After Mr. Fuentes’s interview with Tucker Carlson, Republicans are considering just how far his views are from the nationalism embraced by President Trump’s followers.
For much of President Trump’s second term, the political heirs of his “America First” agenda have tried to form an intellectual framework for their movement that embraces nationalism while keeping overt bigotry out of the coalition.
With the rise of Nick Fuentes, a 27-year-old white nationalist, and his young, racist and antisemitic “Groyper” movement, some fear the exercise has failed.
The struggle and its stakes for the nation burst into view after the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson last week offered a friendly interview to Mr. Fuentes, an avowedly racist antisemite. The interview triggered rounds of acrimony and recriminations on the American right.
Mainstream Republicans have described Mr. Fuentes’s ascendance as a sudden surprise. But others — including some on the right — see it as a natural evolution within the movement that has come to be known as “national conservatism,” whose adherents embrace an American identity based not on the ideals of the nation’s founders but on the centrality of Christianity and familial ties to the land.
National conservatism adheres to a belief that American society lost its moorings when it drifted from a core power structure centered on the Christian white men who founded the nation and instead embraced diversity, multiculturalism and feminism. The movement’s statement of principles eschews the racist ideology espoused by Mr. Fuentes. It also rejects “globalism” and believes immigration has weakened the country.
“The distance between Fuentes and the mainstream Republican Party isn’t really that large,” said Richard Hanania, a conservative writer who once posted under a pseudonym in white supremacist forums. (He has since renounced his past writings.)
The interview on “The Tucker Carlson Show," in which Mr. Fuentes called for an exclusive, “pro-white,” Christian movement and said that “organized Jewry” undermines American cohesion, was denounced by high-profile elected Republicans including Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, the House speaker.
But while prominent voices in the national conservatism orbit, such as Vice President JD Vance, have never embraced Mr. Fuentes, some of the ideas they have espoused have similarities to Mr. Fuentes’s ruminations on splintering societal cohesion.
Mr. Vance has fretted about what he has called “social solidarity.” In an interview in May with the New York Times Opinion columnist Ross Douthat, he said, “I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation, and I don’t think that can happen if you have too much immigration too quickly.”
This summer, he gave a speech at the Trump-aligned Claremont Institute, in which he worried that if being an American means simply adhering to an ideal, “let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence,” American identity “would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreign citizens.”
“At the same time,” the vice president continued, defining citizenship purely as adhering to the principles of the nation’s founding documents would exclude many on the right who don’t subscribe to those principles and whose “own ancestors were here at the time of the Revolutionary War.”
A few months later, Senator Eric Schmitt, Republican of Missouri, was more explicit in a speech before the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, where he lamented that a “few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence” led to unfettered immigration and multiculturalism.
“We Americans,” he said, “are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.”
Mr. Fuentes and his explicit bigotry have been causing the Republican Party heartburn for years, including when Mr. Trump dined with him and the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, at Mar-a-Lago in 2022. Now, as Mr. Cruz put it, the G.O.P. faces a time of choosing.
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