Turning Point exposed a brewing MAGA civil war. Can JD Vance unite it?

By Steve Contorno, CNN

Phoenix (CNN) — This weekend’s gathering of young Republicans and conservative influencers in the Arizona desert offered a glimpse into the divisions already fraying President Donald Trump’s coalition even before its lame-duck leader is out of the picture.

Enter Vice President JD Vance, a figure many in the movement view as the man who can keep the party’s big tent together through the Trump era and beyond.

Speaking Sunday at Turning Point USA’s annual conference, AmericaFest, Vance not only addressed head-on the friction pulling at the party, but he also encouraged attendees to embrace it.

“I know some of you are discouraged by the infighting over any number of issues. Don’t be discouraged,” Vance said. “Would you rather lead a movement of free thinkers who sometimes disagree than a bunch of drones who take their orders from George Soros?”

As the party’s No. 2, Vance has spent the past year cautiously treading through the GOP’s arising tensions, taking care not to alienate any corner of the party’s growing tent. He has largely maintained credibility with Israel’s allies and its skeptics, Big Tech billionaires and artificial intelligence alarmists, immigration hardliners and green-card advocates, isolationists and foreign policy hawks, populists and establishment Republicans.

But the four-day Phoenix summit, the first since a gunman killed Turning Point’s founder, Charlie Kirk, exposed the challenge ahead for Vance. Speakers bad-mouthed one another from the stage, clashed over whether to engage with conspiracy theorists, argued over who belongs in the GOP and America and sparred openly over Israel’s influence on US foreign policy.

Vance is familiar with adapting to his party’s changing winds. He once aligned with “Never Trump” Republicans before becoming a vocal supporter — a transition that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles acknowledged to Vanity Fair appeared politically expedient. And he remains the Republican best positioned to emerge from these internal struggles in 2028. A new CNN poll found 22% of Republican and right-leaning independents would like to see Vance run for president.

No other GOP figure eclipsed 5%. And on the opening night of AmericaFest, Kirk’s widow and Turning Point’s new leader Erika Kirk endorsed Vance for president, even though he has yet to formally launch a bid.

Vance urged Turning Point attendees to help pressure the Republican-led Senate to approve Trump’s judges so there can be “more prosecutions” and “swifter justice.” He hurled insults against Democrats heading into the midterms and even launched some early missives at some of the minority party’s rumored 2028 contenders that he may one day face.

In a deeply partisan speech dripping in Christian nationalism, Vance called on the movement to turn its ire outward, instead of inward.

“I’m not saying you have to be a Christian to be an American,” Vance said. “I’m saying something simple and truer: Christianity is America’s dream.”

An early 2028 endorsement

Should he run, Vance will now carry into the primary a key base of support from an organization credited with boosting Trump’s successful courtship of millennial and Gen Z voters. Turning Point also brought in $84 million in the 2024 fiscal year, according to its most recent tax filings, and has field operations that were battle-tested during the last election cycle. Turning Point intends to have a presence helping Vance in all of Iowa’s 99 counties heading into the critical first caucus state, Turning Point’s Andrew Kolvet said.

Charlie Kirk’s friends and allies said the early backing reflects the deep friendship he developed with Vance, whom he endorsed for Senate in 2022 and then forcefully lobbied to become Trump’s running mate two years later. Sources briefed on the internal conversations said Erika Kirk and other Turning Point leaders were reticent to get ahead of Trump — who may ultimately decide which Republican he will pass the torch to — but nevertheless wanted to send a message to other GOP leaders starting to flirt with 2028 plans.

“The last thing that Charlie Kirk texted me was ‘JD has to win,’” conservative influencer Benny Johnson told CNN as he entered the Phoenix conference hall.

The endorsement from Turning Point comes after Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a prospective 2028 contender, recently made clear to Vanity Fair he would back Vance over challenging the vice president for the GOP nomination. Meanwhile, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a rising star on the right, also threw her support behind Vance from the AmericaFest stage.

