Latest assassination attempt on Trump barely made headlines — desensitized America or wise media silence?



On Sunday, February 22, 21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin, who authorities say breached the secure perimeter of President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort armed with a shotgun and a gas can, was reportedly shot and killed by the United States Secret Service. President Trump was not at his Florida residence at the time of the incident.

Christopher Rufo, BlazeTV co-host of “Rufo & Lomez,” has been surprised by the lack of public outrage about this third assassination attempt on President Trump.

“What I found so fascinating is that this story, which in any other time period in American history would be a huge national story [and] dominate headlines, seemed to pass through the news without much of a blip,” says Rufo.

But this story should be of interest to everyone, he argues, not only because “anyone who is attempting an assassination against the president of the United States represents a fundamental threat to the political order,” but also because there seems to be a strange and dangerous pattern at play.

Both Thomas Matthew Crooks, who shot President Trump in the ear at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally back in July 2024, and Austin Martin have some striking similarities, Rufo suggests.

Both were “bookish, young, white men, glasses, had some trouble, you know, fitting into the kind of high school social order. ... The reporting indicated that at least at some point in their recent past they were pro-Trump or pro-MAGA. Then they have, for whatever reason, some psychological break, and they end up trying to assassinate the president,” he explains.

“The evidence to me suggests that online radicalization is at least a significant part of this.”

But co-host Jonathan Keeperman thinks there’s another factor fueling the recent political violence: the “copycat effect.”

Once people “see someone doing something that is getting attention, the attention-seeking person then will just go copy that same behavior because what they actually want, what they're actually after, is that kind of attention,” he says.

“And so by ignoring these people, by pushing them out of the headlines, we're actually preventing more of this from happening in the future,” he suggests.

Keeperman also ponders the possibility that by trying to sleuth around and identify what’s fueling these acts of political violence we’re actually doing more harm than good.

“We're in a fallen world with fallen people, and they're lunatics, and they commit violence, and it's terrible, and it's tragic. But maybe, actually, our insistence that there's something more to mine from this ... or there's some meaning beyond just the fact that they're lunatics, is itself a kind of conspiratorial delusion that we're enacting in order to make sense of what is otherwise insensible,” he posits.

But Rufo isn’t convinced that attention-seeking or unpredictable lunacy is the root of the political violence we’re seeing. To hear his counterargument, watch the full episode above.

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Harmeet Dhillon is going to WAR against DEI



A major philosophical shift is under way inside the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division — and much of it is thanks to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.

Dhillon tells BlazeTV hosts Christopher Rufo and Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman on “Rufo & Lomez” how she’s moving the agency away from diversity, equity, and inclusion-driven enforcement and toward a return to colorblind equality under the law.

“You’re bringing a totally different theory of civil rights law to the Department of Justice,” Rufo tells Dhillon. “This can’t be easy.”

“It is a very daunting task and, frankly, when I raised my hand in response to the president’s request to do this job, I knew it was going to be one of the more difficult jobs here in the DOJ because historically the Civil Rights Division has been a place that doesn’t really change very much from administration to administration,” Dhillon says.


The reason, Dhillon explains, is that “the lawyers who choose to make their careers doing civil rights work typically, historically, have been from a leftist perspective.”

“And that isn’t necessarily bad. I mean, there was a point in time in our country when we passed a lot of these civil rights laws in the 1960s, where we had rampant discrimination against African-Americans and other people and even against women to a degree,” she tells Rufo and Lomez.

“But way past the time that many of these historical ills have been corrected by our society, with or without the intervention of the Civil Rights Division, people have viewed it as their mission to continue to push the boundaries further and further out to the left,” she says.

This has posed one of the biggest issues for Dhillon in her war against DEI.

“The truism from the Reagan era is that personnel is policy. And so one of the biggest challenges we had here was, how are we going to implement the president’s agenda with personnel who don’t want to do that,” she explains.

“I actually had ... a relatively smooth transition into our mission because early on ... I issued memos to all the different sections here in the Civil Rights Division ... letting them know that we are going to be changing our focus here to implementing the president’s agenda, consistent with the civil rights statutes in the Constitution,” she continues.

“And that simple step, sometimes just one or two paragraphs of a memo to a few dozen lawyers, caused more than half of them to quit right away,” she adds.

