “obvious questions that no one could answer.” Trump, in Carlson’s mind, is the necessary disrupter not the builder. Trump’s job is to shake the tree; someone else will gather the fruit. That someone, of course, is Carlson himself.

In his interview with Fuentes, Carlson finally made his underlying project explicit. He placed himself among a small cadre of Americans “sincere in their opposition” to neoconservative foreign policy, the only group “able to change the country’s orientation.” For Carlson, the words “neoconservative” and “supportive of Israel” are synonymous. His core mission boils down to a single goal: to break the tie between the United States and the Jewish State.

This project draws not on Trump’s mid-century civic nationalism but on the worldview of the WASP establishment of yesteryear—the America of restricted immigration, minimal foreign commitments, and a culturally homogeneous elite rooted in Protestant Christianity. In Trump’s mid-century vision, Israel fits naturally: a stable ally, a partner against shared enemies, a pillar of evangelical identity. In Carlson’s older, pre-war vision, Israel not only does not belong: it is the very catalyst that corrupted the American elite, diluted its identity, and entangled the nation in global commitments that serve the interests of others.

Since leaving Fox in April 2023, Carlson has built an extraordinarily powerful independent media apparatus, grounded in his ring of aligned podcasts. He now uses that reach to drive a single master narrative: the postwar liberal international order is corrupt, globalist, interventionist, and debt-financed. An Empire displaced the old Republic—and it is run by the Jews.

But Carlson’s deepest hatred is not for the Jews themselves but the Christians who empower them. In his interview with Fuentes, he said flatly, “I despise Christian Zionists more than anyone else on earth.” Unusual in its candor, this line reveals the core of Carlson’s project: breaking the alliance between evangelicals and Israel. He chooses guests who will deliver his message plainly:

• Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic Groyper who denies the Holocaust and praises Hitler.
• Darryl Cooper, who casts Jewish financiers as puppeteers of Churchill.
• Candace Owens, who insists Israel had foreknowledge of 9/11.
• Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos, who claims Israel plans to blow up the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
• Libertarians who describe Israel as the orchestrator of America’s role in the Iraq War.
• Protestant pastors and a country music star who denounce premillennial dispensationalism as a Jewish psy-op.

Their backgrounds differ wildly. Their grievances are eclectic. But one theme unites them: the post-1945 order is corrupt, and the U.S.–Israel alliance is the ultimate source of the corruption. On that basis, Carlson is assembling a shadow coalition: diverse in origin, stirred by Trump’s revolt against the liberal order, yet alienated by the very elements that made Trump’s big tent politically viable—evangelical Zionism, civic pluralism, and multi-faith nationalism.

What Trump built was a grand coalition capable of sustaining the national renewal he envisions. Carlson’s movement seeks to dismantle that foundation from the inside out. Its racism alienates every minority group Trump peeled away from the Left; its antisemitism is fatal, instantly destroying trust with evangelicals—the coalition’s most loyal bloc—whose attachment to Israel is theological, emotional, and non-negotiable. The insurgents claim to be purifying Trumpism; in reality, they are stripping it down to its most self-defeating elements.

“A racist, antisemitic, misogynistic admirer of Hitler and Stalin, Nick Fuentes should be untouchable in any serious political movement—yet within the Gen Z new right he is a totem of defiance”

And that grand domestic coalition came with a new foreign-policy imperative. Since the end of the Cold War, American strategists focused on exporting a liberal orthodoxy—market universalism, democracy promotion, humanitarian intervention. To be sure, neoconservatives and progressives waged their intramural battles, but they shared a core assumption: that American power existed to make the world safe for an ideological project, which in turn helped to underwrite American prosperity.

That consensus broke in 2016. Trump reoriented American foreign policy away from liberal evangelism and toward great-power competition—above all, the contest with China and the network of states orbiting it: Russia, Iran, and North Korea. His aim was not to dismantle the post-1945 system but to repurpose it for a world in which Beijing, not Baghdad or Kabul, was the central threat. Europe mattered again as the industrial flank against Russia; the Indo-Pacific mattered because the first island chain constrains China’s rise; and the Middle East mattered as the center of gravity of the global energy market, which was threatened by China’s partner, Iran.

Israel sits at the center of this architecture. It is America’s most loyal and capable ally in the Middle East, the only one with the military, technological, and intelligence advantages needed and ready to contain Iran, which is the regional linchpin of China’s Eurasian strategy. If the United States wants to keep China boxed in across multiple theaters, Israel is indispensable.

Which is why the domestic antisemitism rising inside the New Right is so strategically destructive. It weakens the domestic coalition precisely where Trump’s strength lies—in the bond between evangelicals, Jews, and traditionalists—and simultaneously blows a hole in the global alliance by undermining the essential military-strategic partnership with Israel in the Middle East. If the United States loses the Trump coalition at home and its key force multiplier in the Middle East, then China is the inevitable strategic winner.

And this is the strangest part: after everything we now know about China—its crash military buildup, its nuclear breakout, its penetration of American universities, tech firms, and intelligence networks—Carlson’s outrage is not directed at Beijing. It is directed at Jerusalem. His conspiracy-obsessed guests see Israeli subversion of the United States everywhere: prior knowledge of 9/11, orchestration of the Iraq War, manipulation of U.S. intelligence, efforts to drag America into a war with Iran. In a world where China is openly working to topple the United States from its position of global leadership, Carlson has built a media universe in which the only foreign power worthy of sustained suspicion is America’s most reliable and capable ally in the Middle East.

