A panel on CNN’s NewsNight exploded in anger over the political reaction to highly offensive texts leaked from a Young Republicans group chat that involved references to slavery, gas chambers, and rape.
The Young Republicans called the leaked Telegram chats “vile and inexcusable” in a statement posted to their X account on Tuesday.
However, Vice President JD Vance attempted to downplay the extreme content of the leaked chats by comparing them to a texting scandal where Democratic candidate for Virginia attorney general, Jay Jones, wished death on then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert’s children.
Jones has since called sending the texts a “grave mistake”.
“This is far worse than anything said in a college group chat,” Vance wrote in a social media post made to X on Tuesday night, sharing some of Jones’s texts. “And the guy who said it could become the AG of Virginia,” Vance added. “I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”
Discussing Vance’s reaction post on NewsNight on Tuesday, Republican strategist Kristin Davis called out the “stupid and hateful and just disgusting” content of the Young Republicans group chat.
“I think the vice president could have really used this moment as a learning moment,” Davis said. “Encouraging these young men and women, I don‘t know who they were, but to be better and to denounce what they‘ve said, to move on and be better… I wish the vice president would have said that.”
Davis mentioned that Jones had texted “even worse things” as an adult, “so they’re not comparable.”
Keith Boykin, a former White House aide under President Bill Clinton, then claimed that Davis had done “the exact same thing JD Vance did, except you denounced the words, but you immediately pivoted to a Democrat instead of focusing on the fact that this is a pattern.”
“The saddest thing about this story is that it was not the least bit surprising to me,” Boykin continued. “I don‘t think anyone who… is familiar with where the Republican Party has been going the past decade or so…”
Conservative radio host Ben Ferguson then interjected, “They’re not calling people ‘Hitler’ or ‘fascist’.”
Boykin shouted, “JD Vance literally called Donald Trump ‘Hitler’!”
In 2016, Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler,” writing in 2016 that he swung “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a–hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
After the panel continued to talk over each other, host Abby Phillip said to Ferguson, “Ben, as we’ve played multiple times here, Trump has repeatedly called his democratic opponents ‘fascists’ so that argument does not hold much water.”
Trump has blamed the “radical left” for political violence in America.
“The radicals on the left are the problem,” Trump said on Fox and Friends last month. “They’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy, although they want men and women sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders.”
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