WASHINGTON, March 10 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s nominee for a senior State Department position withdrew from consideration on Tuesday after his controversial comments about Jewish people and diminishing white power stirred rare Republican opposition to the president’s choice.
In a statement on X, Jeremy Carl, Trump’s nominee for assistant secretary of state for international organizations, thanked Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for their support, but said their backing was not sufficient.
“We also needed the unanimous support of every GOP Senator on the Committee on Foreign Relations, given the unanimous opposition of Senate Democrats to my candidacy, and unfortunately, at this time this unanimous support was not forthcoming,” Carl said, using an acronym to describe the Republican Party.
The influential Senate committee typically votes on a nomination before sending it to the full Senate for a confirmation vote.
The nomination was in doubt since Republican Senator John Curtis of Utah, a member of the committee, said after Carl’s nomination hearing in February he did not believe Carl was the right person to represent the country’s best interests at international organizations.
Curtis cited Carl’s “anti-Israel views” and “insensitive remarks” about Jewish people as disqualifying factors.
Failing to support a Trump nominee is a rare rebuke by the Republican-majority Senate, which to date has backed the vast majority of the president’s nominations and policies.
A State Department spokesperson said it is committed to advocating for the Trump administration’s “back to the basics” approach to international organizations.
“Following Mr. Carl’s decision to withdraw his nomination, we will continue working to ensure strong U.S. leadership and reform efforts in this space,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Lawmakers questioned Carl at the hearing about his prior comments about Jewish people and his belief in the “great replacement theory,” a conspiracy theory associated with white supremacy that leftist and Jewish elites are engineering the ethnic and cultural replacement of white people with non-white immigrants.
Carl said at the hearing that he did not remember making some of the comments read aloud by senators and he regretted some others. “I made some comments in interviews about minimizing the effects of the Holocaust that were absolutely wrong,” he said.
When asked at the hearing whether there was an effort to replace white Americans under way, Carl said he believed Democratic immigration policies have “certainly sent signs of that.”
Carl is currently a senior fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute think tank. He was a deputy assistant secretary of the interior during Trump’s first term.
(Reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones and Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Alistair Bell)
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