Then, when an early retirement program at the DOJ was implemented, another several dozen took advantage of the program and quit.

“We were down about two-thirds of the manpower here in the Civil Rights Division. And so, then the challenge became how to do the big job of rightsizing our civil rights agenda and making it consistent with the president’s agenda,” she explains.

While she admits that it was difficult at the outset, she’s “happy to say that we’ve gotten past all of that.”

“We’ve hired a bunch of great people, young and old, here in the Civil Rights Division, who are very willing to work with us in doing the work that you’ve seen in the headlines,” she adds.

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White culture exists — and America is losing it



Jeremy Carl, Trump-appointee and author of “The Unprotected Class,” faced a grilling at the United States Senate when Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) tore into his beliefs on “white identity.”

“You’re now retreating to ethnic identity. You don’t speak about ethnic identity. You speak about white identity. So tell me the values that stitch together white identity and that make it different than black identity,” Murphy asked.

“I would say that the white church is very different than the black church in terms of its tone and style on average. Foodways could often be different. Music could be different, if you look at the Super Bowl halftime show, which was not in English this year,” Carl explained.

Murphy responded, “So our ability to access white churches or white food or white music is being erased?”


“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,” Carl said.

BlazeTV host Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman is of the mind that Carl is right.

“On second viewing, I mean, I watched this live, and by the way, in the context of this hour-long Senate hearing, he was just getting grilled from all directions ... he was being accused of anti-feminism, he was being accused by [Sen.] John Curtis of Utah [R] for not being, like, sufficiently loyal to Israel. And then there was this white thing,” Lomez tells BlazeTV co-host Christopher Rufo on “Rufo & Lomez.”

“And I think what we saw there was him a little bit stumbling through the answer, but it’s actually the right answer. I mean, he gives the right answer, the specific details,” Lomez continues.

Lomez points out that there are different parts of American culture, and different races have their own piece.

“I’m not saying this, by the way, just to please a liberal listener. It’s all true, OK? This is all deeply embedded in our culture and the common culture as well, but it is predominantly what we might call 'white,'” he explains.

“When you turn on Netflix or something, or like Hulu, or just turn on the TV, there’s BET. There’s Black Entertainment Channel, and there’s black stories to enjoy with your family on Hulu, and then there’s Asian stories, and you know, you get the whole diaspora of all these different groups,” he continues.

“There’s no white channel, there’s no white story section ... because ... that is the baseline culture that these other things are kind of orbiting around and existing within. And what Jeremy is suggesting here is that we are losing that common culture. We are losing that common white culture,” he adds.

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Christopher Rufo drops bombshell report on $26B ‘No White Men’ program — Trump SBA issues quick response



Last week, BlazeTV host and investigative journalist Christopher Rufo, alongside Manhattan Institute Director of Research Judge Glock, published a report titled “No White Men Need Apply,” which pulled back the curtain on the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) program.

Despite functioning under the current Trump administration, Rufo and Glock discovered that the program has been awarding government contracts based on race, gender, and social disadvantage — a stark contradiction to the administration’s vows to abolish DEI.

“The Small Business Administration’s 8(a) program,” Rufo says, is “a $26 billion slush fund for government contracts that are available to every identity group except for one: white men.”

“We blew the whistle on this and made the case that this was a corrupt program” and “totally in violation of the president’s stated principles against DEI,” Rufo says.

The reaction from SBA and White House officials was surprisingly humble.

“I got a call from the SBA administrator, Kelly Loeffler. I got a call from a number of people at the White House, some of whom were a bit annoyed that we had brought this scandal to public attention, but all of whom recognized, ‘Yep, we’ve dropped the ball on this. It’s totally unjust. We’re going to take action,”’ Rufo recaps.

And they clearly meant it because just two days after their conversation, Loeffler posted the following announcement to X:

— (@)

Rufo says, “It’s not a perfect solution. I think the program should be abolished, but it’s at least a step in the right direction.”

But his co-host, Jonathan Keeperman, has questions.

“Is it the case that they’re not just abolishing this whole thing because, as Washington is, there’s just too many people who are sort of dependent on this, some of whom might even be Republicans or friendly to the administration?”

