JD Vance Thinks That Tomorrow Belongs to Hitler-Loving Young Republicans

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.”

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.)