When Kevin Roberts, the head of conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation, rose to face the wrath of his staff at a town hall this week, he was also confronting a revolt within Donald Trump’s Maga movement.
In the space of a few days, Roberts had provoked a mutiny among the footsoldiers of American conservatism, by defending the airing of an interview with a 27-year-old Holocaust denier who has condoned rape.
In a short video posted on social media last week, the former college president addressed a sit-down with Nick Fuentes, by former Fox News host and Trump ally Tucker Carlson, that had prompted condemnation from many figures on the right and led to calls for Heritage to disassociate itself from Carlson, whose show it had previously sponsored.
But Roberts chose to defend Carlson, saying the host “always will be a close friend” of the organisation that has incubated right-wing thought since Ronald Reagan’s era and helped shape Trump’s political agenda. He added: “The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division.”
Roberts’ comments ignited a firestorm that threatened to rupture an already fragile Maga coalition, which encompasses traditional conservatives and more extreme figures such as Fuentes, with whom Trump dined in 2022. Trump said at the time that he was not aware of Fuentes’s views.
Numerous antisemitism campaigners cut ties with Heritage, as did Stephen Moore, a veteran economist at the foundation who is close to Trump and who co-authored the Project 2025 playbook for the administration.
As Democrats piled up impressive electoral wins in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City this week, the Republican party became increasingly embroiled in the row over its far-right flank.
“It is the beginning of a reckoning of the American right with this dark underbelly of especially young, very online people . . . who are attracted to figures like Fuentes,” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. “Those on the right have to police their own stables as well.”
House speaker Mike Johnson called Fuentes — whose interview has already been viewed more than 23mn times — “blatantly antisemitic, racist and anti-American”. He added that he did not think Carlson should have given a platform “to that kind of speech”.
In a lengthy monologue, conservative firebrand Ben Shapiro accused Carlson of “normalising Nazism”, playing clips in which Fuentes admired Hitler, justified racism and suggested women wanted to be raped.
Fuentes was the leader of a “splinter faction . . . now being facilitated and normalised within the mainstream Republican party,” Shapiro said.
But vice-president JD Vance, with whom Carlson claims to be friendly and whose wife Fuentes has referred to with an anti-Asian slur, appeared to dismiss the debate as unnecessary “infighting”.
“I care about my fellow citizens — particularly young Americans — being able to afford a decent life, I care about immigration and our sovereignty,” he wrote on X. “If you care about those things too, let’s work together.”
Within the Heritage Foundation, staffers were less sanguine. In a tense, almost two-hour long town hall held by Roberts on Wednesday, a recording of which was leaked online, some openly called for his resignation.
Robert Rector, the mastermind of welfare reform in the 1990s, invoked William F Buckley, saying: “You have to expel the lunatics . . . if they are in your movement you look like clowns.”
Amy Swearer, a senior fellow at Heritage, told a visibly uncomfortable Roberts that he had shown “a stunning lack of both courage and judgment”.
Roberts conceded that Fuentes was not a conservative but “we have to understand that in 2025, that evil person . . . has an audience of several million people”. He added his initial video was intended to appeal to a subsection of Fuentes’s audience “who might be with us”.
Roberts added that he had “made a mistake” and apologised for using the term “venomous coalition”, which some had interpreted as antisemitic.
A spokesperson for Heritage pointed the FT to previous comments made by Roberts in which he said “everyone has the responsibility to speak up against the scourge of antisemitism no matter the messenger”.
However, the apology angered some of Carlson’s defenders. “Absolutely pathetic. Pull your donations to Heritage immediately. And let them know why,” said Daniel McAdams, who runs the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
For now, Roberts remains in his post. Heritage board member and Princeton professor Robert George posted that the conservative movement “simply cannot include or accommodate white supremacists or racists of any type” but did not call for Roberts to go.
But the shattering of the foundation’s long-standing “one voice” policy, which urges employees to “always publicly advocate for a single, unified position” may be a harbinger of similar rifts across America’s right.
Defenders of Carlson and Fuentes “have believed until this very moment, that there are no enemies to the right, and that is an asinine position to take,” said Mark Goldfeder, a director at National Jewish Advocacy Center who has cut ties with Heritage over Roberts’ remarks.
“If your tent is enough to include neo-Nazis and their fangirls like Tucker Carlson, then it is too big for certainly myself and I would hope . . . for the majority of American people,” he added.