After days of prominent conservatives taking shots at each other from the main stage of Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, Vice President JD Vance is trying to play peacemaker for a party that seems increasingly divided. 

During his headline speech on Sunday in Arizona, Mr. Vance took subtle shots at previous speakers, admitted to diving into some of the conspiracy theories around Charlie Kirk’s murder, and told conservatives to stop taking potshots inside the tent. 

Come 2028, Mr. Vance is most likely to be the first Republican presidential nominee not named Trump in more than a decade. To get there, he must bandage the open wounds fellow conservatives have inflicted on one another in the wake of Kirk’s assassination in September. 

“When I say that I’m gonna fight alongside of you, I mean all of you — each and every one,” Mr. Vance said at the top of his speech. “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests.”

While Republicans in Congress disagree on certain issues — particularly around trade, military intervention, and immigration — few supporters of Mr. Trump, either in the diehard base attending AmericaFest or among the leading commentators and activists speaking to it, voiced concern about central tenets of the party’s political platform.  

Instead, it was immediately clear at the outset of the annual conference that some of the most prominent speakers in attendance would be going after each other over, whether over conspiracy theories around Kirk’s death, white Christian nationalism, or how to position the party for the 2026 election. 

“The conservative movement … is in danger from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle, but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty; who offer nothing but bile and despair,” conservative commentator Ben Shapiro told the crowd, later referencing fellow commentators Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens by name. 

Mr. Carlson, who has recently gained notoriety for an “America First” agenda that is more conciliatory to Qatar and Russia, followed Mr. Shapiro onstage hours later, where he attempted to take a dig by jokingly claiming to have not seen Mr. Shapiro’s speech. Others at the event also took personal shots at Mr. Shapiro, who as an Orthodox Jew and staunch supporter of Israel has been subject to antisemitic attacks. 

Yet others at the four-day conference demanded total and complete unity in the face of the Democratic Party, including Mr. Shapiro’s own colleague at The Daily Wire, Michael Knowles, who made the case that no Republican should not go after ideological compatriots. 

Mr. Vance was the highest-ranking elected official to address the crowd over the course of the four-day conference, and it was clear that he had been paying attention to what had been said before him. 

“I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform, and I don’t really care if some people out there … denounce me after this speech,” he declared. “We have far more important work to do than cancelling each other.”

But even while declaring an embargo on cancel culture, Mr. Vance was not immune to the chief driver dividing the party’s elite — American identity and the party’s non-Christian, non-white minorities. 

That division was on full display following a recent New York Times opinion piece by the Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, which sparked intense backlash within the GOP. In the opinion piece, Mr. Ramaswamy — a Hindu Indian-American born to two non-citizen parents — addressed the racism he has personally faced within the conservative movement. He made the case that America was formed as a “creedal nation” not confined to ethnicity or faith. 

He repeated that assertion to the AmericaFest crowd, which earned a seeming retort from Mr. Vance. Without mentioning Mr. Ramaswamy by name, Mr. Vance said that America’s creed was not as broad as his would-be ally suggests. 

“I’m not saying you have to be a Christian to be an American,” Mr. Vance said. “I’m saying something simpler and truer: Christianity is America’s creed,” he declared, arguing that all major debates through American history had “always centered on how we could best, as a people, please God.”

“That creed motivated our understanding of natural law and rights,” he added. 

Mr. Vance also addressed Ms. Owens, who was not invited to the event, with a lighter touch than some of the other speakers. For months, Ms. Owens has been the leading purveyor of theories that Kirk may have actually been killed by his own staff or a foreign government. On separate occasions, she has explicitly named Israel and vaguely referenced France. Mr. Vance said that he understands why people fell into conspiratorial rabbit holes following Kirk’s death. 

“I remember watching every video of the assassination looking for clues, trying to understand what happened,” Mr. Vance told the crowd. “I stayed up all night for many nights in a row researching every conspiracy theory, going down every rabbit hole.”

“What saved me was not lying to myself, but accepting the reality of the fight that we’re in,” he said. “We need to accept that.”