Opposition to Trump’s renewal project is grounded in a worldview that sees the business of alliance-building and exercising power as inherently futile. Instead, it rejects the entire post-1945 American security architecture as a failed enterprise. It sees alliances not as tools to be refitted for a new purpose but as corrupt relics that entangle America in other people’s quarrels. It treats the U.S. presence abroad as the cause of domestic decay, not the shield against foreign predators. If that vision were to prevail, the United States would not reform its alliances for the China challenge; it would abandon them. The result would be predictable: crumbling alliances overseas, fractured cohesion at home, and an America too divided to contend with the only rival capable of displacing it.

America First, as defined by Tucker Carlson, struts onstage as a triumphant ideology, too wised-up to succumb to the blandishments of foreign scam artists who would put the lives and wallets of Americans at risk in order to preserve their own graft. In reality, Carlson’s version of America First is a suicide pact, in which the U.S. unilaterally dismantles its own vast and uniquely powerful global military and economic empire in exchange for far lower living standards and a world whose strategic choke-points are controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and its allies. Perhaps the only Americans who would not suffer greatly under such a revisionist regime are the globalist tech billionaires and bankers who Carlson sometimes claims to oppose—who can all shift their operations offshore.

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File

And yet, though the president knows Carlson is trying to steer MAGA down a new and potentially very dangerous path, he refuses to rein him in. “We did an interview with him—we were at 300 million hits,” Trump said. While the figure is inflated, the logic is real. As long as Carlson delivers enormous audiences, Trump imagines he has no incentive to challenge him. “He said good things about me,” Trump shrugged. “I think he’s good.”

In other words, Trump still treats Carlson the way he treats every powerful interviewer: as a microphone, not a rival political actor. He has always walked into hostile venues—60 Minutes, CNN, The View—because the size of the audience outweighed the risk of the host. Anderson Cooper or Maggie Haberman may occasionally imagine that they are talking directly to Trump’s flock, but Trump has always assumed that his followers would take his side over theirs. He’s the sun at the center of the MAGA universe. The press is a foil for his act. Carlson’s attempt to behave like a political principal doesn’t register for him.

But Carlson is quite clearly catechizing his own coalition—and doing so methodically, week after week, on media that Trump rarely sees. Carlson’s target audience is the cohort shaped by Joe Rogan’s anti-institutional skepticism, Andrew Tate’s performative misogyny, and Nick Fuentes’s open contempt for the most basic of civic norms. Carlson is positioning this formation not as an adjunct to MAGA but as its successor: America First.

Politically, it is far too early to call Donald Trump a lame duck. But on the ideological battlefield, the succession struggle has already begun. Here Carlson clearly believes he holds two structural advantages over Trump—the first being his growing foothold inside Turning Point USA, the largest and most influential youth organization in the MAGA universe. Built by Charlie Kirk into a campus-to-rally pipeline for pro-Trump activism, TPUSA became the institutional bridge between Trump’s coalition and the Gen Z right. Its size, fundraising power, and cultural reach make it the natural staging ground for any post-Trump realignment.

Charlie Kirk’s murder in September threw Turning Point into chaos and removed the one figure who—however imperfectly—kept the organization tethered to Trump’s big-tent, pro-Israel coalition. Kirk himself was personally and consistently Zionist: he traveled to Israel regularly, praised Netanyahu, and refused to let TPUSA drift into open anti-Israel isolationism.

But the movement he built was far more heterogeneous. In the name of free and open debate, Kirk routinely welcomed libertarians, paleoconservatives, and Christian-nationalist voices who rejected Israel and echoed Carlson’s broader critique of American foreign policy. Carlson, in particular, was not a fringe presence but a featured guest—one of the biggest draws at TPUSA events. Kirk acted as a brake on the organization’s anti-Zionist drift even as he gave its leading critics of Israel a prominent stage. His death removed an indispensable internal counterweight capable of restraining that drift, leaving TPUSA suddenly exposed—and uniquely vulnerable to Carlson’s bid for influence.

In the months before and after the assassination, pro-Israel board members and major donors repeatedly urged Kirk—and then his successors—to bar Carlson personally, and to sever ties with the wider anti-Zionist coalition he was assembling. The new leadership, under Charlie’s widow, Erika Kirk, declined to draw that line—even as Kirk herself became the target of vitriolic and defamatory attacks by Carlson associates like Candace Owens. In the heated environment that prevailed, it was easy to see how those attacks might be interpreted as threats to Kirk’s safety, and to the safety of her associates.

The unresolved fight over where to place the boundary of acceptable MAGA discourse quickly spilled beyond Turning Point, erupting at the Heritage Foundation in the explosive controversy over Kevin Roberts’s defense of Carlson. What began as an internal Turning Point succession struggle had become the defining fault line of the post-Trump right. In turn, the drift away from pro-Israel orthodoxy within organizations like Heritage and Turning Point threatens the very coalition Trump needs to sustain a China strategy beyond his presidency.

But Carlson has a second, and perhaps even more important, advantage in his personal relationship to the man who should be Trump’s strongest firewall: Vice President JD Vance.

When Donald Trump asks, “Who do I call?” about ensuring his ideological legacy, the obvious number should be the one belonging to his nominal No. 2 and successor. That call, however, is just as problematic as the one to Musk.

