The G.O.P. Has Gone Off the Deep End
"The Republican Party has a neo-Nazi problem.
This is not slander or pejorative or innuendo; it is the plain truth of the matter, a conclusion drawn from simple observation. And the problem has been getting worse.
Consider a few of the people staffing the Trump administration.
There is Paul Ingrassia, acting general counsel of the General Services Administration, who withdrew his nomination to serve as special counsel of the United States after Politico published a trove of offensive remarks from his social media and group chats. “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it,” Ingrassia, who is 31, wrote in a text in 2024. “We need competent white men in positions of leadership,” he wrote in another message. “The founding fathers were wrong that all men are created equal … We need to reject that part of our heritage.”
There is Nate Hochman, a young Republican operative who was fired from Gov. Ron DeSantis’s 2024 presidential campaign after promoting a pro-DeSantis video that used a Nazi symbol. He now works as speechwriter for Secretary of State Marco Rubio. (In 2022, Hochman wrote a feature for this newspaper’s Opinion section.)
And there are the young staffers responsible for the Trump administration’s social media presence, who use their large and influential platform to share Nazi-inspired rhetoric and post Nazi-inspired memes. In January of this year, for instance, the Department of Labor posted a video with the caption “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American,” a line that echoes the Nazi slogan of “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”: “One people, one realm, one leader.”
Social media accounts for the Department of Homeland Security show a steady stream of memes and images drawn from neo-Nazi and white supremacist agitprop. One post, a recruitment ad for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, read “WE’LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN,” the title of a song written by the Pine Tree Riots, an a cappella group associated with an explicitly white nationalist group. The song is popular with online neo-Nazis and white supremacists. It is unlikely to have been an accident. Another post, also an ICE recruitment ad, was captioned “Which way, American man?,” a direct reference to “Which Way Western Man?,” a virulently racist and antisemitic book published in 1978 and later sold and publicized by the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group.
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Keep in mind that these are not staffers’ private accounts; these posts are reaching the public through the official organs of the U.S. government.
If this weren’t disturbing enough, consider some of the people working for Republican candidates and running for office under the Republican standard.
In Georgia, the Republican Senate nominee Mike Collins has had to answer for a former staffer who posted Nazi images online as well as a photo of himself in full Ku Klux Klan regalia. And Collins’s son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, is a white nationalist and online influencer with a history of posting Nazi imagery. Senator Jon Husted, an Ohio Republican running to retain the seat to which he was appointed after Vice President JD Vance left for the White House, recently fired his 25-year-old political director after learning that he had used a photograph of Nazi soldiers as a social media profile picture.
You’ll notice that most of these people are in their 20s and 30s. That is no coincidence; it is clear that among the young staffer and operative class of the Republican Party are people with neo-Nazi sympathies and white supremacist views. Last year, for example, leaked messages from a group chat of Young Republicans from chapters across the country — who ranged in age from 18 to 40 — included racial slurs, support for Nazi ideas and a declaration of admiration for the leader of the Third Reich, all framed as jokes. “I love Hitler,” wrote Peter Giunta, then the chief of staff to a New York State assemblyman. Asked if he was watching an N.B.A. playoff game, Giunta, who was also the chairman of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, replied, “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” If these were jokes, they revealed a taste for both cruelty and casual bigotry.
The University of Florida’s College Republicans chapter was disbanded after two members were seen performing a Nazi salute on social media. Elsewhere in the state, 34-year-old Marshall Rawson is set to take a seat in Florida’s House of Representatives nearly 10 years after marching alongside neo-Nazis at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va.
In March, 30-year-old Brandon Herrera won the Republican primary for Texas’ 23rd Congressional District. A far-right YouTube personality, Herrera has published videos that feature Nazi imagery and Nazi military anthems, joke about the Holocaust and showcase Nazi weapons. He can even be seen goose-stepping. And one of the most prominent neo-Nazis in the country is 28-year-old Nick Fuentes, a far-right provocateur and political commentator whose supporters are known as “Groypers.” Fuentes dined with President Trump between his two terms and in the past year sat for a friendly interview with Tucker Carlson, still arguably the most important figure in the right-wing media ecosystem.
As the historian David Austin Walsh makes clear in “Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right,” there is a degree of self-flattery in the old conventional wisdom that traditional conservatives successfully policed the borders of their movement in the past. Despite his influence, a figure like William F. Buckley Jr. could not actually expel people from the conservative movement or define “conservatism” to fully exclude people and groups that occupied the dark margins of American politics. “American conservatism,” Walsh writes, “resembled the fragmentation of the Protestant churches, with various factions and sects vying among themselves over who was ‘truly’ conservative.”
The upshot of this dynamic is that there have always been points of political, social and ideological overlap between the far right and more mainstream conservatives. At National Review, the spiritual and institutional home of movement conservatism through much of the late 20th century, writers like Joe Sobran “flirted with the avowedly racist right,” Walsh writes. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the neo-Nazi leader David Duke would make his home in the Louisiana Republican Party and win nearly 40 percent of the vote in the 1991 governor’s race. The next year, in the Republican presidential primary, Pat Buchanan would launch a spirited challenge to George H.W. Bush even after Buchanan was condemned for trafficking in Holocaust denialism.
For a time, the institutional Republican Party was strong enough to keep these views, and the underlying forces that fueled them, away from its center of gravity. It is with the total collapse of the traditional Republican “establishment” — and the extent to which it was supplanted, over the course of the 2000s and the 2010s, by conservative media and assorted billionaire donors — that the party lost any ability it had to police its boundaries. The apotheosis of this phenomenon is Donald Trump, who fully bypassed conservative and Republican gatekeepers on the strength of his celebrity and media savvy, and whose victory in the 2024 presidential election opened the floodgates of the party to the far right.
But where even Trump once had to create the sense of distance between himself and the alt-right, now it is hard to think of it as “alternative” at all. Now it is simply the Republican right.
There is every reason to think, in fact, that the Republican Party’s neo-Nazi problem is spreading.
Just look at the way that House Speaker Mike Johnson defended Herrera after being confronted with evidence of his abhorrent views, treating him as just another Republican candidate with an outsize online persona. “Brandon Herrera has been out running a very effective campaign,” Johnson said.
Or look to last week’s Republican midterm gathering in Dallas, where the vice president echoed far-right tropes about the alleged crime and disorder produced by immigrants. “We were tired of being called racists,” Vance said to the cheers and approving nods of the audience, “for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.”
The vice president is nothing if not shrewd and opportunistic. He sees where his fellow young conservatives are headed. He does not plan to be left behind.
Perhaps there will be some seismic shift that derails the far-right capture of the Republican Party. But this feels like wishful thinking. If the past decade is any guide, then the fever, if that is what we want to call it, is only going to get worse.
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va."
