You don’t need a trove of apparently leaked texts to reveal what is true: Paul Ingrassia is proud of what he believes.
Mr. Ingrassia, an attorney and right-wing provocateur who was awaiting Senate confirmation to the Office of Special Counsel before his nomination was withdrawn on Tuesday, claimed to friends that he had a “Nazi streak,” according to texts published by Politico this week.
Well before those messages surfaced publicly, Mr. Ingrassia was a vocal supporter of extremists like Nick Fuentes, a former dinner companion of Mr. Trump’s who has questioned the death toll of the Holocaust.
Mr. Ingrassia has represented the self-described misogynist Andrew Tate, an influencer facing rape and human trafficking charges overseas. His Substack account — where Mr. Ingrassia proclaims that he is “President Trump’s favorite writer” — reads like a white nationalist manifesto; in one post, he likened immigrants to “Barbarian hordes of criminal invaders” and warned that changing racial demographics could “break the cultural and social fabric” of the United States.
In other words, it really does take a lot for Republicans to back away from confirming a nominee the president wants for a top role in his administration. On Tuesday, though, at least a few Senate Republicans appeared to be alarmed about Mr. Ingrassia, who currently works as White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.
“It never should’ve gotten this far,” Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin and a member of the Homeland Security Committee, told reporters. At least four Republican senators had said they would oppose Mr. Ingrassia’s nomination.
Before Mr. Ingrassia’s nomination was withdrawn, Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, was asked whether it would be a mistake for him to appear at his confirmation hearing. Mr. Thune laughed off the question and replied, “yeah.”
White House officials on Tuesday did not respond to questions about Mr. Ingrassia’s nomination or about whether he would remain in his liaison job.
Still, the fact that the nomination got this far illustrates how much antisemitic and hateful rhetoric has been normalized, explained away or rewarded by Republicans in power. Sometimes, the backlash against it comes from everywhere but the White House.
A common tactic inside the Trump administration is to defend the outrageous or hateful things people say by claiming the remarks have roots in irony — that nothing is that serious. Maybe everyone who is offended should just have a better sense of humor, some officials suggest.
Edward Andrew Paltzik, an attorney for Mr. Ingrassia, cast doubt on the authenticity of the messages in an email, but then said that if the messages were true, they might have been meant in jest.
“We do not concede the authenticity of any of these purported messages,” Mr. Paltzik wrote. “Moreover, even if, arguendo, the texts are authentic, they clearly read as self-deprecating and satirical humor making fun of the fact that liberals outlandishly and routinely call MAGA supporters ‘Nazis.’”
Downplaying or casting doubt on the provenance of antisemitic texts and other messages — claiming that there is nothing to see here, including what you are plainly seeing — is a popular strategy.
Last week, when a leaked group chat of young Republican operatives contained messages expressing a love for Hitler and suggesting that political opponents face gas chambers, Vice President JD Vance was among the group’s defenders. He likened the Nazi-loving texts to anything in a “college group chat” and said that a Democratic candidate in Virginia who glorified political violence against Republicans was worse.
“Part of the challenge is that in the last decade, there’s not only been a normalization of this extremism by political leaders but a desensitization to it,” said Amy Spitalnick, the chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a coalition of advocacy groups. “So none of this should be surprising to anyone, even if it’s still shocking.”
As Mr. Trump and a growing number of Republican lawmakers have demonstrated, promoting conspiratorial beliefs is not a political death sentence. The line now seems to be: Outright appreciation for Nazism or its artifacts is frowned upon.
In August, Mr. Trump pulled his nomination of E.J. Antoni, a conservative economist, to serve as the leader of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The White House did not give a reason for why Mr. Antoni’s nomination was pulled. But he was widely criticized for his professed admiration of the Bismarck, a Nazi warship prized by Hitler. Mr. Antoni once called the ship “hard not to love.”
Mr. Ingrassia is far from the only person who has espoused antisemitic or white nationalist rhetoric to be given a role in the Trump administration.
Darren Beattie, a senior State Department official who was fired as a White House speechwriter during the first Trump administration for attending a gathering of white supremacists, was appointed in July as the acting president of the U.S. Institute of Peace. Kingsley Wilson, a Pentagon spokeswoman, has publicly promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men and a former adviser to Mr. Trump, has shared social media posts suggesting that Hitler and other despots should be absolved for their roles in genocide. In January, Mr. Musk delivered a straight-arm salute on Inauguration Day. He also urged the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, to “move beyond” the guilt of the Holocaust.
Shortly after, Mr. Vance turned up at a conference in Munich and urged his audience to embrace extremist ideologies espoused by the AfD if it meant collecting more votes for conservatives. Mr. Vance was accused by Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor at the time, of interfering in the country’s elections.
Extreme beliefs are now embraced throughout the sprawl of the federal government, of course, because many of those beliefs have been espoused by the president.
During his first term, Mr. Trump repeatedly mentioned to John F. Kelly, his former chief of staff, “You know, Hitler did some good things, too.”
In interviews with The New York Times published last year, Mr. Kelly said that he had assumed that Mr. Trump lacked a grasp of history and a full understanding of the atrocities carried out at Hitler’s direction. Mr. Kelly said he had tried to explain the history to the president.
Mr. Trump eventually brought up Hitler again.
Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
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