Jeremy Carl, President Donald Trump’s nominee for a senior role at the State Department, announced on March 10 that he is withdrawing his nomination after failing to secure enough support from GOP senators.
Trump, in June 2025, tapped Carl, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, to serve as the assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, which oversees U.S. participation in international bodies.
In a March 10 statement, Carl said that while he received support from Trump and State Secretary Marco Rubio, he did not have enough backing from GOP members on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to advance his 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 stated in a lengthy post on X.
“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 the outcome reflects the constitutional system for presidential appointments and that he accepts the “political reality.” Carl also noted that he did not wish to have the president or the rest of his team “waste valuable time and energy attempting to change that decision.”
“I am tremendously grateful to President Trump for nominating me and then (upon expiration of my original nomination) renominating me for this role, and I am also grateful to Secretary Rubio and his team for their continued support throughout this long and time-consuming process,” he said.
His withdrawal comes after the Senate confirmation hearing last month, during which lawmakers questioned Carl about his past remarks about Jewish people and the “great replacement theory,” which alleges that 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 that 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 underway, Carl said he believed that immigration policies from the Democratic Party “certainly sent signs of that.”
After the Senate hearing, Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) issued a statement saying that he would not support Carl’s nomination for the State Department position.
“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,” the senator said.