In his interview of Nick Fuentes, Carlson described himself as part of a small cadre “sincere in their opposition” to neoconservative foreign policy and “able to change the country’s orientation.” He then named JD Vance as a member of that cadre—alongside Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz. By placing the sitting vice president on a short list with three of the most outspoken critics of Trump’s foreign policy, Carlson was outing Vance as a co-architect of the very project now threatening to split Trump’s coalition.

Does Vance legitimately belong on this list? The answer is both no and, in the end more weightily, yes.

Start with the no. On Israel, Vance and Trump appear to be in lockstep. Like Trump, Vance understands Israel as a strategic partner against shared adversaries. Senior Israeli officials have told me personally that Vance, behind closed doors, is a “staunch and unambiguous supporter” and a “reliable friend.” Nothing they see in private, they say, resembles the figure Carlson described to Fuentes.

Now the yes. On Ukraine, Vance has placed himself at the tip of the spear against continued U.S. aid, castigating establishment Republicans for writing blank checks to Kyiv while humiliating the Ukrainian President Zelenskyy during his visit to the White House. Vance’s sustained and vocal support for a negotiated settlement—one that would require Ukraine to surrender significant amounts of territory that Russia has thus far failed to seize militarily—has infuriated European allies and hawkish senators. But among many MAGA voters, Vance’s stance reads as a direct indictment of the expeditionary reflex they believe defined post-9/11 Republican foreign policy. It is precisely Vance’s break from “neoconservatism” that Carlson highlights as the entry point for reorienting the right.

“Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. To those unfamiliar with the anti-Zionist undercurrents of the new right, their visit may have seemed a simple expression of Catholic devotion.”

But Vance edges closer still to Carlson, beginning with the company he keeps. It was Vance who invited Carlson to the Vice President’s official office to co-host Kirk’s weekly podcast after the TPUSA founder’s death, not vice versa. Vance used his stature to rescue the talk show host from a moment of public revulsion from extremist content. With White House backing, Carlson positioned himself as Kirk’s successor as MAGA’s spokesman to and for the young. Vance has publicly explained his willingness to back Carlson as the product of gratitude for helping him to gain the Republican nomination for Vice President. Gratitude and loyalty are no doubt praiseworthy traits, and this explanation is clearly meant in part to underline Vance’s capacity in both areas. Until one considers that the person who granted Vance the nomination was not Tucker Carlson but Donald Trump.

Since converting to Catholicism in 2019, Vance has also clearly absorbed the postliberal critique of the American order articulated by the “Catholic Integralists,” writers like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule. Their argument—that the liberal founding of the United States carries within it the seeds of its own decay—has become a kind of catechism for alienated young men who believe the system turned against them. Postliberals treat the post-1945 American order as an extension of the liberal founding—both of which were bad. America, in this view, is an ideological empire masquerading as a security system whose corruption was inherent in its founding. Carlson translates that critique directly into geopolitics: alliances are not strategic tools but immoral shackles. American global leadership is a civilizational delusion; support for Israel is the theological distortion that keeps the right from recovering its bearings.

To be sure, Vance does not faithfully repeat all the words of the postliberal prayers, but he kneels at crucial moments. His attacks on Ukraine aid, his call for a negotiated settlement on Russian terms, his insistence that U.S. commitments abroad reflect a spent ideology rather than hard strategy—all place him closer to Carlson’s reframing of American power than to Trump’s attempt to repurpose the postwar system against China.

The result is a worldview that cannot sustain the coalition or the alliance network required to confront Beijing. Every partner becomes an ideological burden, every commitment a mark of corruption.

And here is the deeper point. When Carlson attacks “neoconservatism,” he is not merely engaging in a policy argument.He is deliberately drawing on and mobilizing the older Christian tradition from which post-liberalism draws. For centuries, Catholicism embraced supersessionism—the belief that the Church had displaced Israel in God’s covenant. Vatican II formally rejected this doctrine as false in 1965, but vestiges of the Church’s discarded worldview still circulate in postliberal circles and in parts of the Christian-nationalist right. Carlson has made those remnants operational. He platforms Orthodox figures who recycle medieval anti-Jewish polemics alongside Protestant pastors who denounce Christian Zionism as a theological mistake. In the Fuentes interview he dropped his “just-asking-questions” posture altogether and called Christian Zionism “a heresy.”

Strip away the theological robes, and the geopolitical effect is alarming: a right that recoils from the very alliances Trump needs to anchor a China strategy across the Middle East and Indo-Pacific. This is the intellectual milieu in which Vance is openly operating. And that is why Carlson folded him into a cadre “able to change the country’s orientation.”

Seen from inside the New Right, Vance’s September decision to guest-host Kirk’s podcast—and to feature Carlson as his guest less than a week after the assassination—read as an unmistakable signal of alignment. Not an endorsement of antisemitism per se, but a willingness to treat Carlson’s antisemitic ecosystem as an acceptable part of the coalition. More than that: it conferred legitimacy on a current of thought whose logical terminus is the dismantling of the evangelical-Zionist pillar on which Trump’s big-tent coalition depends. In elevating Carlson at precisely the moment TPUSA had lost its internal ballast, Vance strengthened Carlson’s claim to ideological succession and accelerated the drift toward a right that cannot sustain America’s partnership with Israel—or the China strategy that partnership makes possible.

