Policy
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October 17, 2025
In a post-shame era, racist slurs and Nazism can be ignored.
Donald Trump speaks with JD Vance in the Cabinet Room of the White House on October 14, 2025.
(Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
If Donald Trump is a transformative president, it is more thanks to his behavior than to his ideology. In political terms, Trump has governed like a typical right-wing Republican, and the building blocks of MAGA-ism all have deep roots in American history: racism, nativism, nationalism, capitalism run amok, military adventurism, and even authoritarianism. What sets Trump apart, and what has increasingly reshaped the Republican Party, is his complete lack of shame.
The revelations and scandals that would have pushed former politicians to resign and fade into obscurity do not bother him. In retrospect, the defining example of Trump’s public persona was the publication of the infamous Access Hollywood in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, in which the candidate could be heard boasting about how his celebrity status allowed him to “grab ’em by the pussy.” Far from being embarrassed, Trump called his remarks “locker room talk” and went on to win the presidency.
Trump and his supporters took the Access Hollywood no-excuses model and applied it to countless other controversies. That brings us to this week. The GOP is currently grappling with a scandal sparked by a Policy report documenting that many prominent members of a Telegram chat for young Republicans had made all kinds of vile comments, including using the N-word and “watermelon people” to refer to black people, slurs against gays, and calls for rape and the death of political enemies in gas chambers. “I love Hitler” was one of several pro-Nazi sentiments broadcast during the group chat.
In the wake of the scandal, mainstream Republicans followed the usual rituals of disavowal and condemnation. New York Congressman Michael Reilly fired his chief of staff, Peter Giunta, who made some of the most abhorrent comments during the conversation. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who previously praised Giunta, condemned the chat and called for the resignations of those who participated in it.
Reilly and Stefanik were returning to older politics. The White House has chosen a different path. Like my Nation As my colleague Joan Walsh noted, Vice President JD Vance took it upon himself to try to whitewash the abhorrent comments in the chat. In a replay of Access Hollywood scandal, Vance insisted the chat was just a case of boys being boys on the Internet, in fact nothing more than a locker room chat.
Speaking on The Charlie Kirk Show On Wednesday, Vance said, “The reality is kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell jokes that are bold and offensive.”
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As he so often does, Vance was lying. The Young Republicans are not a marginal group of young delinquents. It is made up of mature adults ages 18 to 40, many of whom hold high office or are even elected legislators. Moreover, far from being jokes, the comments in the chat were clearly expressions of deeply held beliefs, even if they were expressed hyperbolically to elicit the thrill of breaking taboos.
But even more significant than the content of the chat itself is Vance’s full-throttle defense of the chat. After all, since the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party in the early 1960s, the Republican Party has often recruited extremist racists, even philo-Nazis. This led to periodic scandals, mitigated by ritual disavowals. In 1965, for example, a group of young Republicans gathered at a party convention in Miami and began singing racist and anti-Semitic songs. A song, following the tune of “Jingle Bells”, had these lyrics:
Crossing the Reich in a Mercedes-Benz,
Kill all the kikes, make lots of friends.
Rat tat-tat-tat-tat, mow these bastards,
Oh, how fun it is to see the Nazis come back to town.
News of this joyous song broke the following year. At that time, there was no significant JD Vance figure to defend the Young Republicans, who were roundly denounced by Republicans and mainstream groups such as the ADL.
Today, however, the highest levels of the Republican Party, up to and including the White House, believe that apologizing is wrong. The far right is such a large faction within the party, particularly among young people, that disavowal is politically costly. Both Trump and Vance are smart enough to know that young Republicans posting “I love Hitler” on chat rooms are the future of the Republican Party. (Just as Trump and Vance protect neo-Nazi extremists, mainstream institutions are also silent in their criticism of Trump and Vance. Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, an organization purportedly dedicated to civil rights, praised Republicans who disavowed the panel discussion, but remained notably silent on the White House’s ignoring the scandal.)
The significant turning point in the Republican Party’s embrace of the far right occurred with the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where Trump famously said there were “very fine people on both sides” of the event.
In an exceptionally prescient response to this event, journalist Alex Pareene, writing in Glow in 2017, noted the strong presence of the Young Republicans at the rally. One such figure was Nicholas Fuentes, a college dropout, who quickly became a leading white nationalist and Holocaust denier, and a public figure enjoying such a large following that he was invited to dinner with Donald Trump in 2022.
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Viewing Charlottesville as symptomatic, Pareene argued that white nationalists were the future of the Republican Party:
Racial resentment has been a driving force behind Republican college recruiting for years, but at this point, that’s really all they have to offer. In the era of President Donald Trump, what inspires a young person to not only be conservative or vote Republican, but also to get involved in organized Republican politics? Do you think it is a fervent belief that Paul Ryan knows the optimal tax policy to stimulate economic growth? Or do you think it’s more likely that it’s something else?…
Meanwhile, the only people entering the Republican Party’s slate of candidates in the Trump era almost have to be allied with the alt-right, because the alt-right is absolutely the only effective and successful youth outreach strategy the GOP currently employs. The future leaders of the GOP are not the hooded Klansmen or the tattooed Nazi thugs who presented the most caricatured faces of hate in Charlottesville, but it is their outright marching comrades and the many right-wing young people across the country who sympathize with their cause.
This will be the legacy of Trumpism: It won’t be long before voters who reflexively check the “Republican” box because their parents did, or because they think their property taxes are too high, or because Fox made them afraid of terrorism, will start electing Pepe racists to Congress.
What Pareene had planned in 2017 is coming true. In the classic film Cabaret (1972), there is a chilling scene where young Nazis from the Weimar Republic enter the crowd chanting “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” When Trump and Vance hear about idiots in the Republican Party praising Hitler, their instinct is to be paternal and protective because they, too, believe that tomorrow is theirs.
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