Are we playing the game of, “Look, we know this is bad, but these are our friends, and sometimes in politics, you just got to sort of weigh the cost of alienating people over here versus the cost of kind of just letting these not great things kind of continue because ... that’s just the friction of Washington, D.C.?” he asks.

“From my reporting on this, the White House had contemplated just unilaterally winding down the program, declaring it unconstitutional, and taking it to the courts,” Rufo says. “From what I heard from a number of people is that the White House lawyers, Department of Justice said, ‘Hey, you can’t do that. It’s a statutory program. You have to release regulations, go through public comment, do the whole song and dance.”’

“So actually, the action was stalled, from what I’ve been told, for a number of months in kind of legal limbo, and only because we published this story were they able to start getting that policy process moving again,” he contines.

However, there is also, he says, “an element of kind of long-standing corruption and complicity from Republicans” at play.

He gives the example of Alaska, which receives a disproportionate amount of the SBA’s 8(a) contract money, the majority of which is funneled into companies owned by Alaskan natives.

Many of these companies, however, subcontract the actual work to non-native (usually white-run) companies. To abolish the program would anger Alaska native groups, which are both politically and economically powerful in the state.

According to Rufo’s sources, Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), for example, has “made it known throughout the administration, ‘We need to keep this cash flowing,’ because he’s dependent.”

“Tribes are pretty powerful in a state like Alaska ... and other red states where there are big tribal populations. They have big lobbying operations. They have big political organizations, a network of businesses, casinos, constructions, contracting, etc.,” Rufo says, “and so there is an element of what I think is legal corruption — even in red states, even with Republican politicians — where they keep this disastrous program alive.”

Regardless, the Trump administration promised to uproot DEI, and Rufo intends to hold them to it.

“It’s been a year. You guys have to get rid of this,” he says.

Even though the SBA is now “letting white men into the program,” Rufo fears that “it will still heavily favor the other groups,” thus allowing the cancer that is DEI to live on.

“The only truly morally defensible position is to get rid of it. And so, I think they should blow it up. I think they should go nuclear,” he urges.

To hear more about Rufo’s investigation into SBA’s 8(a) program, watch the video above.

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'America demands assimilation': BlazeTV's Christopher Rufo and Bessent slam Somali welfare scam 'open secret' in Minnesota



BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo participated in a roundtable meeting on Friday led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to discuss the ongoing, rampant welfare fraud by Somalis living in Minnesota.

'Everyone should be outraged.'

The event was attended by journalists, lawmakers, and local business and nonprofit owners.

“The thing that I found astonishing about this fraud scheme is that it was an open secret for many of the people here in Minnesota,” Rufo stated.

“What I’d like to highlight is that this is a fraud story, but ... this is also an immigration story. It’s an assimilation story. It’s a cultural compatibility story,” Rufo continued. “The reality is that the latest numbers, it seems to be that the Somali community, which represents about 1% of Minnesota’s population, is perpetrating approximately 90% of the systemic fraud in this state.”

“I think America works when America demands assimilation. And Minnesota will work when it demands assimilation to the culture of good government,” Rufo added.

RELATED: Exclusive: Bessent tells Rufo — 'When the bear trap snaps,' Minnesota fraudsters and complicit officials will face justice

BlazeTV host Chris Rufo. Image source: Blaze Media

He called it a “tragedy” that Minnesota, which had previously been known as the United States’ good-government capital, has had its reputation "tarnished as the fraud capital."

“Everyone should be outraged," Rufo remarked.

Bessent announced during a Friday press conference that the Treasury Department was launching multiple initiatives to put an end to the fraud rings and hold perpetrators accountable. The new initiatives included investigations into money-service businesses, lowering the reporting threshold for overseas transfers to $3,000 in Hennepin and Ramsey Counties, and a new IRS task force assigned to probe COVID-era fraud, among several other steps.

RELATED: ‘Financial calamity’: Bessent blasts Minnesota Democrats’ massive fraud fiasco, launching sweeping interventions

Image source: Blaze Media

During the roundtable, Bessent revealed that there are also plans to provide incentives for whistleblowers to come forward with information.

"If these fraudsters want to turn on each other, we welcome that,” he said. “We will be offering cash rewards to whistleblowers to turn in their fellow conmen and women.”

Bessent stated that the fraud “cover-up” nearly enabled Gov. Tim Walz (DFL) to become vice president.

