President Donald Trump’s pick for a senior role in the State Department said Tuesday he is withdrawing from consideration after facing bipartisan backlash over race and religion.
Jeremy Karl, a conservative political commentator, said he was withdrawing from his nomination to be assistant secretary of state for international affairs due to a lack of support from Republican senators.
Karl needs unanimous support from all GOP members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to advance to a full Senate confirmation vote. Republicans on the panel hold a 12-10 majority, so any GOP votes against him would stall his nomination at 11-11 because tie votes would not advance to the Senate floor.
“Unfortunately, this unanimous support was not forthcoming at this time,” Karl wrote in X.
“I accept that political reality and don’t want the president, Secretary Rubio or the rest of his team to waste precious time and energy trying to reverse that decision,” he said.
Members of the Foreign Relations Committee grilled Karl during his confirmation hearings last month, some focusing on his past comments about race and religion.
Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, said in a statement after the hearing that he did not believe Carl was “the right person to represent our nation’s best interests in international forums,” adding that Carl’s “anti-Israel views and insensitive statements about the Jewish people” were “inappropriate.”
Carl has been nominated to implement US policy at the United Nations and other multilateral organizations.
During the hearing, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., quoted Carl’s comments as saying, “How do you define white identity and do you think white identity is being erased?”
Karl responded, in part: “I’m concerned about much of the common American culture we’ve had for a while, in particular, I think mass immigration has become more balkanized, and I think it weakens us. Again, I’m not going to run away from that comment.”
Murphy later posted a clip of the exchange on social media and called Carl a “legal white nationalist.”
Karl pushed back against that post, saying he was “not a white nationalist,” responding at X, “By ‘white culture’ I’m referring to the culture of the majority of Americans who lived here before 1965, and that “Americans of every *race or cultural background can ultimately share in and contribute to that culture.”
Carl, a senior fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute think tank in Washington, was deputy assistant secretary of the interior during Trump’s first term. In her post on Tuesday, she thanked Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for their continued support and the nomination.
“The fact that they chose to nominate me and supported my candidacy is one of many indications that the administration is not content to simply do business as usual or select nominees from ‘business as usual’ possibilities,” he wrote.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday night.
