Donald Trump’s nominee for a top diplomatic post has been withdrawn from consideration after a growing backlash over his past comments about race and Jewish people left him without crucial Republican support.
Jeremy Carl, who had been appointed to serve as undersecretary of state for international organizations – a role that oversees US policy toward organizations such as the UN – announced Tuesday that he would resign after failing to win unanimous support from Republicans on the Senate foreign relations committee.
In a statement published on X, Carl thanked Trump and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio for their support, but acknowledged that it would not be enough to secure confirmation.
“With unanimous opposition from Senate Democrats to my candidacy, we also needed unanimous support from all Republican (Grand Old Party) senators on the Foreign Relations Committee,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, at this time this unanimous support did not come.”
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee typically votes on nominations before sending them to the full Senate. Carl’s prospects had seemed shaky since his confirmation hearing in February, when a Republican member of the panel publicly broke ranks.
Utah Sen. John Curtis, considered one of the chamber’s most moderate Republicans, later said he could not support the nomination, citing Carl’s history of comments about Israel and the Jewish people.
“I find his anti-Israel views and insensitive comments about the Jewish people to be inappropriate for the position for which he has been nominated,” Curtis said.
The opposition was particularly damaging because committee Democrats were already united against Carl, leaving the White House dependent on unanimous Republican support to advance the nomination. The failure marks a rare setback for Trump in a Republican-controlled Senate that has largely approved his appointments.
Carl’s withdrawal was welcomed by the American Jewish World Service (AJWS), a nonprofit organization that highlighted his history of “racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic views” and asked committee members to oppose the nomination.
Rori Kramer, US advocacy director for AJWS, said: “We are delighted to see that Jeremy Carl will no longer serve in this vital role at the State Department. He represents those who have turned their backs on the universal human rights that the United States has long championed.
“Those rights remain important to everyone. Because of this, Jeremy Carl was unfit to serve. We oppose any candidate who espouses hate and fails to live up to those ideals.”
During his confirmation hearing, senators pressed Carl over a series of past statements that critics said echoed themes associated with white nationalist ideology. Senators grilled him about comments that appeared to support the so-called Great Replacement Theory, a widely debunked conspiracy theory that claims elites are deliberately replacing white populations with immigrants.
Asked if he believed there was a deliberate effort to replace white Americans, he responded that Democratic immigration policies had “certainly sent signals of that.”
Carl told senators that he did not remember making some of the comments cited during the hearing and said he regretted others. He also acknowledged making comments that minimized the impact of the Holocaust, calling them “absolutely wrong.”
Other criticism focused on earlier writings and interviews in which Carl argued that Jewish people “often love to play the victim” and suggested that resentment toward Jews might arise because they had historically chosen professions that made them “more oppressive.”
He also criticized the Juneteenth federal holiday, which marks the end of slavery in the United States, calling it an event of “racial pushback and white shaming.”
Carl is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, and previously served as deputy assistant secretary at the Department of the Interior during the first Trump administration.
He added in a second tweet: “Several senators in our caucus (and not just the ‘based’ ones) reached out to me to let me know how disappointed they were with this outcome. And several senators went above and beyond the call of duty to support me.
“…But unfortunately, we also have a significant number of problem senators, and without help from Democrats and a narrow majority, we are unfortunately going to see a lot of disappointment. Our voters need to pay attention in the primaries and, if you have a good senator, make sure that senator holds his weaker colleagues to the fire.”