“What a tragedy it would have been for the American people for someone with no integrity, who was complicit and perhaps corrupt, to assume the office of the vice president,” he added.

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Exclusive: Bessent tells Rufo — 'When the bear trap snaps,' Minnesota fraudsters and complicit officials will face justice



While fraud rings in Minnesota's Somali community have been under federal investigation for years, it was investigative journalist and BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo’s reporting that brought the billion-dollar scandals to national attention. Back in November 2025, Rufo published a report titled “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer,” in which he and co-author Ryan Thorpe alleged that billions of taxpayer funds were being stolen through schemes in Minneapolis’ Somali community and that millions of those funds were being funneled to the Al-Shabaab terror group in Somalia.

Rufo's reporting sparked massive federal action, including revoking Temporary Protected Status for Somalis, surging Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, freezing child-care funds, and ramping up prosecutions. Most notably, it led Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to visit Minnesota in January 2026 and launch major FinCEN probes into hawala businesses, IRS audits, and enhanced transfer reporting.

In this exclusive BlazeTV interview with Rufo, Bessent shares what his team’s investigations have revealed about Minnesota’s Somali fraud operations and what steps the Treasury is taking to ensure it stops.

Bessent says his team’s investigations confirmed that the fraud schemes were “bigger than anyone thought” and that money — either excess government-issued funds or stolen funds — are indeed being sent illegally out of the country.

One positive result of the investigations into Minnesota’s fraud rings, however, is that they will provide a “model” for future investigations in the other 49 states.

“Just because of the population sizes — California, Illinois, New York — that what's going on [in Minnesota] is a microcosm of what's going on there. And it's like someone on the panel said today: Benefits have been turned into businesses. It is a cottage industry of teaching people how to form multiple LLCs, how to game the system, how to move money around,” says Bessent, pledging to “follow the money” and explore “recoveries” for cheated Americans.

Rufo calls these predominantly Somali-orchestrated fraud rings Minnesota’s “open secret.” Fraudsters were successful largely because they knew that the cultural standard of “Minnesota nice” and politicians’ “fear of being called racist” would result in the turning of blind eyes everywhere.

“What do you think the right attitude should be as you look at these frauds moving forward?” he asks.

“Clearly the governor's office does not want to do investigations. So we just want the facts. We want to see where they lead, and we want to put the bad guys in jail,” says Bessent.

Further Minnesota’s soft-on-crime policies that “incentivize” criminality need to be addressed. “You could steal hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, and under the Minnesota laws, you might not even get jail time. You might get a series of paroles,” Bessent adds.

“We have the ability to bring in IRS enforcement, and they don't monkey around. So the incentive is going to be to stop this.”

Rufo then posed the question that conservatives nationwide are eagerly awaiting an answer to: Will we finally see any big names face justice?

“From [Gov. Tim Walz] on down appears to be at a minimum to have turned a blind eye. There are rumors circulating around this building right now that in fact some have been complicit in these schemes. Is that something your office is looking into?” he asks.

“That's part of following the money. There are evidently some disturbing tapes of AG Ellison in meetings with people who donated to him calling for political favors to stop the investigations. So we'll see,” says Bessent.

“And Chris, I can guarantee you when the bear trap snaps, we're going to get these folks.”

To hear the rest of Rufo’s exclusive interview with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, watch the video above.

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‘Faces of meth’: How Antifa radicalizes its foot soldiers



Antifa first rose to mainstream prominence during the summer riots of 2020. While how the group managed to recruit so many young people has remained a mystery to most Americans, domestic security expert Kyle Shideler knows its methods well.

“So as to the psychological perspective, you know, you talk about those mug shots. There’s almost, like, if you look at, over the course of 2020, there’s almost like a ‘faces of meth’ campaign,” domestic security expert Kyle Shideler tells BlazeTV hosts Christopher Rufo and Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman on “Rufo & Lomez.”

“You see them at their first arrest, and they’re kind of fresh-faced and relatively normal-looking, and you see them in the next one and the next one and the next one, and by the end of it, you know, five years later, they’re unrecognizable. Clearly hard living, drugs, homelessness, and the like,” he continues.


“This is part of that affinity-group structure is to suck people in so that the group becomes their only social outlet. … So they get these masses of people out into the streets, and then the goal is to try to get them to engage in some criminal act, right, to get them to step over the line and then bring them further into the group,” he explains.