Vance’s courtship of Tucker Carlson marks a sharp departure from the tradition that brought Trump to power—not the religio-political doctrine of this or that postliberal Catholic theorist, but the Eisenhower–Reagan model of religious politics in America.

Eisenhower in particular has much to teach Vance. He famously said, “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” Clumsy and easily mocked, the statement remains strategically astute. Eisenhower understood that in the United States religion is politically potent only when articulated broadly enough to bind rival traditions together.

He practiced what he preached. For his second inauguration he opened the Bible his mother had given him upon his graduation from West Point. The verse before him read: “Blessed is the nation whose God is Jehovah.” The word “Jehovah” would have revealed the Bible as a Watchtower edition—published by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, then one of America’s most stigmatized sects. Eisenhower simply read the verse aloud as “the Lord.” Ten days after his first inauguration, he quietly converted to Presbyterianism—the faith of the American elite. His pastor, Edward Elson, baptized him in the National Presbyterian Church. The timing—barely a week after taking office—suggests political prudence more than theological urgency.

Nathan Howard/Pool Photo via AP

Eisenhower also cultivated both halves of mid-century Protestantism—the mainline and the evangelicals—even though their theological disagreements ran as deep as the social divisions they often reflected. His pastor in Washington was Edward Elson, but he made a point of bringing Billy Graham into the White House, seeking Graham’s counsel and hosting him repeatedly. Eisenhower rode these two horses simultaneously because he understood that, properly harnessed, religion could foster national cohesion rather than sectarian fracture.

Only one other modern Republican president matched that level of intuitive mastery: Ronald Reagan. His career-long approval rating of 53% comes closest to Eisenhower’s and rivaled any Democrat in the polling era. Reagan, too, treated religion not as dogma but as a moral vernacular—a language capable of uniting evangelicals, Catholics, Jews, and even secular patriots around a shared civic covenant. By offering America as the “city upon a hill,” he elevated belief itself, not any particular doctrinal claim. He transformed religion from a source of fracture into the grammar of national renewal.

Trump instinctively continued that Eisenhower–Reagan tradition. His coalition works because it is broad—evangelicals alongside Catholics, observant Jews alongside secular conservatives, Black Pentecostals alongside Hispanic charismatics. Despite his irreligious background, he understands what Eisenhower understood: that the language of American faith must be expansive and sunny if it is to be politically useful.

Vance is moving in the opposite direction. He is narrowing the vocabulary of American civic religion at the very moment it must remain wide. Where Eisenhower blurred sectarian lines, Vance sharpens them. Where Reagan invited competing traditions into a single civic myth, Vance draws distinctions. Where Trump kept the tent open, Vance signals a future in which the tent narrows.

An example of Vance’s penchant for playing up sectarian divisions rather than working to forge a winning electoral coalition came with his recent visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Accompanied by Second Lady Usha Vance and a host of photographers, he met with the Latin Patriarch, received confession, and participated in a private Franciscan Mass inside the Edicule. He knelt at the Stone of Anointing, prayed at the Chapel of the Crucifixion, lit candles from the tomb’s eternal flame, and posted afterward: “What an amazing blessing to have visited the site of Christ’s death and resurrection.”

To those unfamiliar with the anti-Zionist undercurrents of the New Right, the episode might well have appeared as a simple expression of Catholic devotion, which Vance’s online messaging apparatus made a point of rebranding as “Christian.” Lauren Witzke—a “Christian nationalist” former Delaware Senate candidate now aligned with Fuentes—circulated the clip with the caption: “The Vice President of the United States JD Vance opted out of the wall-kissing ritual in Israel, instead choosing to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.” This framing was enthusiastically adopted by other self-styled Christian nationalist influencers like Steve Bannon, who celebrated the need for “a Christian state of Jerusalem.”

Evangelicals, who form the backbone of Trump’s pro-Israel coalition, were pleased by none of this. Protestants contest the historical location of the crucifixion, with some favoring the Garden Tomb and others rejecting both sites as unproven.

The denigration of Israeli national symbols like the Western Wall entirely misreads how evangelicals—and many Catholics—understand the place. Evangelicals do not see a visit to the Wall as an act of submission to Jews. Jesus taught in the Temple; the Gospels and archaeology both attest to the site, and for evangelical theology the covenant with Israel and the covenant fulfilled in Christ are not competing dispensations but a single unfolding promise. To pray at the Wall is, in their view, to stand where Jesus stood and to honor the continuity of God’s dealings with His people.

And Vance, as a Catholic, had no need to play to sectarian sentiments. There is an unimpeachable Catholic precedent: John Paul II’s 2000 pilgrimage, during which he placed a handwritten prayer in the Wall’s stones—“God of our fathers… we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant.” When Vance’s allies mocked “kissing the wall” as a humiliation ritual imposed by Jewish donors, evangelicals and many Catholics saw not bravado but a gratuitous rupture with a shared sacred history. In the Vance–Carlson alignment, they recognized an effort to redefine that history—and to sever the covenantal bond that has long anchored the pro-Israel core of the conservative coalition.

