That question, rhetorical of course, is prompted by the story about the leaked texts by members of the group known as Young Republicans that reveal them saying the most awful things, a story that keeps gaining steam.

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n–ga” and “n–guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

Is there anyone in this day and age, especially young people, who does not know that there is no such thing as confidentiality on the internet? That anything you put out there has the potential to be unearthed and exposed? The mind boggles that anyone could be that stupid.

While some leaders of the Republican party have tried to distance themselves from the group, JD Vance has tried to excuse their ugly words as “stupid jokes”. This shows that he has decided that to get the next Republican nomination for the presidency, he cannot afford to alienate any group within the party, however extreme and hateful they are, and that there are no depths to which he will not sink.

These are people who aspired to be future leaders of the party so you would have expected them to be at least a little circumspect about what they put out.

Members of the chat held or sought real political power. They knew the stakes. They also knew that the chat could be exposed, and that exposure would be catastrophic for their reputations and perhaps for the reputation of the GOP. Yet that knowledge did not penetrate deeply enough to change their behavior.

The latest fallout is that Trump’s nomination of Paul Ingrassia to head the White House office of special counsel (that is supposed to protect federal employees from retaliation for whistleblowing) is faltering because of his texts.

Paul Ingrassia, currently a White House liaison at the Department of Homeland Security, previously advocated for making 6 January a national holiday and publicly questioned whether the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack was a “psyop”. But the fans were flamed again on Monday after Politico reported text messages in which Ingrassia allegedly described himself as having “a Nazi streak” and suggested Martin Luther King Jr Day should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell”.

When reporters asked whether the administration should pull Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the office of special counsel, John Thune, the Senate majority leader, responded on Monday: “I think so. He’s not going to pass”.

At least three GOP senators on the homeland security committee indicated they will vote against Ingrassia when his confirmation hearing proceeds on Thursday: Rick Scott of Florida, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and James Lankford of Oklahoma.

“I don’t plan on voting for him,” Scott told reporters. “I can’t imagine how anybody can be antisemitic in this country”.

That is an utterly disingenuous statement by Scott. Antisemitism is rife in this country, as is racism, misogyny, and homophobia, all cultivated over decades by right-wingers and Republicans and Trump. In the current climate, these people feel so comfortable having these views that they feel no need to hide them.

Now there are the inevitable articles that try to understand how they could be stupid.

Valerie McDonnell, the youngest state legislator in New Hampshire who stepped down as a Young Republican national committeewoman in August, said she was appalled by the “repeated terrible language about other members.”

“It wasn’t just a one-off comment. It was, I believe, over a span of six months, just repeated terrible language about other members,” she said. “This just was beyond belief to see the extent of this.”

Still, the second state chair worried that ongoing divisions in the organization following the August leadership election could hamper the organization’s value to the GOP in the 2026 midterm elections.

“These are the meanest people I have ever met in my life,” the person said of their Young Republicans colleagues. “I love this organization so much, and it meant so much to me in my early- and mid-20s, and it is just different. These kids are not the same. I think they’ve grown up in politics only seeing how Trump treats people and they think that’s how you treat people.”

Sorry, that excuse does not work. Plenty of young people have grown up in the Trump era of politics and do not behave this way, gleefully spewing racist, misogynist, antisemitic, and homophobic sentiments. The soil has to be fertile for the seeds of bigotry to take root and grow like this, and the Republican party has been preparing this soil for a long time.

It is probably not simple stupidity. These people are intoxicated by power, by the feeling that Trump and his cult are in control and that thus they are untouchable and will suffer no repercussions if they let their hate flags fly.