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Florida Republican Representative Randy Fine said on Sunday that he will not support Vice President JD Vance in the 2028 Republican presidential primary, accusing him of betraying President Donald Trump and scapegoating Israel and American Jews for the Republican Party’s crushing defeat in the midterm elections.
Fine made the remarks in his first exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post since winning reelection on Tuesday, delivering an unusually harsh attack on the vice president and warning about the growing influence of the Tucker Carlson wing of the Republican Party.
“I won’t endorse JD Vance in the 2028 primary,” Fine told the Post. “Given the things that he said about Israel and everything else, I thought it was important to say I found Vance’s message to be abhorrent and wrong.”
Fine went further, accusing Vance of shifting responsibility for the Republican defeat onto the Jewish community.
“When people want to refuse to take responsibility for their own failures, what weak people do is they blame the Jews, and that’s exactly what he did,” Fine said. “And I find it inexcusable.”
“I thought his comments were a betrayal of the president,” he added.
Fine also called Vance’s post “the biggest bunch of gibberish I’ve ever read,” said the message “smacked of the kind of thing you’d read in 1932 Germany,” and declared: “He’s out in my book!”
The congressman’s remarks followed Vance’s assessment of Tuesday’s elections, in which Democrats captured control of both the House and Senate. In a lengthy statement on X, Vance argued that the war with Iran had been a major factor in the Republican defeat. He said voters who previously backed Trump wanted the administration to end the war, address inflation, put America first and change Washington’s relationship with Israel.
Vance did not explicitly blame Jewish Americans for the election results, but Fine interpreted his comments about Israel as an attempt to redirect responsibility for the administration’s failures.
Fine also directly challenged Vance’s handling of negotiations with Tehran, arguing that the vice president’s diplomatic approach had prolonged the conflict rather than brought it to an end.
“JD Vance is the reason that the war in Iran is not over because he led us astray in claiming that we could do a peace deal,” he said. “Remember the idiotic MOU? Well, that was him. How’d that work out?”
Vance played a leading role in diplomatic negotiations with Iran earlier this year, including talks aimed at securing an agreement to end the conflict. Those efforts failed to produce a lasting settlement.
Asked whether American Jews and Israelis living in the United States should be concerned about the political forces surrounding Vance, Fine pointed directly to the influence of conservative commentator Tucker Carlson.
“That comes from the Tucker Carlson wing of the Republican Party, and it’s disqualified,” he said.
Fine rejected the suggestion that Israel or American Jews were responsible for the Republican defeat, pointing to his own result.
“Look, I take responsibility for the election results. I won. I was one of the only Republicans in America whose margin increased from their last election,” he said. “But it’s my side that lost, and I’m not looking to blame anyone else for that. We have to make a hard assessment about why things went badly, but it ain’t because of Israel, and it’s certainly not because of the Jews.”
Fine also floated Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Senator Ted Cruz as alternatives he could support in the 2028 primary.
In the same interview, Fine called Michigan’s newly elected senator, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, a “Muslim terrorist,” alleging that members of El-Sayed’s family were affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and claiming the senator-elect had signed a document supporting the organization. There is no verified evidence that El-Sayed has participated in terrorist activity or belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood. The senator-elect has repeatedly denied connections to the organization and publicly disavowed it, and fact-checking organizations have challenged the claims.
Fine ended the conversation with a stark warning about the direction of American politics.
“I think we have very dark times ahead,” he said. “And it’s going to be very important in those dark times to be willing to speak the truth, and to not be afraid to do it.”