This recognition triggered discontent among evangelicals, which erupted into open confrontation. On Dec. 2, 2025, prominent Christian Zionist Dr. Michael D. Evans—founder of the Friends of Zion Museum—told a Jerusalem Post reporter: “Right now we are having a movement within the MAGA movement that is anti-Israel. It is very serious because it is led by Tucker Carlson, who is very close to the vice president. He is coming out and saying worse things presently than the Nazi Party said at their platform in 1920.” Days later, at a gala event attended by PM Netanyahu and Sarah, his wife, Evans pledged to train 100,000 Christian ambassadors to combat antisemitism and defend Israel, signaling the deepening rift inside Trump’s grand domestic coalition.

Vance’s political use of his own religious journey is therefore clever, but brittle. The intellectual circle that appears to shape his worldview—Deneen and Vermeule, the Catholic integralists—has major influence online, but almost none in electoral politics or within the Republican Party. Catholics as a voting bloc are smaller than evangelicals. Whereas evangelicals overwhelmingly vote Republican, Catholics, traditionally, have been split nearly evenly between the parties, and in recent decades have been far less churchgoing. Furthermore, most American Catholics are not integralists; they are not seeking to impose a premodern moral architecture on a pluralistic, democratic society. If all the true Catholic integralists in the United States gathered for an annual conference, they could fill a mid-sized bistro in Lower Manhattan.

That wager—that Vance can maintain operational loyalty to Israel while gesturing toward a post-evangelical Republican future shaped by Tucker Carlson—puts at risk the most indispensable component of the MAGA coalition: evangelicals. Their support is structural, not ornamental. Trump’s original political breakthrough—uniting evangelicals, Orthodox Jews, traditionalist Catholics, married women, and portions of Black and Hispanic churchgoers in a governing majority—cannot survive any project that treats evangelical Zionism as expendable. The reason why is simple math: Subtract evangelicals (and Orthodox Jews) and the Trump majority becomes a minority.

The strength of MAGA was never doctrinal purity. It was breadth—a unity of people who could never come together around a shared theology but could agree that the Progressive elite was assaulting their fundamental beliefs and their place in American life. That coalition survives only if its political vocabulary remains wide enough to include them. When the coalition fractures, so does the political foundation for a China strategy that can endure after Trump leaves the stage.

The United States will not lose the 21st century to Beijing on some distant battlefield. It will lose it here at home—in X posts and podcast studios—while the grand American majority assembled to prevent that outcome tears itself apart debating whether the Jews orchestrated 9/11.

Michael Doran is Director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East and a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.

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#Donald Trump

](https://archive.is/o/7bOzT/https://www.tabletmag.com/tags/donald-trump)[

#JD Vance

](https://archive.is/o/7bOzT/https://www.tabletmag.com/tags/j-d-vance)[

#Tucker Carlson

](https://archive.is/o/7bOzT/https://www.tabletmag.com/tags/tucker-carlson)[

#MAGA

](https://archive.is/o/7bOzT/https://www.tabletmag.com/tags/maga)

• Identity debate: Vivek Ramaswamy’s op-ed reignited the right-wing argument between those who tie Americanness to lineage and those who tie it to ideals, prompting pointed responses from critics invoking common heritage.
• Heritage American definition: Ramaswamy described heritage Americans as descendants of Founding-era populations, contrasting that view with his preferred identity based on allegiance to constitutional ideals.
• Critics’ stance: Opponents such as Colin Redemer argue for a shared culture and stock, aiming to sustain the notion that descent matters for American identity.
• ACS ancestry data: The 2024 American Community Survey shows about 44% of respondents claim Founding-stock first ancestry, but only 37% are solely attributable to those groups.
• Demographic shifts: Post-Founding immigration waves—late 19th/early 20th-century Europeans and post-1965 arrivals from Latin America and Asia—explain why at most one-third of Americans qualify as heritage Americans by descent.
• Poll findings: PRRI 2025 polling reveals that most Americans prioritize freedoms, institutions, and civic allegiance over Western European heritage, with just a quarter endorsing lineage requirements.
• Identity centrality: 2024 General Social Survey and 2021 Pew data indicate white respondents are least likely to view ancestry as central to identity, while Black and Hispanic adults report stronger origin ties.
• Conclusion: Heritage Americans are now a minority, yet the legacy of English-derived institutions persists, so the nation must blend respect for tradition with careful immigrant selection emphasizing cultural fit.

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Courtesy Anna Shipman/Unsplash.

What, exactly, is a heritage American? It’s the question that nobody can seem to answer, despite a smoldering dispute on X and among right-wing activists. Vivek Ramaswamy—currently seeking the Republican nomination for Governor of Ohio—reignited the debate in a provocative New York Times op-ed, which argued that the American right is now divided by its very understanding of what an American is.

“One vision of American identity is based on lineage, blood and soil: Inherited attributes matter most. The purest form of an American is a so-called heritage American — one whose ancestry traces back to the Founding of the United States or earlier,” Ramaswamy wrote. “The alternative (and, in my view, correct) vision of American identity is based on ideals. … You are an American if you believe in the rule of law, in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, in colorblind meritocracy, in the U.S. Constitution, in the American dream, and if you are a citizen who swears exclusive allegiance to our nation.”

Ramaswamy was replying to a growing tendency on the right to identify Americanness with descent from the nation’s Founding population. If your ancestors weren’t here at the Founding (or in 1860, or 1942, or 1965—nobody can quite agree which it is), then you aren’t a real American. At the very least, you aren’t as American as a member of the DAR.