Among Turning Point attendees, Vance has many fans. Katherine Munson, a 25-year-old from Texas, said Vance would be a driving force to “move America forward and be a Christian nation again,” while 19-year-old Michigander Easton Urbanek said Vance’s “nationalist messaging” resonates with younger Republicans.

“When you look at what right-wing Zoomers are believing, they believe in Trump’s message or further, and I think Vance could really tap into that,” he said.

Not everyone, though, was ready to jump on board a presidential campaign. Shea Thompson, a 21-year-old from Seattle, said that it was too soon to have the conversation and that “we should keep focused on Trump right now.” Californian Jose Rodriguez, 32, said these kinds of party succession plans drove him away from Democrats after Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders lost the 2016 primary to Hillary Clinton.

“I can’t just blindly follow JD Vance,” he said.

Vance, for his part, has avoided public discussions about his political ambitions. On Sunday he thanked Erika Kirk for “her support” and vowed to “fight alongside you,” but didn’t directly address the endorsement. Sources familiar with private deliberations about his future say that Vance is incredibly sensitive to the timing of formal conversations about 2028.

In the meantime, Vance’s inner circle believes his political future is directly tied to whether Trump can convince Americans he has successfully transformed the country for the better. And Vance has been deployed to help message the president’s agenda to voters straining to find hope in the face of an affordability crisis.

“I know that some of you are impatient at the pace of progress, and my response to that is good. Be impatient,” Vance said. “Use a desire for justice for your country as fuel to get involved in this movement.”

A looming challenge for MAGA: Nick Fuentes

Vance has at times sought to de-escalate conflict within the party rather than join other Republicans warning of a troubling strain of racism and antisemitism among younger conservatives. On social media, he regularly deflects criticism of his party back onto Democrats, accuses the media of trying to divide MAGA or returns to the issue he blames for many of the country’s ills, illegal immigration.

Earlier this year, he defended young Republican operatives who shared Holocaust jokes and ethnic slurs in text messages published by Politico, dismissing bipartisan backlash as “pearl clutching.” He also urged forgiveness for a Department of Government Efficiency staffer who resigned over racist social media posts. The staffer was later rehired.

That approach, however, has carried risks.

Last week, Vance waded into an X debate over Israel and antisemitism — an increasingly polarizing issue within the GOP base — to defend his supporters. Within the online back-and-forth, Vance responded to a White nationalist influencer by writing: “I would say there’s a difference between not liking Israel (or disagreeing with a given Israeli policy) and antisemitism.” The same person replied by urging Vance to “include India in the third-world country ban.” Vance’s wife is of Indian descent.

The exchange also appeared to embolden Nick Fuentes, an avowed White nationalist and podcaster whose appeal to young conservatives has long concerned Republican leaders. “It’s okay to dislike Israel,” Fuentes posted in response.

Fuentes was a regular tormenter of Turning Point but increasingly has the ear of many within Charlie Kirk’s youth movement. His recent interview with Tucker Carlson ripped the conservative movement apart, an episode that loomed large over the weekend. Some speakers, like comedian Rob Schneider, called out Fuentes by name and Carlson for elevating him, while others delivered more oblique rebukes.

“If you believe that Hitler was pretty f**king cool, you have no place in the future of the conservative movement,” Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said. “If you call Usha Vance, the second lady of the United States of America, a ‘j**t,’ you have no place in the future of the conservative movement,” referring to an ethnic slur Fuentes has used in the past to describe Vance’s wife.

Last year, Vance called Fuentes a “total loser,” but he hasn’t weighed in on the podcaster’s more recent push for relevance. Fuentes went unmentioned in Vance’s remarks Sunday, and the vice president told the crowd he didn’t arrive with a “list of conservatives to denounce and deplatform.”

But Vance also appeared ready to embrace the racially charged rhetoric that Fuentes’ supporters now increasingly expect for their leading figures.

“In the United States of America,” Vance told the crowd, “you don’t have to apologize for being White anymore.”

CNN’s Jeff Simon, Kristen Holmes and Alayna Treene contributed to this report.

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