Article Type: Broadcast Recap
Broadcast Date: September 16, 2026
Watch: Episode 1748 on Rumble
Source Note: This recap is based on the original broadcast and its transcript. Quotations may be lightly edited for punctuation and readability without changing their meaning.
Nick Fuentes used Episode 1748 of America First to sharpen his case against Vice President J.D. Vance, pointing to a new Vanity Fair profile that reports Vance privately offered advice to Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 election.
For Fuentes, the report was more than another example of Vance’s past opposition to Donald Trump. He presented it as evidence that Vance was actively trying to stop the political movement he is now positioned to inherit.
Vance Reportedly Contacted Clinton’s Campaign
The profile says Vance asked an intermediary to connect him with Jake Sullivan. According to the account Fuentes read on air, Vance warned that Trump could win and urged Clinton’s campaign to focus on Midwestern battleground states. A source close to Sullivan disputed part of that recollection but confirmed that Vance pressed the campaign to repair the damage from Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark.
Vance’s spokesperson rejected the claim that he was trying to help Clinton win, saying he offered advice to people in both parties about struggling working-class communities. Fuentes argued that the response did not deny the contact itself and did not answer the central question: why was a future Republican vice president seeking access to Clinton’s campaign six weeks before the election?
Fuentes placed the report alongside Vance’s other well-known positions from 2016. Vance publicly opposed Trump, voted for independent candidate Evan McMullin and later wrote favorably about Barack Obama’s character and intellect. Fuentes said the new reporting makes that record harder to dismiss as a temporary objection to Trump’s personality.
“He was trying to prevent all of this from happening,” Fuentes said, referring to Trump’s victory and the political realignment that followed it.
A Conflict Over What Trumpism Means
Fuentes also revisited Hillbilly Elegy, arguing that its message was fundamentally at odds with Trump’s 2016 campaign. In his reading, Vance blamed the decline of working-class communities largely on destructive habits and a culture of defeat. Trump, by contrast, blamed government policy, deindustrialization, mass immigration, free trade and foreign wars.
Fuentes believes that difference is worth noting, because the next Republican nominee will determine whether the party returns to the original promises of MAGA or moves toward a technology-backed conservatism associated with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and other figures around Vance.
Fuentes defined the original America First agenda around three priorities: immigration restriction, trade protection and a foreign policy that avoids unnecessary wars. He said a genuine successor to Trump should close employment-visa programs that displace American workers, use tariffs to rebuild domestic industry and end the war with Iran.
He does not believe Vance would lead the party in that direction. Fuentes described him as dependent on wealthy technology patrons, insufficiently opposed to Israel’s influence and politically unprepared for a national campaign without Trump absorbing most of the media’s attacks.
Fuentes Questions Vance’s Political Strength
Fuentes played a recent clip in which Vance answered a question about the midterms by asking voters to give Republicans “another chance” and “another couple of years.” He called the answer weak at a time when the party faces public anger over inflation, the Iran war and the failure to deliver mass deportations.
He compared the enthusiasm surrounding Vance to the early effort to promote Ron DeSantis as “Trumpism without Trump.” In both cases, Fuentes said, influential donors and conservative institutions treated a candidate as a marketable product before voters had tested him under sustained national pressure.
The profile draws on comments from Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Susie Wiles and Vance’s former Yale professor Amy Chua, adding to Fuentes’s broader concern about elite networks. He highlighted Vance’s relationships at Yale and in the technology sector, arguing that a small circle of donors, advisers and institutions is attempting to choose Trump’s successor before the Republican electorate does.
Macklemore, Sneako and the Middle East
Earlier in the show, Fuentes returned briefly to the controversy surrounding Macklemore’s removal from Ed Sheeran’s tour after saying “Free Palestine” onstage. He said Kraft’s reported decision to match Sheeran’s $2 million aid pledge did not address his underlying objection. In Fuentes’s view, the dispute was not mainly about Gaza relief but about the ability of powerful pro-Israel figures to impose consequences on American entertainers and institutions.
Fuentes also mocked Sneako’s attempt to explain the strategic importance of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. He contrasted Sneako’s remarks with his own recent coverage of Iran, the Houthis and the pressure on oil routes through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. The segment was less about the substance of the war than Fuentes’s argument that political commentary requires more than repeating familiar anti-Israel slogans.
During the superchat portion, Fuentes expanded on how he believes a political movement must be built. He said exposing elite networks is not enough; dissidents must develop talent, wealth, expertise and durable relationships of their own. Individual members need influence before they can operate together as a serious political force, he argued.
Episode 1748 ultimately returned to a question that has become central to Fuentes’s recent broadcasts: who will control the Republican Party after Trump? The new reporting about Vance and Clinton gave him his strongest answer yet for why he believes the vice president should not.
Editorial Note: AF Observer independently produced this recap from the original broadcast. AF Observer is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or an official representative of America First or its creators.