Trump State Department Nominee Withdraws After Brutal Grilling in Confirmation Hearing

Jeremy Carl, President Donald Trump’s pick for a top State Department post, announced on Tuesday that he would be withdrawing his nomination, after a poor performance at his Senate confirmation hearing last month.

Carl, a senior fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute, was nominated by the president to the post of Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs in June, where he would oversee relations with international organizations like the UN.

In his withdrawal announcement on X, Carl cited an inability to secure a majority in the Senate, writing that Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s support was not enough to secure the nomination.

“Unfortunately, for senior positions such as this one, the support of the President and Secretary of State is very important but not sufficient,” he wrote. “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 claimed that he accepted the “political reality” and did not wish “to have the President, Secretary Rubio, or the rest of his team waste valuable time and energy” attempting to change Congress’s mind.

“Under our Constitutional system, that is the role that the Senate has in deciding Presidential appointments at this level and I accept that political reality, and do not wish to have the President, Secretary Rubio, or the rest of his team waste valuable time and energy attempting to change that decision,” wrote Carl.

A former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior in Trump’s first term, Carl has a history of controversial comments about race, women, and Jews. His decision to withdraw follows a tense Senate confirmation hearing in February, where his history of making incendiary statements about Jews and espousal of the anti-Semitic “great replacement theory” became a sticking point.

During one crucial moment, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) grilled Carl about his claims that white identity is being erased. The nominee sputtered through his answers, leading Murphy to post a clip of the exchange where he went so far as to call Carl “a legit white nationalist.”

The hearing led Carl to lose at least one Republican vote, Sen. John Curtis (R-UT), who announced after the proceedings that he would not support Carl.

“After reviewing his record and participating in today’s hearing, I do not believe that Jeremy Carl is the right person to represent our nation’s best interests in international forums, and I find his anti-Israel views and insensitive remarks about the Jewish people unbecoming of the position for which he has been nominated,” he wrote.

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