Bipartisan opposition over inflammatory comments likely to sink Trump State Dept. nominee

Jeremy Carl, the Trump administration’s pick for a senior position at the State Department, is unlikely to get the job after a bipartisan group of senators grilled him over his history of racist, sexist and anti-Semitic comments and posts.

Republican Senator John Curtis of Utah said Thursday after a heated Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing that he would not support Carl’s nomination to be assistant secretary of state for international organizations.

“After reviewing his record and attending today’s hearing, I do not believe Jeremy Carl is the right person to best represent our nation’s interests in international forums, and I believe his anti-Israel views and insensitive statements about the Jewish people are unbecoming of the office for which he has been nominated,” Curtis said.

Republican opposition will likely defeat Carl’s candidacy; If all Democrats on the committee also vote no, Carl will have no vote to advance. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also opposed her nomination.

A White House official told CNN Thursday evening that Carl is still a candidate.

CNNs KFile appeared in September 2025 Carl reportedly deleted thousands of social media posts, many of which revealed a history of inflammatory comments (including inflammatory posts about race, claiming that “peaceful coexistence” with Democrats was impossible, and even calling for a political rival to face the death penalty).

Carl has also written repeatedly about the “Great Replacement,” a conspiracy theory aimed at deliberately bringing non-White immigrants to Western countries to “replace” White populations.

At his hearing on Thursday, Carl was pressed about past comments and others, including a 2024 podcast appearance in which he said “Jews often like to play the victim” and that “the Holocaust dominates much of modern Jewish history,” according to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat.

Shaheen, the committee’s ranking member, said Carl “has tweeted over 850 times, appeared on five podcasts, and repeated this language” since his nomination.

“It’s a pattern,” he said.

“It’s hard to see how we can trust you if you can’t even restrain yourself when you’re a candidate,” he told him.

Carl argued that he understood “the importance of restraint and behavior.”

“Unfortunately, I have to balance this with my current job, which involves advocacy. As I explained, I can’t completely set aside my day job,” he said. Carl is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. He served as a former deputy secretary of the Interior Department during President Donald Trump’s first term.

During a meeting with Democratic Senator Cory Booker, Carl said he regretted some of the comments he had made in the past about Jewish people.

“I made some comments in interviews about minimizing the impact of the Holocaust, which were absolutely wrong. And I’m not going to sit here and defend them,” he said.

But when asked if he regretted comments he made about other races, Carl said Trump repeated that “unity over diversity is strength.”

Senator Chris Murphy said Carl’s nomination was “heartbreaking” and called him “wildly unqualified” for the position. The Connecticut Democrat spent several minutes questioning Carl on his views on “anti-White discrimination” and “erasure of White culture.”

Carl struggled to answer Murphy’s questions about what constituted “White culture,” but said that “mass immigration” had erased “the common American culture” and that it “weakened us.”

Curtis, a Republican from Utah, pressed Carl on how he could counter allegations of anti-Israel bias at the United Nations, based on his previous comments.

And Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen, who is Jewish, called Carl’s past comments “despicable” and said his candidacy “should alarm every Senator who believes in basic decency.”

CNN reached out to the State Department about Carl’s nomination. Inside September 2025Spokespeople for both the department and the White House defended the candidate.

CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, Em Steck and Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.

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