Vice President JD Vance spoke Monday night behind closed doors to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, where reporters were kept one floor below the room and the group’s influential donors and activists got the private access. The event came hours after Vance campaigned in Michigan for Senate candidate Mike Rogers, while Jewish Republican skepticism about his pro-Israel credentials kept building inside the party machinery.
Who Gets the Private Room
The RJC, a coalition group of influential political activists and donors, chose to keep the session private so it could have an “open and honest” conversation, according to CEO Matt Brooks. That meant the public got nothing. No audience questions. No open exchange. Just a roughly 45-minute “fireside chat” with Norm Coleman, the former Minnesota senator who is the national chairman of the RJC board, while reporters waited below and CNN relied on audio from someone who attended.
That setup says plenty about who gets access and who doesn’t. The people in the room were the ones with money, influence and a direct line into Republican power. The rest had to settle for a filtered version of the conversation after the fact.
Vance used the appearance to address “some of the obvious elephants in the room,” including growing skepticism among young people about the US-Israel relationship. He said Republicans need to “actually get out there and talk about the ways in which it is in the best interest of the United States of America.” Coleman, meanwhile, asked about media figures including Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Joe Rogan and Nick Fuentes, saying they “have platformed antisemites.” Vance replied, “I recognize a lot of people in this room might disagree with things that Tucker Carlson or Megyn Kelly or Joe Rogan has said,” and he drew a distinction between Rogan and Fuentes, who he said are “very, very different” people.
The Party’s Internal Machinery
Ted Cruz has already said the party has not coalesced around Vance ahead of 2028 and that there will be a “full discussion” about what the party stands for before then. That’s the language of a hierarchy sorting itself out, with ambitious Republicans, donors and allied groups trying to shape the next acceptable face of power.
The RJC’s own donor network sits close to that process. The group is closely aligned with Miriam Adelson, the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and a leading donor to Trump’s 2024 campaign effort, giving more than $100 million. It was unclear whether Adelson attended Monday’s event, but her shadow hangs over the room all the same. Money doesn’t just speak in these circles. It sets the table.
Vance defended his willingness to engage with controversial media personalities by saying Republicans need “to be willing to go everywhere and bring our message anywhere and to any person.” That’s the campaign logic of a machine that treats every platform as a channel for message discipline, no matter how ugly the company.
The vice president’s remarks also landed in a moment when support for Israel has dropped across party lines after Israel’s war in Gaza following Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attacks and the US and Israel launching the more recent war in Iran. Vance has been especially scrutinized since he took the lead in promoting an Iran peace deal struck in June but later collapsed. He warned Israeli government officials against “attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.” Days later, in an interview with Joe Rogan, he accused some in the Israeli government of trying to manipulate American public opinion to undermine the deal.
What People Said Afterward
RJC leaders praised him once the room emptied out. Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary and now an RJC board member, said, “The vice president really helped himself tonight,” adding, “He answered a lot of questions that people had about where his heart is.” That’s the language of reassurance from the people who help manage the party’s image.
Not everyone bought it. Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Gen Z Jewish activist, said, “He totally deflected,” and predicted Carlson would “continue to dog” Vance like the far-left streamer Hasan Piker has been linked to El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race. One attendee said Vance had the chance to disavow Carlson and disappointed “many” when he “ducked the Tucker issue altogether.” Sid Rosenberg, a New York City radio host, called the answer “not strong enough on Israel” in an X post, even after urging the crowd earlier in the day to “give Vance a chance.”
Vance has declined to disavow Carlson even after Trump had a falling out with the former Fox News host over the Iran war and called him “totally irrelevant.” Carlson, who said he would no longer support the Republican Party, told a June podcast interview that he would always consider Vance a friend and said Trump had put him in an “impossible situation” by pursuing foreign conflicts at odds with their 2024 campaign promises. “I feel sorry for JD Vance,” Carlson said.
The scrutiny around Vance also runs through the party’s own anxieties about who gets to define its line on Israel and antisemitism. Vance regularly condemns antisemitism and has disavowed Fuentes by name, calling him a “total loser.” But in a December 2025 interview with NBC News, he said he did not think antisemitism was “exploding” on the right, and in a December 2025 podcast interview he said, “Tucker’s a friend of mine. Do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends, especially those who work in politics.”
The room also included voices trying to translate all this into electoral reassurance. Stuart Weil, an RJC member from California, said he walked away feeling concerns about Vance’s positions on Israel were overblown. “I have no fear of supporting JD Vance as the president of the United States,” Weil said. Gabe Groisman, a Republican strategist and former RJC board member from Florida, said there were “concerns” about how Vance navigates the moment, but added there is “a lot of hope” that his position is still strong on the American Jewish community. “Most people believe that when it is time for him to really express his positions, it’s going to be positions that people are comfortable with,” Groisman said. “Still,” he added, “it’s not automatic for him or for anybody.”
That’s the whole game in one sentence. Nothing is automatic. Not loyalty, not policy, not the blessing of the donor class.