When they successfully get these college students to commit even just a small crime that could land them in jail, that’s when they organize their "jail support."

“You pay their bail. You tell them how much you care about them and how the movement’s going to take care of them. They get out of jail, and now they’re, you know, more tightly bound to the group. And that’s what we saw all through 2020,” Schideler says.

“And that’s what these things are really for,” he explains. “The large-scale mass-movement protests, from the point of view of Antifa, it's to slowly weed through and bring people further and further along into radicalization to be willing to do more and more radical things.”

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We used to need guts to sin. Now we just need wi-fi.



Once upon a time, before the digital age swept us up in a current of global access, vices like gambling, pornography, and marijuana were kept in check with what BlazeTV hosts Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman argue was healthy friction.

It’s what made Mr. Johnson blush when he skulked up to the checkout counter at the local video rental with an X-rated videotape sandwiched between two rom-coms. It’s what forced hopeful gamblers to sneak into illegal card rooms at the back of sketchy bars, pockets stuffed with ATM cash withdrawn in small increments to avoid spousal skepticism. It’s what necessitated dark parking lot meetups, secret car compartments, and stashes of air fresheners and breath mints.

But today, none of those physical and social barriers exist. Want to watch an adult film? Jump online; there are millions to choose from. Interested in placing a bet? Easy: Open an app and blow $10,000 on a random ping-pong match without ever leaving the comfort of your bed. Out of weed in a state that hasn’t legalized it? No problem; there are hundreds of dispensaries that will illegally ship right to your front door.

The glowing rectangle that lives in our pocket has pulverized every obstacle that once kept vices reined in.

Keeperman laments the death of “the gray market,” where “public shame and censure” were a real obstacle for vice-seekers but not so large an obstacle that they barred them completely from indulging.

“I think that balance is sort of ideal,” he tells Rufo.

“People, unfortunately, without any of these barriers to entry, they go down these rabbit holes; they start cultivating these bad behaviors, these addictions, and it ruins their lives. And it ruins the lives of the people around them, and it's horrible for society.”

He remembers working at his town’s video rental shop as a teenager and the “cycle of shame” that commenced every time a local would sheepishly duck out of the curtained room at the back of the store with “Debbie Does Dallas” tucked covertly under his arm.

“It was like, ‘All right, man, like, cool. You're embarrassed; I'm embarrassed to be doing this.’ ... But it was good. That's how it should be,” he reminisces.

This system of shame and risk also benefited kids. Keeperman recalls the notorious male student who stole Playboy magazines from his dad’s secret stash and smuggled them to school in his backpack so he could charge his fellow delinquents $5 for a week's rental.

“It’s shameful, and if the vice principal catches you, you're screwed, man. You're in the doghouse. ... You might get suspended or get these demerits or whatever, and your mom's going to be mad at you,” he laughs.

But in all seriousness, these were real barriers that kept a lot of kids from engaging in pornography. But today, there’s no need for magazines or smuggling. All kids need to do is run a quick Google search alone in their bedrooms, and they’ll be inundated with graphic content from hundreds of sites. Addiction is all but guaranteed.

Keeperman says that while he takes all necessary precautions to prevent his children from accessing graphic content on their devices, he knows there’s only so much he can do.

“My kid's going to have a public life. He's going to have a social life that extends beyond the boundaries that we can draw for him as parents. And I can't control what the kid next door does. You just can't. And it's just too easy. It's too accessible,” he says.

Rufo says the answer to this problem of a barrier-less world is to re-create the barriers in the digital sphere.

“You have to have a digital version of the back room and the curtain, meaning you have to have ID verification, age verification,” he says.

To hear more of his theory, watch the episode above.

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AI isn’t killing writers — it’s killing mediocre writing



For years, we were warned that artificial intelligence would eventually eliminate the need for writers. In mere seconds, it would be able to crank out essays, articles, reports, blog posts, you name it, rendering flesh-and-blood writers obsolete.

Well, those days are here. AI writing floods our inboxes, social media feeds, and web pages every single day.

But it’s not quite the product we were pitched. While bots can indeed string coherent sentences together, the end result is mediocre at best. Its flat, em-dash heavy, idiosyncrasy-free, polite prose is easily recognizable to average readers, most of whom are disenchanted by the lack of human touch.

