Jeff Danziger lives in New York City and Vermont. He is a long time cartoonist for The Rutland Herald and is represented by Counterpoint Syndicate. He is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at jeffdanziger.com.
Insert LinkInsert LinkPretending to be “shocked” by junior Republicans revealing their inner Klansmen must be a challenge, at this late date, for anyone who has been paying attention. Perhaps some of the GOP officials proclaiming their disgust over the disclosure of thousands of racist, antisemitic, homophobic, misogynist and yes, Hitlerian texts exchanged by leaders of the National Young Republicans organization are sincere – but are they truly surprised?
Replete with primitive bigotry and fantasies of horrific violence, the messages unearthed by Politico capture the essential character of Trumpism and those attracted to it. Given what we already know about the Young Republicans, the MAGA movement, and the direction of the Republican Party in the Trump years, this latest scandal is no surprise at all.
It is not at all astonishing to learn that leading figures among Donald Trump’s political heirs profess their “love” of Hitler and their hatred for almost everyone else. The infestation of the Republican Party by neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers is a sickening and rapidly growing phenomenon that has only gotten more pronounced in recent years as party leaders averted their gaze.
Indeed, the angry protest heard from responsible Republicans in 2017, when Trump praised the “good people on both sides” after the Charlottesville neo-Nazi riot, has faded into distant memory. The outrages have grown more frequent and blatant, but Republican leaders simply ignore them – and meanwhile the neo-Nazi infiltration proceeds rapidly. Just ask Nick Fuentes, the goose-stepping Gen Z YouTuber who got his first taste of fame when he dined with Trump and Kanye West, another Hitler admirer, at Mar-a-Lago.
Remember that little scandal? Unbelievably, Trump later claimed not to know what West had said or who Fuentes is, but the unsavory pair somehow got into his private club for an intimate meeting. And although the then-former president issued a social media blast at West over his effrontery in planning to run for president, Trump never said a critical word about Fuentes.
That little hate entrepreneur – who along with most of the Young Republican Nazi sympathizers bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Aryan “master race” – has consorted with many prominent Republicans, including Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who spoke at his white nationalist “American First Political Action Committee” conference and has hired various neo-Nazis to work on her campaigns and in her office. In that regard, Greene is hardly a MAGA outlier. Her colleague Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), infamous for his fantasy animations of deadly violence against Democrats, also runs a ultra-right hiring hall on Capitol Hill.Not to be overlooked is Gosar’s fellow Arizona Republican, State Sen. Wendy Rogers, the kind of aging fangirl who shares Nazi song lyrics on X.
The notorious Fuentes visit wasn’t the last time that white nationalists or actual Nazis were welcomed onto Trump property. Candace Owens, the raving anti-Semitic podcaster recently barred from Australia, has headlined a campaign fundraiser with Donald Trump Jr. Both Don Jr. and brother Eric have appeared at the Trump Doral’s “Reawaken America” events that also featured outspoken anti-Semites and neo-Nazis. Jack Posobiec, the far-right operative who is frequently seen at Mar-a-Lago and enjoys presidential patrongage, has a long history of promoting neo-Nazis and sharing anti-Semitic propaganda on social media. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host and Trump confidant, another longtime fan favorite on the ultra-right, has taken to promoting Holocaust revisionism.
As for the Young Republicans -- and especially the New York state chapter -- their vile ravings in private chats were not exactly astounding either. The Manhattan Young Republicans, whose leader Gavin Wax has been blamed for this week’s chat leak due to an internecine feud, repeatedly hosted ultra-right extremists like Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. The club’s 2024 gala attracted such honored guests as the Berlin youth chair of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland Party, an outfit founded and heavily laden with real live Nazis.
Only three years ago their prospective candidate for governor, upstate New York Rep Elise Stefanik, backed a foul-mouthed bigot named Carl Paladino in a Congressional primary -- an endorsement she did not withdraw even after Media Matters resurfaced an interview where the Buffalo developer described Hitler as "the kind of leader we need today." Somehow Stefanik excused his remarks as "taken out of context," but he lost the primary anyway. The point is that even Paladino, having uttered many such slurs during his public career, wasn't too extreme for the Republican who rose to the third-highest position in the GOP House conference.
