In a post-shame era, racist slurs and Nazism can be ignored.
Donald Trump speaks with J.D. Vance in the White House Cabinet on October 14, 2025.
(Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
If Donald Trump is a transformative president, it has more to do with his behavior than his ideology. Politically, Trump has governed as a typical right-wing Republican, and all the components of MAGA-ism have deep roots in American history: racism, nationalism, nationalism, uninhibited capitalism, military adventurism and even authoritarianism. What defines Trump and increasingly changes the Republican Party is his complete lack of shame.
Revelations and scandals that would have forced previous politicians to resign and fade into obscurity do not bother him. In retrospect, the defining example of Trump's public persona was the release of the notorious Access to Hollywood recording in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election in which the candidate could be heard on tape boasts of his celebrity status let him “grab them by the pussy.” Trump isn't embarrassed at all shrugged it off his words were called “locker room talk” and he became president.
Trump and his followers accepted Access to Hollywood model of non-apology and applied it to countless other controversies. This brings us to this week. The Republican Party is currently grappling with a scandal fueled by Politician report documentation that many prominent participants in a Telegram chat for young Republicans made all sorts of vile comments, including using the N-word and “watermelon people” to refer to black people, slurs against gays, and calls for the rape and murder of political opponents in gas chambers. “I love Hitler” was one of many pro-Nazi statements made in the group chat.
In the wake of the scandal, traditional Republicans went through the standard rituals of recantation and condemnation. New York Assemblyman Michael Reilly dismissed his chief of staff, Peter Giunta, who made some of the most offensive comments in the chat. Representative Elise Stefanik, who previously praised Giunta, convicted chat and called for the resignation of those involved.
Reilly and Stefanik were returning to the old policy. White House chose a different path. Like mine Nation colleague Joan Walsh markedVice President J.D. Vance took the lead in trying to whitewash the disgusting comments in the chat. On repeat Access to Hollywood scandal, Vance insisted that the chat was just a case of boys being boys on the Internet, essentially nothing more than online locker room talk.
Talking about The Charlie Kirk Show on Wednesday, Vance said“The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially boys. They tell harsh, offensive jokes.”
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As he often does, Vance lied. The Young Republicans are not some fringe group of juvenile delinquents. It is composed of adults between 18 and 40 years of age, many of whom hold senior career positions or are even elected legislators. Moreover, the comments in the chat were not jokes, but clearly expressed deeply held beliefs, albeit expressed in hyperbolic terms to evoke the thrill of breaking a taboo.
But Vance's fierce defense of the chat is even more important than the content of the chat itself. After all, going back to the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party in the early 1960s, the GOP often recruited extreme racists and even philonazis. This led to periodic scandals, smoothed out by ritual renunciations. For example, in 1965 a group of Young Republicans met at the party congress in Miami and began singing racist and anti-Semitic songs. One song to the tune of “Jingle Bells” had these words:
Driving through the Reich in a Mercedes-Benz,
Having shot all the Jews, making many friends.
Rat ta-ta-ta-ta, mow down the bastards,
Oh, what fun it was when the Nazis came back to town.
News of this cheerful singing appeared the following year. There was no significant J.D. Vance figure at the time to defend the young Republicans, who were roundly condemned by Republicans and mainstream groups such as the ADL.
But now the highest levels of the Republican Party, all the way up to the White House, believe the apology was a mistake. The far right is such a large faction in the party, especially among young people, that denying it is politically costly. Both Trump and Vance are smart enough to know that young Republicans who write “I love Hitler” in chat rooms are the future of the Republican Party. (Just as Trump and Vance defend neo-Nazi extremists, major institutions have also remained silent in their criticism of Trump and Vance. Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, a supposedly civil rights organization, praised Republicans who disavowed the group chat but were especially silent about the White House's obliviousness to the scandal.)
A major turning point in the Republican Party's embrace of the far right was the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, at which Trump famously said there were “very good people” on both sides of the event.
In an exceptionally prescient response to this event, journalist Alex Parin wrote in Shard in 2017, took note large presence of young Republicans at the rally. One such figure was Nicholas Fuentes, a college dropout who quickly became a leading white nationalist and Holocaust denier, as well as a public figure with such a large following that he invited to lunch with Donald Trump in 2022.
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Considering Charlottesville to be symptomatic, Parin argued that white nationalists were the future of the Republican Party:
Racial animosity was a driving force behind college Republican recruitment. for many yearsbut for now that's really all they have to offer. What inspires a young person in the era of President Donald Trump to not just be a conservative or vote Republican, but to actively participate in organized Republican politics? Do you think Paul Ryan knows the best tax policy to stimulate economic growth? Or do you think it’s more likely something else?…
Meanwhile, the only people on the GOP ticket in the Trump era almost have to be associated with the alt-right, because the alt-right absolutely represents the only effective and successful youth outreach strategy the GOP is currently using. The future leaders of the Republican Party are not the hooded Klansmen or Nazi-tattooed thugs who represented the most caricatured faces of hate in Charlottesville, but their clean-cut marching colleagues and the many young right-wingers across the country who sympathize with their cause…
This will be the legacy of Trumpism: Soon voters who reflexively check the box that says “Republican” because their parents did, or because they think their property taxes are too high, or because Fox made them fear terrorism, will begin electing Pepe's racists to Congress.
What Parin predicted in 2017 is now coming true. In a classic movie Cabaret (1972), yes scary scene where young Nazis in the Weimar Republic attract a crowd with the song “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” When Trump and Vance read about the idiots in the Republican Party praising Hitler, they instinctively become paternal and protective because they, too, believe that the future is theirs.
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