Vile Texts Expose GOP Rot

The Young Republican Telegram chat wasn’t private chatter. It was a window into a party teaching cruelty as culture; mocking decency and betraying the voters who trusted it.

Guest article by Michael Cohen. Follow him on Substack for more by clicking here.

Source: POLITICO

The truth didn’t leak; it detonated.

For seven months, a group of Young Republican leaders across New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont typed freely in a private Telegram chat—convinced no one would ever see their words. What spilled out in reporting from POLITICO was more than offensive; it was a blueprint of moral rot. They joked about putting political opponents in gas chambers, fantasized about sexual violence, and openly praised slavery. “Everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber,” Peter Giunta wrote as if announcing a campaign platform. Bobby Walker described rape as “epic.” William Hendrix tossed around the n-word like it was punctuation. Joe Maligno casually suggested, “Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic.”

This isn’t the idle cruelty of teenagers. These are grown men and women in positions of political influence—state chairs, congressional aides, campaign operatives—the very people shaping policy and strategy in Trump’s America. They laughed at genocide and celebrated sexual violence, training themselves to measure loyalty by the depth of their depravity. And they did it openly, because the Trump-era GOP had made cruelty safe, normalized, and politically useful.

JD Vance, in his blind loyalty to Trump, isn’t creating this culture; he’s defending it. In doing so, he is doing what Democrats could not—alienating the minority communities that delivered Trump the 2025 election. Vance’s moronic, shrugging dismissal of these texts signals that the party values loyalty to the base’s most extreme impulses over the voters who crossed lines of history to support Trump. Communities who believed in the promise of inclusion are now being mocked; their trust weaponized as a punchline.

Inside the chat, cruelty was a game. Giunta told a colleague about a darker-skinned pilot landing his flight: “If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there. Scream the no-no word.” Hendrix joked about a Black customer ordering watermelon and Kool-Aid. Walker targeted opponents with threats, mockery, and fantasies of death. They were training themselves to act without conscience; to see opponents—and, in some ways, the voters themselves—as disposable.

And they weren’t silent in their pride. “Great. I love Hitler,” Giunta typed, and the group reacted with emoji applause. Racial, sexual, and antisemitic slurs were flung with abandon—the n-word, homophobic epithets, and terms for sexual assault peppering thousands of messages. The culture was so saturated in hate that even mentions of winning votes were entangled with fantasies of torture and murder.

This isn’t a “few bad apples” scenario. It is a structural failure of values—amplified and rehearsed in private so it can flourish in public. The chat shows what happens when a party encourages loyalty through fear, extremism, and moral inversion. Leaders of Young Republican groups worried what would happen if their messages were leaked; yet they kept typing, laughing, daring each other to go further. This is the new GOP: cruelty as currency, depravity as skill, and loyalty measured in willingness to dehumanize.

The consequence is immediate and clear. Minority voters who supported Trump in 2025—the very coalition that swung the election—now face a party that treats their humanity as expendable. Vance and his enablers shrug, deflect, and normalize. By excusing these horrors as “bad jokes,” they are quietly dismantling the bridges of trust built by the last election, eroding the coalition Trump relied upon for his win. Where Democrats struggled to hold that coalition together, the GOP is tearing it down from within.

These messages, in their horror, should serve as a moral alarm. They aren’t just words; they are rehearsal for the erosion of decency—the architecture of cruelty being passed to the next generation. The party’s future leaders are learning that loyalty is demonstrated not by competence or ethics, but by how far they are willing to embrace the grotesque.

And here’s the hard truth: it’s working. Silence, laughter, and complicity are the new virtue. Vance isn’t the author of this rot; he is the symptom. The disease runs deep, and the people who made Trump president are watching as the party’s moral compass is erased—one vile text at a time.

If these messages don’t shock us into action, it is because we have grown numb to the grotesque. And if we allow this normalization to continue, the cost won’t just be political—it will be the quiet erosion of a country that once believed in decency, equality, and human dignity.

This isn’t a leak, a joke, or a scandal. It’s a blueprint for betrayal. Betrayal of values, of voters, and of the country that trusted them to lead.

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