PRAGMATIC ISSUES

More young Republican chat members and operatives are finding themselves suddenly unemployed, shunned, or publicly condemned and not because of cancel culture or “woke mobs.” It’s because the rot that began at the top of their movement has finally trickled down.

It all started on Tuesday when POLITICO published an exclusive report on the Telegram exchanges exposing a group chat between some young Republicans. 2,900 pages of which were leaked and reviewed by POLITICO called Black people monkeys, repeatedly used slurs for gay, Black, Latino and Asian people, and jokingly celebrated Adolf Hitler and much, much more.

These young conservatives didn’t invent hate speech. They inherited it. For nearly a decade, Donald Trump’s tone, mocking, divisive, and laced with grievance has set the standard for how to “win” in Republican politics. Cruelty became currency. Bullying was repackaged as strength. Racism, sexism, and homophobia were rebranded as “just telling it like it is.”

Now, those who grew up politically under Trump are reaping the consequences. They’re being exposed for the same inflammatory language, the same dehumanizing memes, the same smirking contempt for anyone outside their ideological bubble because that’s what they were taught leadership looks like. And instead of correcting course, senior Republicans continue to pretend that the problem lies anywhere but within their own party culture.

Stephen Miller’s Project 2025 is perhaps the clearest expression of this moral collapse. It isn’t just a policy blueprint, it’s a manifesto for a permanent authoritarian movement cloaked in patriotism. Its architects envision a government purged of dissenters, women’s rights rolled back to pre-Roe conditions, and the press cowed into silence. The misogyny embedded in Trump’s worldview from “grab them by the…” to mocking female journalists and world leaders wasn’t a one-off.

It was doctrine.

And young men took notes.

What we’re witnessing now, the firings, the scandals, the chatroom leaks, the racist slurs and sexist tirades are not isolated lapses in judgment. They are the direct offspring of a political movement that confused cruelty with conviction.

It’s telling that even as these incidents pile up, so many Republican officials refuse to draw the line back to Trump himself. They’ll condemn “bad behavior” in the abstract but never the culture of hate that fuels it. Because to do that would mean acknowledging that the man they still worship as a political savior is the root cause.

This is not about party lines anymore, it’s about character. A generation of young conservatives has been taught that empathy is weakness, that facts are negotiable, and that power justifies anything. The result is a movement hemorrhaging credibility, one viral scandal at a time.

Republicans often claim they’re the party of personal responsibility. If that’s true, then it’s time they own up to what their rhetoric has created. The young people being fired or exposed for vile comments didn’t emerge from nowhere, they are the inevitable result of years spent marinating in Trumpism’s toxic brew of victimhood and rage.

The irony is that Trump’s influence, which once energized the GOP, now threatens to hollow it out completely. Each new scandal involving a “rising conservative star” doesn’t just damage a career, it reminds voters what the party has become under his watch.

If the Republican Party ever hopes to reclaim moral ground, it must start by rejecting the politics of hate it allowed to flourish. Otherwise, more of its own will fall not to censorship or conspiracy, but to the simple reckoning of public decency.

Because the truth is plain, Trump didn’t just divide America. He deformed an entire generation of conservatives who believed that cruelty was leadership  and now they’re paying the price for it.