Vice President JD Vance’s answer to a question about conservative pundit Tucker Carlson left some in the audience disappointed.
Page A3From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 2 September 2026
Haley tells Vance to choose Israel or Tucker Carlson; Vance courts Jewish Republicans while Tucker still looms.
As it ran on the front
Nikki Haley says JD Vance has to choose a side: Israel or Tucker Carlson. Read that again. That is not a foreign policy debate, that is a loyalty test administered by a woman who is not currently in government, to a man who currently is the Vice President of the United States, about a podcast host.
Here is how it actually works. Vance spent the week doing the thing every politician does when two donor bases don't like each other: he went and courted Jewish Republicans directly, made the rounds, said the right words in the right rooms. Meanwhile, over in the other room, Tucker Carlson is still there. Still looming, as the reporters put it, which is a polite way of saying he still has the ear of the base Vance actually needs to win a primary someday.…
…(cont) This isn't about Israel and it isn't about Tucker Carlson personally. This is about what happens when a party's actual foreign policy gets decided by which donor writes the bigger check this quarter and which podcast gets the bigger download numbers. Nobody in that fight is talking about what any of this costs, or who's affected by it, or what the actual troops moving around the Middle East think about being a proxy in a beef between a cable pundit and a hotel chain of political action committees. They're talking about who Vance has lunch with.
I've watched this movie before. Somebody very powerful says 'choose a side,' and the choosing is never the point — the audience for the choosing is the point. Every reporter covering this as a horse race between two factions is missing that both factions get what they want either way: attention, leverage, a Vice President who now owes both of them a favor he can't pay off with policy alone, so he'll pay it off with something else. Access. A meeting. A judgeship somewhere down the road.
The stakes here aren't abstract. This is the man a heartbeat away from the presidency, being asked to publicly pick a lane on a question that will directly shape military decisions in the Middle East, and the deciding factor being floated in the press is a talk show host's audience. Write that down. Then watch what Vance actually does, not what he says in front of either room.
“Two named enemies, one Vice President, and no actual position taken – that's not indecision, that's a business plan. Whoever 'wins' that argument gets a favor owed, and favors owed by a Vice President don't get spent on you.”
“Look, courting multiple constituencies isn't caving, it's coalition math, that's just retail politics — I mean, is it retail politics if there's no actual product? No, forget I said that, it's leadership, is what it is.”
The receipts
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley accused Vice President Vance Tuesday of not taking a clear stance on Israel — slamming him for trying to “be both.” “Right is right.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.