Young MAGA supporters cheer at CPAC. Reuters/Nathan Howard
The Republican Party finds itself stuck with a new hiring pool full of a new "generation of rabid, incompetent idiots," according to Politico, and it only has itself to blame for the problem.
In a report published Saturday morning, Politico dug into the situation that has "some GOP veterans [worried] about the rising generation of young staffers in their party," as they "fret" over concerns that the "pipeline that feeds young conservative talent into government jobs is defective — if not broken." According to these veterans, many of them non-MAGA Republicans, the party's longstanding metamorphosis into President Donald Trump's fiercely loyal personality cult has left it with a dire new talent pool lacking in skill and devoted to extremism.
"This isn’t just the standard middle-aged lament that the kids aren’t all right," the report explained. "It’s a criticism aimed at institutions like the Heritage Foundation that purport to identify and train the party’s future governing class. To conservative critics in and out of government, many of whom ascribe to more traditional, pre-MAGA Republican beliefs, some such institutions have spent the last decade selecting for rigid conformity to Trumpist ideology over more typical markers of expertise. Maybe that helps for enforcing the party line in the new GOP. But these critics fear a decline of merit and skill, along with a tolerance for darker ideologies that could cripple the party’s ability to govern in the long run."
The outlet cited interviews with "four senior Republican congressional staffers, as well as think tank scholars, Heritage expats, academics who study think tanks and up-and-coming young Republicans," finding within those discussions "a widening generational split and mutual distrust over the issue."
One anonymous senior GOP staffer did not mince words about the growing problem, dismissing the new generation of prospective staffers as "idiots."
“Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence,” the staffer said. “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”
Sources highlighted the specific influence of Nick Fuentes, the far-right and explicitly racist streamer and commentator, whose influence is being felt among this new generation of conservative staffers. The term used for his followers, "groypers," has become a "catch-all term of abuse for young, anti-establishment right-wingers."
As Adam Serwer, a reporter for The Atlantic, observed on BlueSky, the party only has itself to blame for this new staffing predicament, given the ways in which it has reshaped itself over the last decade.
"Not only did they absolutely beg for this, they made it so that 'merit' was synonymous with being white so now you’re stuck with precisely the kind of moron who believes that," Serwer wrote.