In a post-shame era, racist slurs and Nazism can be shrugged off.
Donald Trump speaks with JD Vance in the Cabinet Room at the White House on October 14, 2025.
(Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)
If Donald Trump is a transformative president, it is due to his behavior more than his ideology. In policy terms, Trump has governed like a typical right-wing Republican, and the component parts of MAGA-ism all have deep roots in American history: racism, nativism, nationalism, unchained capitalism, military adventurism, and even authoritarianism. What makes Trump distinct, and increasingly has reshaped the GOP, is his utter lack of shame.
Revelations and scandals that would cause earlier politicians to resign and slink off into obscurity don’t faze him. In retrospect, the defining example of Trump’s public persona was the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape on the cusp of the 2016 presidential election, in which the candidate could be heard on tape bragging about how his celebrity status allowed him to “grab ’em by the pussy.” Far from being embarrassed, Trump waved off his words as “locker-room talk” and went on to win the presidency.
Trump and his followers have taken the Access Hollywood no-apology model and applied it to countless other controversies. That brings us to this week. The GOP is currently grappling with a scandal ignited by a Politico report documenting that many prominent members in a Telegram chat for Young Republicans had made all sorts of vile comments, including the use of the N-word and “watermelon people” to refer to Blacks, slurs against gay people, and calls for political foes to be raped and killed in gas chambers. “I love Hitler” was one of the many pro-Nazi sentiments aired on the group chat.
In the wake of the scandal, conventional Republicans went through the standard rituals of disavowal and condemnation. New York Assemblyman Michael Reilly fired his chief of staff, Peter Giunta, who made some of the most odious comments on the chat. Representative Elise Stefanik, who had previously praised Giunta, condemned the chat and called for the resignation of those who participated.
Reilly and Stefanik were harking back to an older politics. The White House chose a different path. As my Nation colleague Joan Walsh noted, Vice President JD Vance has taken the lead in trying to whitewash the heinous comments in the chat. In a replay of the Access Hollywood scandal, Vance has insisted the chat was just a case of boys being boys on the Internet, in effect nothing more than online locker-room talk.
Speaking on The Charlie Kirk Show on Wednesday, Vance said, “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes.”
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As he does so often, Vance was lying. The Young Republicans isn’t some fringe group of juvenile delinquents. It’s made up of fully grown adults aged 18 to 40, many in high staffing positions or even serving as elected lawmakers. Further, far from being jokes, the comments on the chat were clearly expressions of deeply held beliefs, albeit ones that were expressed hyperbolically to excite the thrill of taboo-breaking.
But Vance’s full-throttle defense of the chat is even more significant than the contents of the chat itself. After all, going back to the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party in the early 1960s, the GOP has often recruited extreme racists and even philo-Nazis. This has led to periodic scandals, smoothed over by ritualistic disavowals. In 1965, for instance, a group of Young Republicans met at a party convention in Miami and started singing racist and antisemitic songs. One song, following the tune of “Jingle Bells,” had these lyrics:
Riding through the Reich in a Mercedes-Benz,
Shooting all the kikes, making lots of friends.
Rat tat-tat-tat-tat, mow the bastards down,
Oh what fun it is to have the Nazis back in town.
News of this merry sing-along 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.
Now, though, the highest level of the Republican Party, up to and including the White House, feels that apologizing is a mistake. The extreme right is such a large faction in the party, especially among the young, that disavowal is politically costly. Both Trump and Vance are shrewd enough to know that Young Republicans who post “I love Hitler” on chats are the future of the GOP. (Just as Trump and Vance are protective of neo-Nazi extremists, so mainstream institutions are similarly muted in criticizing Trump and Vance. Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, an organization putatively devoted to civil rights, praised the Republicans who disavowed the group chat but was notably silent about the White House shrugging off the scandal.)
The significant turning point in the GOP’s embrace of the far right came with the Charlottesville, Virginia, neo-Nazi rally in 2017, where Trump notoriously 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 Splinter in 2017, took note of the large presence of Young Republicans at the rally. One such figure was a college dropout named Nicholas Fuentes, who quickly emerged as a leading white nationalist and Holocaust denier, and a public figure with so large an audience that he was invited to dine with Donald Trump in 2022.
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Seeing Charlottesville as symptomatic, Pareene argued that white nationalists were the future of the Republican Party:
Racial resentment has been a driving force behind College Republican recruitment for years, but at this point it’s really all they have left to offer. In the age of President Donald Trump, what inspires a young person not merely to be conservative or vote Republican, but to get active in organized Republican politics? Do you think it’s a fervent belief that Paul Ryan knows the optimal tax policy to spur economic growth? Or do you think it’s more likely to be something else?…
Meanwhile, the only people entering the Republican Party candidate pipeline in the Trump era almost have to be allied with the alt-right, because the alt-right absolutely comprises the only effective and successful youth outreach strategy the GOP currently employs. The future leaders of the GOP aren’t the hooded Klan members or Nazi-tattooed thugs who presented the most cartoonish faces of hate in Charlottesville, but they are their clean-cut fellow marchers, and the many young right-wingers around the nation who sympathize with their cause….
This will be the legacy of Trumpism: It won’t be long before voters who reflexively check the box labeled “Republican” because their parents did, or because they think their property taxes are too high, or because Fox made them scared of terrorism, start electing Pepe racists to Congress.
What Pareene foresaw in 2017 is coming to pass now. In the classic movie Cabaret (1972), there’s a chilling scene where young Nazis in the Weimar Republic entrance a crowd by singing “Tomorrow belongs to me.” When Trump and Vance read about Hitler-praising lunkheads in the Republican Party, their instinct is to be paternal and protective because they, too, believe that tomorrow belongs to them.
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