With "uncharismatic pretenders and Nazi wannabe heirs waiting in the wings" as President Donald Trump towers over the "rightist movement," much of MAGA is fixated on trying to rehabilitate Adolf Hitler and that makes them "easy prey," writes journalist Noah Smith.
Last week, Politico revealed thousands of racist, antisemitic, and violent text messages exchanged within a private Telegram chat among leaders and members of the Young Republican National Federation, which Smith says was hardly shocking.
The leaks led to a backlash from the GOP, with the New York and Kansas chapters of the Young Republicans getting shut down, a Vermont state senator stepping down, and a handful of other participants losing their jobs. "(JD Vance didn’t join in, making excuses for the “kids” in the chat group, even though they were in their late 20s or 30s)," Smith notes.
Despite the few incidents of condemnation, Smith says, it's not good enough.
"It’s good to see that the institutions of the Republican Party still have enough power — and enough of a conscience — to crack down on things like this, at least a little bit," he writes. "But it’s unlikely that official censure or condemnations will stem the trend toward authoritarianism and racial hatred among the party’s younger members."
Smith says that the leaked texts were tame compared to what's actually going on in the right-wing-populated darker web.
"In fact, if anything, what’s surprising is that the mainstream media seems to have been so blindsided by texts that were so tame compared to what gets said on public forums like X and 4chan every day," he says.
Today's right-wingers, Smith notes, are aligning themselves much more with the Third Reich.
"There is a lot more unabashed Hitlerism than in the Young Republicans’ group chat. Popular right-wing accounts now regularly ridicule the widespread belief that Hitler was evil as a 'religion' or a 'myth'," Smith says.
Politico's leaked chats revealed a “the love of Nazis within their party’s right wing," Smith says. "In fact, attempts to rehabilitate Hitler are becoming more common all across the right-wing media ecosystem."
Smith cites former Fox News host "Tucker Carlson’s embrace of a revisionist historian who calls Winston Churchill the true villain of World War 2, claims that Hitler actually wanted peace, and declared that Hitler conquering France was preferable to a modern drag show."
Smith calls this a "new trend of Hitler apologia on the right," fueled by the fact that most who fought Hitler in World War II are long gone and not here to dispute their jokes and revisionist history.
And while leftists, he says, don't like Hitler, "the rise of the Palestine movement on the left probably contributed to the trend," as well, he explains, giving "rightists a green light to unleash their own much more virulent antisemitism without fear of leftist attack."
Social media, he says, also rewards extremism with extremist views tending to go viral more than more temperate ones, he says.
And by boosting extremists, "social media exposes everyone to maximum threat from the other side; when some random clout-chasing pseudonymous progressive calls normal Republicans “Nazis” for restricting immigration, those Republicans may feel like the whole progressive movement is calling them 'Nazis,' he says.
"This may make some of them simply give up on the idea of policing their actual Nazi extremists in order to maintain respectability, because they may feel that this is a lost cause."
The combination of all these factors is "allowing the worst voices on the American right to rehabilitate Adolf Hitler," he says, and while Trump is more of a "corrupt personalist Peronist" as opposed to a Nazi, Smith says his end is nigh.
Trump "will cease to be coherent or sharp enough to control the GOP or determine the direction of the MAGA movement," he writes, and "In the absence of a towering charismatic figure, the movement that Trump built will have to be held together by ideology."
This is where the revisionist, rehabbed vision of Hitler comes in, he explains.
"The idea of the Great Replacement — that immigration is a plot to subjugate both the White race and the Republican party — will be absolutely core to that ideology," he explains. "Rightists believe that Hitler’s place as the Great Satan in America’s folk memory gives liberals and leftists a moral trump card, and so they feel like they need to deemphasize the evil of the Nazis in order to level the political playing field."
Trump's immigration sweeps and urban crackdowns may leave MAGA in a difficult position to retain minority votes, Smith says, "but hating on Jews may allow them to hold on to a few foolish guys who don’t realize that Hitler would have sent them to the gas chambers too."
As a result, Smith notes, the "MAGA movement is probably going to become more Nazi-adjacent and Nazi-apologetic when Trump’s personal influence fades," and, "while things will probably get worse before they get better," it will be easier to fight this post-Trump MAGA, he says.
"It’s a lot easier to fight against an army of grim, cruel Hitler apologists than it is to battle a charismatic populist, and basically no demographic group in America is actually majority antisemitic," he says, adding, "America is unlikely to stand for actual Nazism."
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