So when "conservative" Republicans put on their horrified faces-- and even fire a bozo like the New York state YR chairman Peter Giunta -- it is appropriate to be skeptical or even cynical. The authentic MAGA reaction to their vile babble was voiced instantly by Vice President JD Vance, who reacted by citing a string of awful texts sent by Virginia Democrat Jay Jones, the nominee for attorney general, in which he fantasized about lethal violence against Republicans. Horrifying as Jones’s texts were, they displayed only his own immaturity and stupidity. Yet Vance seized on them to excuse the “kids” in the Young Republican chat group, most of whom are well into adulthood, with several holding jobs in the Trump administration or even elected office.
Just as there is no such organization as “Antifa,” despite the wild ravings and accusations of the Trump White House, so there is no equivalent among Democrats to the political sewer inhabited by the Young Republicans. Every Republican politician who professes to be appalled must know better by now. The filth runs too deep and too wide to be cleansed by hosing a few hapless morons.
Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024).
The ongoing fallout over leaked racist text messages from Republican leaders and staffers is now causing one prominent Black organizer from President Donald Trump's reelection campaign to issue a stark warning to her party.
The text messages, which were initially leaked to Politico this week, showed Republican elected officials and party officials in multiple states openly praising Germany's fascist regime during World War II, sending political opponents "to the gas chamber" and calling Black people "monkeys" and "watermelon people." Several of the Republican officials named in the report have either resigned or been fired from their positions.
In a Thursday op-ed for the Washington Post, Gina Barr — who was the executive director of Black coalitions for the Trump 2024 campaign — lamented that young Republicans who have been tasked with leading the GOP in the coming decades openly espoused "hatred and racism."
"Their bigotry doesn’t just stain their reputations — it blinds them and their ilk to the reality of the political terrain ahead," Barr wrote.
Barr, who is also the director of women and urban engagement at the Republican National Committee according to her LinkedIn profile, said that the scandal was particularly damning for Republicans given that the most important "terrain" in the 2026 midterm elections is in the suburbs, and that people of color will play an outsized role in determining who controls Congress next November.
"The demographics tell the story. Of the 26 congressional districts targeted by the National Republican Congressional Committee, 17 are in areas where at least 40 percent of residents are people of color, according to the 2020 census," she wrote. "Four of Texas’s five newly drawn seats are majority minority. Those numbers aren’t just statistics — they are the future knocking on the GOP’s door."
Barr acknowledged that while Republicans made inroads with communities of color in 2024, those gains could be wiped out if voters see the GOP as a party filled with closet racists. She called on the GOP to "root out anyone in its ranks still clinging to the racist relics of the past."
"The Republican Party made real progress with voters of color in 2024. If it hopes to keep Congress in 2026, it will need to work even harder," she wrote. "Because the terrain has shifted — and in politics, like war, if you don’t understand the terrain, you lose."
In an exclusive story, Politico got access to thousands of private messages revealing young GOP leaders joking about gas chambers and slavery, among other "insensitive and inexcusable" topics.
The chats took place on the Telegram app, Politico reports. In them, they "referred to Black people as monkeys and 'the watermelon people' and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers."
Kansas Young Republicans vice chair William Hendrix, former vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans Bobby Walker and Chairman of the Association of New York State Young Republican Clubs Peter Giunta were among the Republican leaders named in the report.
“Can we fix the showers?” Joe Maligno, who previously identified himself as the general counsel for the New York State Young Republicans, replied.
“I’m ready to watch people burn now,” Annie Kaykaty, New York’s national committeewoman, said.
The 2,900 pages of chats shared among young Republicans between January and mid-August also featured members talking "about the pressure to cow to Trump to avoid being called a RINO."
Giunta, Politco reports, apologized, saying “I am so sorry to those offended by the insensitive and inexcusable language found within the more than 28,000 messages of a private group chat that I created during my campaign to lead the Young Republicans."
“While I take complete responsibility, I have had no way of verifying their accuracy and am deeply concerned that the message logs in question may have been deceptively doctored," Giunta said.
Social media, however, wasn't so accepting of the apology, nor were they surprised about the context of the messages.
"Shocked. Shocked I tell you. Who could have expected this from them?" wrote veteran Kirk Wolff on X.
"This is Charlie Kirk's legacy," wrote Drew Smith on X.
"They can't even scream liberal 'fake news!' cause it was leaked by Republicans," wrote Profiteroles Carmichael on X.
"This is sickening, the rhetoric needs to be toned down on both sides, and even though I voted for Pres Trump 3 times, he needs to stop it too, we need a calm leader who wants to unite the country, not childish memes and name calling," wrote Sherri Twigg on X.
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