The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 18 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is the Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

A civil war has erupted inside the MAGA movement over Nick Fuentes, the neo-Nazi and white supremacist, and President Donald Trump just made it worse. In an interview, Trump defended Fuentes in a way that will boost his standing inside MAGA in a big way. Yet it occurs to us that this is terrible news for JD Vance. The Vice President has tried to avoid taking sides on Fuentes, but it’s now clear that Fuentes represents a big constituency inside MAGA. Vance and everyone else who’s thinking about what MAGA will look like after Trump will have to take this very seriously. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp has a really good piece digging into the developing MAGA civil war about all this, so we’re talking to him about where the American right is going in the wake of it. Zack, great to have you on.

Zack Beauchamp: Hey, Greg. Good to be talking to you again.

Sargent: So to quickly recap, Tucker Carlson recently gave Nick Fuentes as a long, largely fawning interview. That caused some on the right to lash out at Carlson for platforming a “well-known Nazi sympathizer,” as one put it. Another called it “sick and despicable.” Trump finally broke his silence on all this. Here’s what Trump said about Tucker’s interview with Fuentes.

President Donald Trump (voiceover): We’ve had some great interviews with Tucker Carlson, but you can’t tell him who to interview. I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it. Get the word out. Let them. You know, people have to decide. Ultimately, people have to decide. So there you have it.

Sargent: Trump is just fine with platforming Nick Fuentes. Your response to all that, Zack?

Beauchamp: I don’t find this surprising at all, what Trump just said, to be clear. It’s consistent with his pattern of a very long time. You know, back as far as Charlottesville he said, there are very fine people on both sides. And then he told the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by during the 2020 presidential election and then he went on to defend the January 6 rioters, right? Trump’s attitude towards extremism is very consistently not to condemn and to play this sort of dance around it, where he’ll never say, basically, no, or he will in the most oblique terms. And if he does try to criticize it, he’ll walk that back sometime soon in some other way.

Sargent: So in addition to that, Zack, I want to flag something else because Trump in that exchange sort of tried to say, I don’t really know what Nick Fuentes stands for, but Axios just asked the White House if Trump condemns Fuentes’ racism and anti-Semitism, and the White House pointed Axios back to Trump’s remarks, which didn’t criticize Fuentes. So Trump and the White House can’t even claim ignorance anymore. They were given the explicit opportunity to condemn Fuentes’ racism and anti-Semitism and declined to do so. Zack, can you talk about what that means and what Fuentes really believes and who the Gropers are?

Beauchamp: I mean, the thing about Nick Fuentes is if you actually watch his show as opposed to his more sanitized public appearances on like sort of center-right or more mainstream-right podcasts, he’s not subtle about what he thinks, right?

This is a man who says that he admires and loves Hitler. He said at one point the Holocaust has never happened and made fun of it. And while at the same time, calling for the execution of “perfidious Jews,” that’s his term. This is as explicit anti-Semitism as you could imagine. This isn’t any of this coded stuff that you’ve gotten in the past. And so when the White House is refusing to condemn that, they’re not, it’s not just like refusing to condemn it, right? It’s saying it’s an acceptable part of our discourse, that this man should be somebody that Tucker Carlson can be friendly with without suffering social consequences or professional consequences, which is like how you maintain norms in a society, right?

You maintain boundaries that there are consequences for engaging in particular kinds of behavior. And when you say Nick Fuentes gets a pass, you’re saying there’s no limit. I mean, we’re talking really explicit, violent eliminationist anti-Semitism. At one point, he called for Jews to be forced to convert or leave the country, right? It really is that bad.

Sargent: Well, in your piece, you dug........

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