Sen. Mike Lee, who sits with Curtis on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been mum on Jeremy Carl’s nomination.
(Kenny Holston | The New York Times) Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, asks a question at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington on Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026. The senator is opposing President Donald Trump’s nominee to a top State Department role, likely sinking it.
Citing “insensitive remarks about the Jewish people,” Sen. John Curtis announced Thursday he will oppose a high-level State Department nomination from President Donald Trump, likely crushing it.
The Utah Republican, who has served in Congress for nearly a decade and began his first term in the Senate last year, questioned political commentator Jeremy Carl about his views on Israel during a Foreign Relations Committee hearing Thursday morning. Trump tapped Carl last June to become assistant secretary of state for international organizations.
“After reviewing his record and participating in today’s hearing,” Curtis said in a statement Thursday, “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.”
A spokesperson for Sen. Mike Lee, who also sits on the committee, did not respond to questions about his position on Carl’s nomination. He did not ask questions during the hearing.
Carl is a senior fellow at the conservative think tank Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, focusing on “immigration, multiculturalism, and nationalism,” according to his bio.
While Carl has questioned whether the U.S. should be sending aid to Israel, he has also made broader remarks about Jews — primarily on podcasts — that have been criticized as antisemitic. Curtis pointed to Carl, who was born into a Jewish family and later converted to Christianity, not pushing back when the host of the podcast “Seeking the Hidden Thing” said Jews claim “special victim status” because of the Holocaust.
Carl’s views on race and other inflammatory comments have been called into question, too, by Democratic opponents to the nomination.
He has repeatedly expressed a belief in the white nationalist “great replacement theory” — the false claim that immigrants are taking the place of white Americans. Carl published a book in 2024 titled, “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart.”
CNN reported in September that Carl had scrubbed thousands of controversial social media posts he had made, including one calling for American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten to be executed, and others describing rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as “political prisoners.”
During the Thursday hearing, Curtis was the most critical of those in the GOP-majority who sit on the 21-member committee. His announcement that he will oppose the Trump nominee is the latest in a line of breakages from the White House by the senator in recent weeks.
After the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last month, Curtis said he felt Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “undermined public trust” following the killing and said he supports a push from U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, for top Trump administration immigration officials to testify, “so trust can be restored and justice served.”
Curtis also criticized Trump earlier this month after the president posted a racist video portraying former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as monkeys.
“The post was blatantly racist and inexcusable. It should never have been posted or left published for so long,” the senator wrote on X.