It turns out AI — beholden to algorithms and formulas — cannot counterfeit the voices of the deeply complicated, unique creatures that are human beings.

Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman, BlazeTV hosts of “Rufo & Lomez,” believe that AI writing may actually make writers more valuable — but just the ones with genuine talent.

AI is undeniably eliminating the massive class of mediocre writers. The kind of text AI produces is quickly becoming “the default sound or voice of people who don't have talent, who can't do things on their own. ... It’s becoming the default voice of stupidity,” says Keeperman.

On the flip side, “Anybody who can write at a level above [AI] now has more value.”

The pervasiveness of AI copy seems to suggest that those genuine talents are few and far between.

“I am seeing [AI writing] everywhere. I am seeing it in published books. ... Tons of ad copy even for really prominent companies that obviously have huge marketing departments [are] leaning on these sort of tripartite adjectival phrases. ... There’s all these sort of syntactical signals that are giveaways,” says Keeperman, “but it's also making me attuned to people who can write really well, and I find myself gravitating towards those people.”

But that doesn’t mean writers can’t use AI to their advantage. It is an excellent tool for “research,” “aggregating a lot of information,” “analysis,” and “brainstorming,” Keeperman adds.

Rufo agrees. “Terrible writing, [but] it’s good for discovery. ... I think for certain tasks, it's better than a Google search or a search engine search.”

For someone like him, who conducts large-scale research, AI can expedite the process of sifting through hundreds of pages of PDFs, but it’s not fail-proof.

AI is “maybe comparable to an undergraduate research assistant but ... an unreliable [one],” says Rufo.

“You double-check the work, and you realize that the AI makes up 30% of the things that it's telling you.”

“It seems like something that has huge potential, but I just see it slowing down in its improvement. I see it still having some fundamental flaws that would prevent it from being a trustworthy object of delegation,” he says.

“I remain extremely skeptical of the AI doomers or AI fatalists who think that this is going to take over the world and the machines are going to be controlling everything. It's like it can't even format citations. I think we're a long ways away from the AI taking over the world.”

To hear more, watch the episode above

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Debate: Can JD Vance become the right’s great unifier — or does his VP role stand in the way?



The young conservative movement is experiencing a notable leadership gap amid ongoing chaos in the online right-wing space. Sure, there are passionate influencers and rising political voices, but no one has fully stepped up to unify and guide the broader coalition with a commanding presence.

One person investigative journalist and BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo thinks might be able to step into the role, however, is Vice President JD Vance. But Rufo’s co-host Jonathan Keeperman isn’t sure Vance is up for the job either.

In this episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” the hosts debate whether JD Vance can step up as the unifying leader the conservative movement needs amid escalating chaos.

“I've been so far a bit surprised that the vice president hasn't tried to step into this role,” says Rufo, arguing that Vance has both the “charisma” and the “authority” to effectively lead the movement.

“I’ve known JD over the years. ... It does feel like he has some hesitation or maybe even some fear,” he adds.

While Keeperman agrees that Vance “has all of the tools and charisma and ... the right talking points” to be an excellent leader, his role as the vice president would actually be a hindrance.

“I don't think JD Vance should actually do that in his vice presidential position. Not right now. I think it'd be a bit presumptuous. I think people might kind of see it as him stepping in to sort of correct a situation that I think needs to just happen organically,” he counters.

For one, Vance’s position prohibits him from “[speaking] candidly about the administration.”

“Whoever is going to step into this role has to feel credible to this audience, and part of that credibility is going to come from just speaking honestly about all of these different things happening in this ecosystem — whether it's the different personalities, the ideas, the sort of ideology that's animating Trump but also the specific actions that the Trump administration is taking,” Keeperman explains.

In other words, the kind of leader people will follow needs to be an outsider who can speak brutal truths about the current administration, and Vance, as Trump’s right-hand man, can’t be that person.

Secondly, President Trump is still the top dog, Keeperman explains. For his VP to assume the authority of this role as the leader of the conservative movement “might not sit well inside of this coalition.”

“Maybe you're right,” Rufo concedes. “We need some sort of native figure to step up in the same way that Charlie Kirk did, in the same way that Tucker had done.”

To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.

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