In a normal political reality, one truth would be undeniably clear after Tuesday night’s electoral shellacking: Donald Trump’s time as the leader of the Republican Party should be over.
Trump has proven himself incapable of securing electoral victories for his party, except in cases when he is on the ballot himself, running against an incumbent party (but not the incumbent himself). And he will likely ever be prevented from ever running again, if not by the precise wording of the Constitution, then by biological reality, which finds him barely able to stay awake for this presidency. Lucky him.
That would leave JD Vance as the heir apparent of the GOP’s reins, especially since Trump already attempted to have the last heir apparent lynched.
That would make Wednesday a remarkable turnstile in history, given that Vance is half Trump’s age and potentially could linger at the top of a movement dedicated to securing one-party rule in the United States for scores, well into the 2060s.
So how did JD mark his ascent to the top rung of the GOP?
He made Ted Cruz seem courageous. He did this by insisting that the Republican Party be a welcoming place for Groypers, a group of younger white nationalists who range from Nazi-curious to “to the right of Hitler.”
That the vice president of the United States and new leader of the Republican Party welcomes a coalition with gutter antisemites and racists with outwardly genocidal politics feels like big news! Especially as the sham that this regime ever cared about “antisemitism” is falling apart, even for some of the Jews who decided to lend their identity to that farce.
So let’s do a quick Google search to see how the press is taking the news.
You can see that most of the stories focus on the Hitler lover, Nick Fuentes, who has been ushered into the mainstream by Tucker Carlson, one of the greatest popularizers of white nationalism of the century, after being invited back on X by Elon Musk, the greatest popularizer of Nazism this century.
The best one of the lot is probably from the Washington Post, “Far-right provocateur Nick Fuentes is triggering a MAGA civil war,” and “Groyper Trouble” by David S. Bernstein is worth your time.
Still, what’s missing is any focus on JD Vance’s reaction to Fuentes, who celebrated his platforming on one of the largest podcasts on the right by going directly at the vice president, renewing the vicious personal and racist attacks on Vance and his wife.
(Sorry for all the X links in the link above and below, but a big part of this story is how the radicalization of the GOP, which has always been one of the biggest stories in America, has accelerated infinitely by Musk building the worst radicalization machine humanity has ever known.)
Last year, when Trump made Vance, he took something like a stand against Fuentes, calling him a “loser” and insisting he was far more concerned with “government policy that discriminates based on race.”
This was an example of what I have to call Vance’s gift for Racist Dog Whistling.
Peter Thiel’s ambassador to humans has mastered both the barely cloaked race-baiting that elevated Trump to the GOP and the 2.0 version of this skill, which Ian Haney López, who wrote the book on Dog Whistle Politics, calls Racial Theater. That rhetorical move sees the white nationalist demagogue turn the tables by accusing critics of his racial division of being the “real bigots.” He calls out Fuentes and then embraces the underlying fiction of white racists in America, that the US government discriminates against white people, and implicitly declares himself in coalition with Fuentes and his Groypers.
You’ve probably heard the term Groypers, but it matters a lot for understanding what’s going on in the GOP. So let me remind you that they are named after a variation of the Pepe the Frog meme, which racists have co-opted.
'The Groyper movement has been described as homophobic, racist, nativist, fascist, sexist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, and an attempt to rebrand the alt-right movement,” Wikipedia explains. “It has also been called accelerationist.”
Basically, Groypers are generally “more honest MAGA,” right-wing white males who follow the outward bigotry of Fuentes even more than they follow the outward bigotry of Donald Trump, who still—despite his obviousness to anyone on the left—cloaks his hatred in some plausible deniability. And Fuentes believes there are enough of them that Vance can never become president or even lead MAGA without Fuentes’ Groyping acolytes.
“Now, if Vance condemns the Groypers, we are deploying to Iowa,” he said. “Raise your right hand. I swear I’m going to move to Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada and South Carolina and one primary after the next.”
Fuentes called this “The Gropyer Squeeze,” and the intent is to force Vance to—at the very least—not do what Ted Cruz has done and call out the Groypers:
“If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very cool and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing, then you’re a coward and you are complicit in that evil,” Cruz said during a speech at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas last week.
What has Vance’s response been?
Far less brave than Cruz, who famously responded to Donald Trump insulting his wife and father by bathing Trump’s feet with his tongue for a decade. Instead, Vance’s response either ranges from impossibly cowardly to horrific, depending on how you read his always cagey words. On the day after the GOP’s electoral drubbing, he posted on X a list of notes for his fellow white nationalists. And this was number three:
The infighting is stupid. I care about my fellow citizens--particularly young Americans--being able to afford a decent life, I care about immigration and our sovereignty, and I care about establishing peace overseas so our resources can be focused at home. If you care about those things too, let’s work together.
It’s a classic Vance rhetorical move that’s almost indecipherable if you don’t pay much attention to the world of MAGA that now pretty much only exists on X, Fox, and some other podcasts. Instead of calling out Fuentes, he called out anyone who has been calling out Fuentes. And he called on the GOP to unite around the things they love: like deporting brown children.
This is terrifying in two ways.
Vance is welcoming Nazis in all but name into the GOP. Their oft-stated goal is an ethnic cleansing of the United States and the vice president’s family. And Vance has moved to form a coalition with them, while the press cannot even attempt to explain to America what this means.
It reminds me of how our country failed the “Don’t Give the Dictator an Extraordinarily Well Funded Secret Police” test earlier this year, with almost no debate about what we were doing to ourselves and our neighbors. There’s exceptional skill (or denial) being applied when the freest, most prosperous country ever to exist on earth flounders like a fledgling democracy.
This mix of skill and denial is why I fear Vance and the way he skids between raindrops. Jamelle Bouie OFTEN points out that many of Vance’s X “mutuals”—those of his followers whom Vance follows back—are actual neo-Nazis. Yet, the press doesn’t feel that merits coverage, even as they cover other politicians' social media follows to embarrassing degrees. His first significant move as vice president was to attack the limits that had condemned Nazism to the trash heap of history.
This is why, when I realized last fall that Trump could very likely win, I’ve been fixated on Vance and his often brilliant nefariousness.
He’s cagier than Trump, far more “normal” seeming, and shares a strange immunity with Trump. The press cannot or will not pierce through his rhetoric to see the what-should-be-obvious danger of the man.
Which leads us back to the first sentence of this post, which begins, “In a normal political reality…” This is clearly not where we are.
We are in a period of rapid authoritarian consolidation by a party that makes its intentions of one-party rule enforced by the military more undeniable every day, with a mass movement that understands the threat we face, but an opposition party that has proven itself incapable of opposing the intentional rot of our Constitution in any decisive way.
This is only happening because of Donald Trump's unique political skill, impunity, and investiture. I don’t believe Vance could have ever gotten us to this point, but I do think he is uniquely fit to attempt to take it to a dark next stage.
Do I believe Donald Trump and the Trumps want that? I have no idea.
I know Don Jr. was essential to Trump's decision to pick Vance. And Vance’s connections to Silicon Valley could make him the best-funded politician in human history, with multiple figures throwing down billions on his behalf, the way Elon Musk did for Trump in 2024.
All I know is this crisis has reached a turning point, and Vance is telling us that the ethnic cleansing that Stephen Miller is now conducting on Trump’s behalf is just the beginning if he gets his way. And he keeps getting his way.
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Even the name, groyper, is ugly.