Trump’s pick for top diplomatic role faces scrutiny over ‘white supremacist’ views

Donald Trump’s pick for a top diplomatic post has championed “white supremacist, racist, antisemitic and homophobic views”, a former US state department official has warned.

Jeremy Carl is set to go before the Senate foreign relations committee on Thursday as the president’s nominee for assistant secretary of state for international organisations, a role that involves managing relationships with and policies toward the United Nations and its agencies.

Carl, from Montana, served as deputy assistant secretary of the interior during Trump’s first term. He is now a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative thinktank based in Upland, California, and specialises in issues such as immigration, multiculturalism and nationalism.

He faces a rough ride from Senate Democrats over a long history of inflammatory remarks, some since deleted from social media, many on the topic of race.

Carl has repeatedly expressed sympathy for the “great replacement” theory, a baseless notion that immigration is engineered to supplant white populations. “Imagine thinking the Great replacement is a conspiracy theory,” he wrote in September 2021.

In 2021, responding to comments by then congresswoman Cori Bush about systemic racism, he wrote: “There is no ‘peaceful coexistence’ we are going to have when our opposition is led by people like this. We either win or die.”

In the same year, he lamented what he inaccurately described as the “total absence” of white Protestants in Joe Biden’s administration, calling it “a huge story” that was being ignored. He dismissed the creation of Juneteenth as a federal holiday as “race hustling and white-shaming” and described “self-hating white people” as “mentally ill”.

Following the conviction of members of the far-right Proud Boys for seditious conspiracy, Carl wrote that he would “rather be a Black man on trial for the assault of a white man in 1930s rural Mississippi than I would be a right-winger in DC today on trial for political crimes”. And in the wake of Derek Chauvin’s conviction for the murder of George Floyd, Carl repeatedly described Floyd as a “violent felon” and “thug”, writing that he was “looking up from hell”.

The Senate has previously rubber stamped Trump nominees such Pete Hegseth as defence secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr as health secretary and Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary despite misgivings over their extremism or lack of experience. But Carl may prove a bridge too far.

Desirée Cormier Smith, the co-founder and co-president of the Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice, said: “My concern with Mr Carl is that he not only has no multilateral qualifications for the job but, perhaps more important, he has espoused white supremacist, racist, antisemitic and homophobic views. He is a proponent of the great replacement conspiracy theory, which essentially says that Jewish people and people of colour are in cahoots to ‘replace’ white people around the world.”

She added: “He has written books about a white genocide and how anti-white racism is going to ruin American democracy. He has called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 an ‘anti-white weapon’. This is someone who has extremely dangerous and offensive worldviews and I don’t believe he could credibly represent the United States to the rest of the world.”

Trump has rattled global alliances with tariffs, threats to Greenland and the gutting of the United States Agency for International Development. A survey by Pew Research last year found that positive ratings of the US had dropped significantly in 15 countries since the previous year. One of the biggest declines was in neighbouring Mexico.

Smith, formerly the state department’s special representative for racial equity and justice, warned that the confirmation of Carl would only further damage America’s standing. “White people only represent about 7% of the global population,” she noted. “Imagine how he would be able to credibly engage in a respectful manner as partners with diplomats from Africa, from Latin America, from the Caribbean, from Asia, from Europe who are not white?

“How could they engage with someone who essentially believes in white supremacy? I don’t think it would be in the best interest of the United States to send someone to engage with the world who has these kinds of racist, offensive views.”

Last September, CNN reported that Carl had deleted at least 5,000 social media posts, including expressions of sympathy of Trump supporters who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, whom he described as “political prisoners”. He even sought to have material removed from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine – though not all of it disappeared.

In December, Jewish Insider highlighted more of Carl’s past comments, including an apparent call for the “Jewish question” to be addressed.

Carl faces a committee united in opposition on the Democratic side. With no votes to spare, he will need every Republican on the panel to fall into line if he is to be reported favourably to the Senate floor.

Jeanne Shaheen, the committee’s top Democrat, told the Axios news site: “I am going to ask him about his statements with respect to women, and the antisemitic comments.” Senator Tim Kaine was quoted by Axios as saying: “I’m amazed that Republicans have not pulled his nomination. He has such a flagrant series of just horrible missteps, discriminatory, antisemitic comments.”

Earlier this week Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, took to the Senate floor to denounce the nominee. “To call Jeremy Carl a radical and a bigot and unqualified is all far too kind,” he said, accusing him of a “long history of making violent, antisemitic and openly racist comments on podcasts and on social media”.

Schumer added: “He said that ‘Jews often love to play the victim.’ And on a podcast a few years ago he added ‘throughout history, Jews chose some professions that made them more oppressive and they can’t be surprised that the average descendants of Cossack peasants would be resentful towards them.’

“Can you believe this? What stereotypical garbage. On the Holocaust, Jeremy Carl simply says: “Everyone has traumas in their past.” In other words, get over it. That’s vile.”

The state department did not respond to a request for comment.