How the Groypers Hope to Remake Trump’s GOP
The perilous politics behind the elevation of Nick Fuentes.
At long last, President Donald Trump’s grip on the GOP is slipping. There’s no Götterdämmerung, no dramatic denouement, no operatics in the dictator’s bunker. Trump is being dragged down by normal politics: He’s simply unpopular, dogged by a sex scandal and a lousy economy. The laws of gravity, it turns out, apply on Planet Trump. He’s a lame duck, and he’s just plain old. After dominating the news for a decade, he finds himself yesterday’s man. And like the little Nazi in Cabaret, Nick Fuentes and his army of groyper toads are croaking out “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”
Vice President JD Vance and edgelord podcaster Tucker Carlson seem to agree. Carlson is welcoming Fuentes and the groypers on board, while Vance refrains from criticizing them. He deplores “infighting” and tries to get people to refocus their hatred on the “30 million illegal immigrants” who are supposedly hogging all the housing and social-welfare benefits. Vance’s position is particularly humiliating and low: As Fuentes and the groypers call him “fat boy” and attack his Indian American wife, Vance holds his fire. He apparently thinks he cannot afford to alienate the white-nationalist caucus that he views as integral to his likely 2028 bid for the White House. Vance is in a tricky spot: He’s trying to cultivate the extreme right, but he’s also the candidate closest to Peter Thiel and the tech-bro contingent. And for reasons both populist and antisemitic, Fuentes detests the ascendancy of the tech oligarchs in the GOP. “Most of them are immigrants, most of them are either brown or Jewish, many of them are gay, and all of them are non-Christian,” he wrote on Telegram, in a text that also advises: “YOU FORGOT THE NUMBER ONE RULE OF POLITICS: DETERMINE WHETHER THEY ARE JEWISH.” And until now, they’ve also stood in the way of Fuentes’s bid to storm the commanding heights of the Republican Party.
Fuentes may not have much use for the tech oligarchs, but they clearly view him and his followers as useful in some way. Remember, it was Elon Musk who allowed Fuentes and the other creepy-crawlies back inside when he all but extinguished content moderation on X. To understand why, it helps to remember the political functions of antisemitism. One is its deployment as a tool in a factional battle for control over a political party. Think Stalin versus Trotsky: Present the other guys as alien interlopers, the puppets of foreign and unseen powers. We can see that tactic clearly in Fuentes’s campaign to take over the GOP.
But another key use of authoritarian antisemitism is to create a coalition of the top and the bottom—an alliance of the elite and the mob. As Benjamin Ginsberg writes in his neglected book The Fatal Embrace, antisemitic appeals “are used by forces that attempt to mobilize the masses while avoiding threats to the interests and property of elite strata. Thus, anti-Semitic ideologies are typically espoused either by radical populists who court elite support or by a segment of the upper class seeking to arouse and mobilize a mass base for an assault on the established order.” Now, who might want to be able to manipulate the masses without serious threats to their interests and property? Maybe the industrialists who want to seize the state and raid its coffers for their high-tech armaments business?
Fuentes, too, might be clever enough to modulate the antisemitism when it suits his ascent. He recently said, “We’ve reached a stage in the adoption of antisemitism…where now it actually might be time to start to refine. Because now it’s just attracting a lot of idiots, and…I will not be held hostage by idiots that don’t know what they’re talking about.” So maybe Fuentes will now decide who is a Jew. He’s already rolling his eyes at fans who bring up the Peter Thiel–driven Palantir conspiracy theories that Fuentes helped propagate in the first place.
All fascist movements involve a combination of populist rowdies and a section of the ownership class that thinks it can use them as thugs. The arrangement has perils for both sides. The thugs may bite the hand that feeds them. And the bigwigs might decide to purge the more anti-establishment elements of the mob that threaten their power. Young Fuentes would do well to remember the fate of Ernst Röhm and the other brownshirt leaders.
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