When President Donald Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia, a 30-year-old lawyer and far-right provocateur, to run the Office of Special Counsel, he described him as a “highly respected attorney, writer, and Constitutional Scholar.” Just months later, and on the eve of a Senate hearing to confirm his position as head of the federal whistleblower agency, Ingrassia announced he was withdrawing from consideration for the job. The cause of this spectacular implosion was the revelation, in a Politico report published this week, of a group chat in which Ingrassia allegedly made a series of racist and offensive remarks. “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it,” read one.
Ingrassia’s lawyer offered two competing explanations for his client’s alleged texts. “Looks like these texts could be manipulated or are being provided with material context omitted,” the lawyer wrote in a statement to Politico. “However, arguendo, even if 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.’”
This prevalence of extreme rhetoric in Republican group chats isn’t a new problem. Journalist Aaron Sibarium said in 2023: “Whenever I’m on a career advice panel for young conservatives, I tell them to avoid group chats that use the N-word or otherwise blur the line between edgelording and earnest bigotry.”
“There is a problem on the right,” Sibarium says now in an interview with VF. “And it has gotten noticeably worse in the last two years.”
Ingrassia’s downfall comes just a week after Politico reported on another group chat of Young Republican leaders who exchanged a dizzying number of racist and antisemitic messages. The members of the chat, according to Politico, “referred to Black people as monkeys and ‘the watermelon people’ and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.” (The Young Republicans board called for those involved to resign, and said they “are appalled by the vile and inexcusable language revealed” in the article. “Such behavior is disgraceful, unbecoming of any Republican, and stands in direct opposition to the values our movement represents.”)
Richard Hanania—a writer once popular among the far-right who has since disavowed extremism—traces the rise of this trend back to 2015. In an interview, he describes how “the great awokening” on the left kicked into high gear just as Trump, a defiantly offensive political candidate, vaulted to the top of the Republican presidential ticket.
“To be a young conservative at that point, especially if you’re on a university campus or something, felt pretty stifling to people,” Hanania says. “It created a simplistic heuristic: Whatever thing the left is doing, we’re going to go to the opposite extreme. So they’re obsessed with not being racist, not being sexist, not being homophobic? We’re going to be all of those things.”
The Young Republicans group chat was very much all of those things. Some of the messages are obvious jokes, extreme attempts at shock-value humor made in a community where pushing the bounds of bigotry was clearly encouraged. The “I love Hitler” comment that drew most of the attention was, in context, a joke. Still, Sibarium notes that this kind of nihilistic edgelording—where offending is the point—is becoming increasingly common in pro-Trump circles. Often, it’s impossible to tell where the shock value ends and the true belief begins, a blurring of lines that has allowed Republican leaders to dismiss these stories as trivial cases of kids making off-color jokes. Who among us hasn’t done a Hitler bit?
No one has embraced that view with quite as much zeal as Vice President JD Vance. The man who just a few years ago was describing Trump as “America’s Hitler” has now taken to defending his supporters when they express their admiration for Nazis. While Vance has yet to weigh in on Ingrassia, when the previous group chat was reported by Politico, he rallied in support of its participants, referring to the fully-grown adults as “young boys” and mocking the “pearl-clutching” over their racist and antisemitic commentary. (As his many critics have pointed out, Vance is considerably less tolerant of extreme rhetoric on the left.)
Vance’s convenient dismissal is reflective of an attitude that fueled these group chats’ prevalence in the first place: defiance of tone-policing, which the right argues has been imposed upon them by America’s liberal institutions for decades.
For Sibarium, it’s not just defiance of liberal censoriousness, but also mirrors the excesses of the left. “My worry is that what happened to the left with wokeness could easily happen to the right with Groyperism,” he says, referring to a pro-Trump, white nationalist movement led by Nick Fuentes. “When wokeness began gathering steam, it was often dismissed as an online or campus-bound phenomenon. ‘It’s just a few college kids, they’ll grow out of it.’ Or: ‘It’s just a few weirdos on the internet.’ The problem is that the institutions never told those weirdos ‘No.’ Fast forward to 2020, and wokeness had captured The New York Times, the nonprofit industrial complex, and much of the Democratic Party. The crazy college kids were actually making policy.”
He adds: “If enough young, very online edgelords join the Republican Party, the party will eventually be forced to cater to those edgelords.”
Hanania points out another similarity: “I think the thing that radicalized the left on these issues was actually Twitter. That was the coordination point where extremists could yell at politicians and institutions. And then [Elon] Musk buys Twitter in 2022 and we see this stuff take off on the right.”
When Trump nominated Ingrassia in May, he already boasted an ignominious biography: In frequent podcast appearances and social media posts, he called for January 6 to be declared a national holiday and said former presidential candidate Nikki Haley should be deported (Haley is a US citizen born in South Carolina). He represented Andrew Tate and praised Fuentes. Politico reported earlier this month that Ingrassia was investigated by DHS’s human resources for sexual harassment after he allegedly canceled a lower-ranking colleague’s hotel room on a work trip so she would be forced to share one with him. (Ingrassia denied any wrongdoing. The colleague retracted her complaint, and a DHS spokesperson told the outlet that Ingrassia has been cleared.)
“He’s part of the loose screw caucus of post-J6 Trump sycophants whose only qualification for government positions is that they were willing to champion the worst aspects of Trumpism, such as the Sidney Powell–style election conspiracy theories,” one former Trump campaign official explained.
That such a figure would even be considered for such a role is something only possible in Trump’s second term, which, as New York Times White House reporter Katie Rogers noted, “illustrates how much antisemitic and hateful rhetoric has been normalized, explained away or rewarded by Republicans in power.”
Hanania says, since Trump’s rise in 2015, the kind of “edgelords” who fester in these group chats have gone from the fringes to powerful positions in the new administration. “They’re ascendant,” he says. “It’s a huge faction and it’s a recognizable type. These people are in government, and they’re hugely influential throughout the right-wing ecosystem.
Ingrassia was shut out by the Senate, but he indicated in his statement that he would retain his job in the administration. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on whether Ingrassia would keep his job. Time will tell. During its second term, the Trump administration has boasted about its “no scalps policy,” which dissuades the firing of officials who have been the subject of bad headlines. That means figures like Ingrassia have a better chance than ever of weathering this kind of storm. It also means the administration—and the media ecosystem that supports it—is composed of more fringe characters than ever before.
As a result, Hanania has little optimism that this kind of performative extremism will go away—or remain confined to offensive jokes in private group chats. “I look for indicators that there’s a return to sanity among the Republicans, or a potential for it,” he says. “And I look at the top podcasters, the top influencers in the country. There’s very, very little room for optimism there. The trend lines are going toward more ethno-populism, more open racism, more misogyny. I think that’s the future of the party.”
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
-
What Bari Weiss Means for 60 Minutes
-
All About Melania
-
Meet the British ’90s It Girl Who Wants to Make England Great Again
-
Anjelica Huston’s Cultured Coolness
-
Gore Vidal’s Final Feud
-
The 6 Grisly Films Inspired by Serial Killer Ed Gein
-
Charlie Kirk, Redeemed by the Media
-
The 25 Best Movies to Watch on Netflix This October
-
From the Archive: The Hollywood Secret Katharine Hepburn Helped Bury
The post Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s Man With a “Nazi Streak,” Embodies the Right’s Growing Group Chat Problem appeared first on Vanity Fair.