Ramaswamy’s volley, of course, prompted its own replies, with critics insisting that America is not an idea, but a common heritage. “America does have a creed, but we also have a common culture and a common stock, as do all other nations,” Colin Redemer wrote in a representative response in First Things.

Nothing about this debate is new; the fight over whether America is defined by creed or descent has split the right since at least the 1990s, when intellectuals tussled over the ideas of Samuel Huntington and Pat Buchanan. But while this debate is in some senses about ideas, it is also fundamentally about demographics. And there’s a basic problem with one side’s position: most Americans simply aren’t descended from the Founding generation, or even those who were here after the Civil War.

To understand why, start with who was present at the Founding. As Schoolhouse Rock helpfully reminds us, “America was founded by the English, But also by the Germans, Dutch, and French.” To that list we can add, per one analysis, the Welsh; the Scotch-Irish; the Scottish and Irish separately; and a small number of Swedes. To be comprehensive, we should also count the ancestors of today’s black Americans, between 75 and 90 percent of whom are plausibly descended from slaves.1 And we should include descendants of the Native Americans.

What fraction of today’s Americans are descended from this “Founding stock”? One way to get at this question is simply to ask people their ancestry—as, indeed, the American Community Survey (an annual survey product from the U.S. Census Bureau) now does. The ACS gives respondents the ability to list two different ancestries; the figure below uses data from those who gave responses to at least the first one. Notably, this is an overestimate—if, for example, you’re an English person who arrived last week, you’d still count toward the Founding-stock-attributable share here.2

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The image above offers two visualizations of people’s responses to this question on the 2024 ACS. Each square in the waffle plot represents 1 percent of the relevant population. (There may be some slight error due to rounding.)

Figure 1 depicts the breakdown of respondent’s first self-reported ancestry (among all those who gave any answer). It implies that about 44 percent of respondents identified their ancestry as being in our Founding stock groups. The remaining majority—56 percent—don’t claim such descent.

Figure 2 looks within respondents who identified with a Founding-stock ancestry and asks what their secondary ancestry was, if any. About 56 percent gave no second answer, while 29 percent named some other Founding-stock ancestry. The remaining 15 percent said they had some non-Founding-stock secondary ancestry.

What does all this mean? At its greatest extent, the population solely attributable to Founding stock—i.e. descended from Founding-origin groups, without any out-marriage—is about 37 percent of Americans.3 In other words, a little bit more than one in three Americans is of the appropriate ancestry to potentially be a “heritage American.” There are (at most) about 126 million heritage Americans—substantially outnumbered by the (at least) 216 million Americans who are at least partly attributable to post-Founding arrivals.

Where did all of those new ancestors come from? People who post about “heritage Americans” often fixate on the wave of arrivals since the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. That law significantly increased immigration, especially from Latin America and Asia, creating a wave that has yet to subside. Per Pew, about a quarter of the population was either a first- or second-generation immigrant as of 2012—equivalent to about 85 million people today.

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But what about the remainder—the people who are neither recent arrivals nor plausibly Founding stock? You may remember that we are currently in the second great wave of immigration in American history. (If not, consult the Schoolhouse Rock video above.) The first—beginning after the Civil War and lasting until entry was significantly curtailed by the Immigration Act of 1924—saw the arrival of some 30 million people. That’s a significant increase compared to the 38 million people who were counted in the 1870 census. As I wrote in a 2023 Manhattan Institute report:

As before 1860, the vast majority of these new immigrants—90% from 1860 to 1919—were European; a further 5% were Canadian. But they came from many more countries, including Italy (12% of arrivals); Austria-Hungary (12%); Germany (12%); Russia (9%); the United Kingdom (9%); Ireland (7%); and the joint kingdom of Norway-Sweden (5%). A large number of Jews also arrived from across Eastern Europe.

These arrivals significantly altered the demographic composition of the United States. They were, of course, mostly European (a point that people enamored of “heritage Americans” like to bring up when I observe this). But that didn’t stop the native population from looking askance at them. Discrimination against Italians and Irish was not uncommon in early 20th century America. And indeed, the level of disruption that natives perceived was part of why immigration was effectively paused in the 1920s, to give the new arrivals time to assimilate.

In that report—as part of a separate inquiry—I asked a relatively simple question: how much of today’s population is attributable to post-Civil War arrivals? Imagine we had closed the borders in 1870 and kept them sealed; how much smaller would our population be? For purposes of the paper—which was about reparations for slavery—I looked in particular at the non-black population. But that group is relevant to our topic insofar as the black population is (as previously mentioned) mostly not attributable to immigration, and especially not to the first wave of immigration.

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The results of my efforts to answer that question are depicted in the chart above.4 In short: I estimate that the “natural increase” of the vintage 1860 population—the rate at which that population would have grown in the absence of any immigration or emigration—implies that today there would be about 88 million non-black Americans. In reality, there are 286 million non-black Americans, of whom about 197 million are non-Hispanic whites.

What this implies—although it’s just an estimate—is that 69 percent of today’s non-black population, and about 55 percent of the non-Hispanic white population, is attributable to post-1860 immigration. Put this together with a presumed 90 percent of the black population—the share assumed to not be descended from slaves—and you get an implied pre-1860-attributable share of 39 percent.5

You can quibble with this method as with the ACS estimate, but the basic point remains the same: however you slice it, the super-majority of Americans are not “heritage.” They are instead descended—either party or exclusively—from one of the tens of millions of people who came here after the Founding period, and even after the Civil War. Nor are these people all recent Asian or Hispanic arrivals—a sizable share of them are attributable to the mass migration of the late 19th and early 20th century.

