The crisis over antisemitism that has erupted at the Heritage Foundation has reached the point where President Trump’s silence could leave him open to misinterpretation. He can’t want the failure of Heritage’s leadership to say what needs to be said here to tarnish his own administration, whose leaders have so far avoided the mistakes that, say, the presidents of Harvard and University of Pennsylvania made in testimony to Congress.

In the case of campus antisemitism, the presidents of Harvard and Penn were unable to grasp that “yes” was the answer to the question of whether calling for the genocide of Jews would breach their schools’ harassment policies. They were properly ousted. Now no less a distinguished institution than Heritage is having a hard time denouncing the shocking conversation between Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes about antisemitism and other forms of bigotry.

The situation at Heritage has, in our view, reached the point where  the think tank will best be looking for a new president. It’s not that the current president, Kevin Roberts, is himself an antisemite. It is, though, hard to see how Heritage will be able to hold onto its broad support among conservatives with a leadership that can’t condemn Mr. Carlson’s warm bath of an interview with Mr. Fuentes, a bigot of the first water. 

Mr. Roberts, in a galling video, declared that Heritage “will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, who … always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.” He denounced as “venomous” those who objected to the tacit endorsement of Mr. Fuentes, who rails against “organized Jewry” and “Talmudic Jews” and is enamored of Hitler and Stalin. 

Mr. Roberts’s chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, who appears to have been behind the statement, has resigned, but that has hardly stemmed the torrent of criticism. The Post reports that the organization is internally riven, with some staffers horrified at this betrayal and others worried that there are a “growing number” of Heritage’s ranks who agree with the rancid worldview espoused by Mr. Fuentes, who avers “that Jews always act in bad faith.”

Mr. Roberts has admitted “a mistake.” In a speech at Hillsdale College on Monday he protested that he possessed “the best of intentions” when he said, in response to Mr. Fuentes’s celebration of the Nazis, that “Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic.” Mr. Roberts, in his video, expressed disagreement with Mr. Fuentes but averred that “canceling him is not the answer.” Mr. Roberts also denounced the “globalist class.”

Moral clarity came from other quarters. Ben Shapiro, in a soliloquy that stretched for more than 40 minutes and has racked up more than 20 million views, calls Mr. Carlson “an intellectual coward, a dishonest interlocutor, and a terrible friend” and “the most virulent superspreader of vile ideas in America.” Senator Ted Cruz has also been a stalwart, calling it a “time for choosing” and declaring that “I choose to stand with Israel … I choose to stand with America.”

Vice President Vance has not distinguished himself on this issue. He dismissed concerns over leaked correspondence from a Young Republicans group chat as so much “pearl clutching.” Those messages expressed racist and antisemitic sentiments of the crudest variety. Mr. Fuentes says that Mr. Vance “​​doesn’t want to condemn the Groypers” because he fears their opposition. Mr. Trump, who once dined with Mr. Fuentes, would now do well to condemn him.

To us Mr. Trump seems like the right president to take on this issue more broadly. The president’s daughter is a convert to Orthodox Judaism who, with her Jewish husband, is raising Jewish grandchildren of the president. Mr. Trump, a supporter of Israel, is leading a historic campaign to bring to the Middle East a peace that promises to integrate Jews into the Arab world. Mr. Trump can’t want the stain of antisemitism on his movement.