President Donald Trump's pick for a senior role at the State Department said Tuesday that he is withdrawing from consideration after having faced bipartisan backlash over his comments about race and religion.
Jeremy Carl, a conservative political commentator, said he was backing out of his nomination to be assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs because of a lack of support from Republican senators.
Carl needed unanimous support from all GOP members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to advance to a full Senate confirmation vote. Republicans on the panel hold a 12-10 majority, so any GOP vote against him would stall his nomination at 11-11 since tie votes do not advance to the Senate floor.
"Unfortunately, at this time this unanimous support was not forthcoming," Carl wrote on X.
"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," he added.
Members of the Foreign Relations Committee grilled Carl last month during his confirmation hearing, with some focusing on his past comments on race and religion.
Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, said in a statement after the hearing that he did not believe Carl was the "right person to represent our nation’s best interests in international forums," adding that Carl's "anti-Israel views and insensitive remarks about the Jewish people" were "unbecoming."
The post Carl was nominated for involves implementing U.S. policy at the United Nations and other multilateral organizations.
During the hearing, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., referred to comments by Carl and asked, “How you define white identity and what you think is being erased about white identity?”
Carl responded, in part: “I am concerned with the majority common American culture that we had for some time, that through, particularly, mass immigration I think has become much more balkanized, and I think that weakens us. And again, I’m not running away from that comment.”
Murphy later posted a clip of the exchange on social media and called Carl a "legit white nationalist."
Carl pushed back against that post, responding on X that he is "not a White nationalist," that "the 'White culture' then that I was referring to was simply the culture of the overwhelming majority of Americans who lived here prior to" 1965 and that "Americans of *every* race or cultural background can ultimately share in and contribute to that culture."
Carl, a senior fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute think tank in Washington, was deputy assistant interior secretary during Trump’s first term. He thanked Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for their continued support and nomination in his post Tuesday.
“The fact that they chose to nominate me and were so supportive of my candidacy was one of many indications that this is an administration that was not satisfied to simply do business as usual nor to simply pick nominees from the same stable of ‘business as usual’ possibilities,” he wrote.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday night.