If you believe that America is for heritage Americans, in other words, I regret to inform you that the heritage Americans are no longer the majority. And that change isn’t recent; it’s been baked in for over a century.

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Moreover, and in part because of this demographic mishmash, your view isn’t shared by most of your fellow Americans. Take, for example, the above 2025 polling from the left-leaning Public Religion Research Institute. PRRI asked respondents what characteristics are important to truly American. Across partisanship, large majorities emphasized things like believing in individual liberties, the Constitution, and our basic institutions. Respondents were narrowly divided on qualities like being born in America and believing in God. But only a quarter—including just a third of Republicans—say that you need to be of Western European heritage in order to be an American.

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For a similar result, consult a module from the 2024 General Social Survey, a subset of respondents to which were asked about how important they felt different things were to American identity. While again large majorities identified respecting our institutions and having American citizenship, only about a third said that being American requires having American ancestry. Interestingly, white respondents—the racial group most frequently identified as deserving some unique heritage status—were the racial group least likely to say that having American ancestry was important to being an American.

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That’s not all that surprising: in 2021 Pew polling, white respondents were the group least likely to self-identify with their self-defined origin. Less than a quarter said that their origin was “central to their identity,” relative to over half of black and Hispanic respondents. None of the above data allow breakout by self-identified ancestry. But it seems quite likely that those Americans who can trace their identity back to the Founding (or similar) are in large part not actually strongly identified with that lineage.

In short: when someone like Redemer claims that America has a “common stock,” he is factually incorrect. The large majority of today’s Americans are not descended from the people who founded our nation. That’s not a recent phenomenon. In fact, it’s been a part of our culture so long that most Americans do not consider common descent as an essential part of American identity—including those who would most obviously benefit from that being the case.

Does that mean that Ramaswamy is right, though, that “American identity is based on ideals?” I don’t think so—or, at least, not exactly.

The ideals that Ramaswamy says define an American—belief in “the rule of law, in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, in colorblind meritocracy, in the U.S. Constitution, in the American dream”—are what respondents to the above polls pointed to. But these ideas are, importantly, not untethered from a particular heritage. The concepts of liberty encoded in the American tradition at the Founding come from somewhere: the English philosophical and legal tradition in which the Founding fathers were embedded. Those ideas have an ineluctable cultural substratum. The Constitution of North Korea also provides for freedom of expression, but the words plainly have a different meaning in the DPRK.

To be an American, moreover, it is not enough to mouth the word “liberty.” One has to actually have the experience of practicing it, as de Tocqueville saw it practiced in the early American republic. And the form of liberty on display there is, like it or not, an inheritance of the particularly English political context from which our institutions sprang.

That culture, moreover, was and can be again challenged by immigration. The Irish and Italians who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th century came from distinct political cultures and struggled to integrate with America’s norms. Most other nations are not as free as is our own—some days it seems as though Europeans like our concept of free speech almost as little as the North Koreans do. And, as George Mason economist Garrett Jones has argued, American culture is a “goose that laid the golden egg”—even from the disinterested perspective of global total utility, interfering with our delicate institutional balance through uncontrolled mass immigration is an obvious error.

None of this means that we should seal the borders. Rather, it means that we need to pay careful attention to cultural as well as economic fit in selecting immigrants. We should want smart people who love our country and know how to practice American values. Conversely, there’s nothing wrong with rejecting people who hate America, no matter how skilled they might be.

It’s quite possible that Ramaswamy agrees with all this. But we should not undersell the challenge posed by the end of heritage America. We no longer live in a nation populated primarily by the English who founded the country. But we are still inheritors of their tradition, a tradition that is both essential to our success and hard to replicate.

In other words, most of us aren’t heritage Americans. But even those who aren’t have a responsibility to that heritage nonetheless.

1

This figure is estimated in the report I cite later in this piece.

2

If you care to replicate this analysis in IPUMS, I used the following codes for the ANCESTR1 and ANCESTR2 variables: 11 (“British”), 12 (“British Isles”), 21 (“Dutch”), 22 (“English”), 26 (“French”), 32 (“German”), 50 (“Irish”), 87 (“Scotch Irish”), 88 (“Scottish”), 89 (“Swedish”), 97 (“Welsh”), 900 (“Afro-American”), 902 (“African-American”), 920 (“American Indian”). For fig 1, I drop respondents who give answers > 994.

3

0.44 * 0.85 = 0.37.

4

If you want to know how I got there, read the report.

5

(1 - 0.69) * (1 - 0.14) + 0.9 * 0.14 = 0.39.

• Campaign promise: Zohran Mamdani seeks universal childcare, free buses, and municipal groceries funded by higher corporate taxes.
• State proposal: He calls for raising New York’s top corporate income tax from 7.25 percent to 11.5 percent, aligning with New Jersey’s top rate.
• Existing burden: NYC businesses already face federal 21 percent, state 6.5/7.25 percent, 30 percent MTA surcharge, and a city corporate tax of 8.85 percent.
• Combined rate: Adding all layers brings NYC’s corporate rate to 39.275 percent today and 44.8 percent under Mamdani’s plan.
• New Jersey comparison: NJ’s top 11.5 percent rate applies only above $10 million in profits and has no municipal tax, making it more competitive.
• Economic impact: Raising the rate would cover all profits linked to NYC activity, discouraging investment and making the city one of the least friendly business climates.
• Tax incidence: Research shows corporate taxes reduce investment, wages, and jobs while increasing consumer prices, meaning workers and shoppers shoulder most of the burden.
• Alternatives: The city could repurpose spending (e.g., universal free meals) and address childcare costs via staffing ratios, taxes, and land expenses instead of hiking corporate taxes.

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Courtesy David Dee Delgado/Getty.

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on universal childcare, fare-free buses, and municipal grocery stores—all of which he wants corporations to pay for. As a candidate, Mamdani called for New York State to raise its top corporate income tax bracket from 7.25 percent to 11.5 percent. This, Mamdani said, would match New Jersey’s rate (the highest in the country). New Yorkers by-and-large support the idea: 67 percent say they favor higher taxes on corporations—no doubt because they think only corporations will bear the burden.

Unfortunately, that’s not true. Nor is Mamdani’s plan as modest as he depicts it. Large corporations in New York City are subject to far higher corporate tax rates than elsewhere, since the city also levies its own corporate tax—rarely mentioned by Mamdani. If the state signs off on Mamdani’s proposal, then New York, already an expensive place to do business, would become an even less appealing investment. And all of this ends up hurting not “the rich,” but everyday workers and consumers.

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New York State businesses already pay a lot of taxes. In addition to the 21 percent federal rate, the state charges them at a rate of 6.5 percent on the first $5 million, and 7.25 percent beyond that. Most businesses also pay a 30 percent MTA surcharge on that state corporate tax, if the business activity was carried out in and around the New York City metropolitan area. And finally, New York City charges its own corporate tax of 8.85 percent—the tax Mamdani often leaves out.

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Counties subject to a 30 percent metropolitan transportation business tax (MTA surcharge) on their state corporate profits.

Thus, corporate profits above $5 million are currently taxed at a combined rate of 18.275 percent in New York City. Since New York City competes for investment not just with the rest of the country but also the rest of the world, one must factor in the federal rate, bringing the corporate tax rate to 39.275 percent. Mamdani’s proposal would raise that number to a staggering 44.8 percent.

New Jersey, by comparison, has a top rate of 11.5 percent—32.5 percent if you add in the federal charge. New Jersey’s top rate also only kicks in on profits over $10 million. The absence of city-level corporate taxes also makes it more competitive than New York.

Raising the corporation tax rate would require approval from the State Legislature. If Mamdani succeeds in convincing them to do so, it would be difficult for companies to avoid it simply by incorporating elsewhere. Corporate taxes apply to all profits derived from business, sales, and receipts within New York, regardless of where the seller is located or incorporated.

The move would therefore make New York City one of the least friendly business environments in the country, with rates far higher than any other jurisdiction when all taxes are properly taken into account.

“Good. Tax the rich! Tax the rich!” some will say. A closer look at the mechanics of corporate taxes, however, reveals that most of their costs are borne by consumers and workers, not shareholders.

Proponents of corporate taxes sometimes assume that it’s the shareholders who pay, usually in the form of lower dividends or corporate income. But that’s not what occurs. When governments increase taxes on corporations, return on investment decreases. Investors, seeking to maximize returns, will then allocate future resources to areas with higher returns. For example, a company might choose to open new stores in Miami rather than Manhattan, since returns would be higher. Capital investment (machinery, buildings, labor, etc.) then decreases, both because some of the profits are directly reallocated to the state, and because investors shift their resources elsewhere.

Workers are the most affected by this: less capital (think machinery, resources, tools, etc.) means workers are less productive, which ultimately translates into lower wages. Companies might also offset taxes through automation, freezing hiring or firing workers. Empirical studies have demonstrated this connection repeatedly: workers end up absorbing between 50 and 70 percent of the cost of corporation taxes, mostly in the form of lower wages, bonuses, and reduced bargaining power.

It’s hard to see costs when those costs take the form of opportunities and jobs not created. Nevertheless, the harms steadily accrue: as Veronique de Rugy, an economist at the Mercatus Center specializing in taxation, told me, “corporate tax shows up in real life as fewer office openings, delayed projects, less innovation, and ultimately lower pay for workers.”

High corporate taxes are also bad for affordability, since the costs are often passed onto consumers. One study found that about 52 percent of the burden of corporate taxes is tacked right onto the cost of goods sold, ultimately meaning higher prices at the checkout. Shareholders—which include most people who have a retirement fund—bear 25 percent of the cost of corporation taxes.

“Corporate income tax is the most distortive way to raise revenue,” said de Rugy. And in the end, it’s mostly paid for by workers and consumers anyways.

If Mamdani is insistent on growing New York City’s transfers, there are better ways to do it than hiking corporate taxes. The city could find less useful spending items—like universal free school meals, even for families whose incomes far exceed the median**—**and reallocate their budget to expanding existing public childcare.

Better yet, it could figure out what’s making services like childcare so expensive in the first place. That could mean raising some of the child-to-staff ratios, decreasing the taxes which make it so much more expensive to hire people, and addressing the high costs of land.

Such interventions would increase availability and lower cost. No-doubt, some New Yorkers would feel cheated out of the free childcare Mamdani said greedy corporations would pay for. Economics tells us, however, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

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