Tuesday night’s airing of CNN’s “NewsNight” exploded during a heated debate over Vice President JD Vance’s deflecting response to a report detailing highly offensive and racist message exchanges leaked in a Young Republicans group chat.
The Telegram chat at the center of a Politico report detailed heinous conversation exchanges between leaders of Young Republicans groups across the nation, where racial slurs were used multiple times, rape was called “epic,” and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was praised.
“Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic,” Joe Maligno, an ex general counsel for the New York State Young Republicans, reportedly wrote.
Vance downplayed the report on X by highlighting former Virginia state lawmaker Jay Jones’ leaked messages from 2022, where he suggested he would shoot a then state House speaker if given a choice between Hitler and Cambodia’s Pol Pot.
The vice president said he “refuses to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”
“NewsNight” guest Republican strategist Kristin Davis said Vance “missed an opportunity here” and “could have really used this moment as a learning moment” to encourage those caught up in the scandal to “be better” by denouncing what they said.
“These were Young Republicans, and so I don’t hold necessarily anyone responsible,” Davis said. “They’re young. They need to make mistakes. They need to apologize and see the error and move forward, and I wish that, you know, the vice president would have said that.”
However, fellow panelist Keith Boykin said, “The saddest thing about this story is that it was not the least bit surprising to me.”
“I don’t think anyone who I know who is familiar with where the Republican Party has been going the past decade or so…” Boykin said before he was interrupted by conservative radio host Ben Ferguson, who said the Young Republicans were “not calling people ‘Hitler’ or ‘fascist’.”
Boykin fired back, “JD Vance literally called Donald Trump ‘Hitler.’”
In recent weeks, Vance advocated against political violence by demanding that people stop using “Nazi” as an insult. However, he drew an ironic backlash when people brought up that in 2016, he told a former roommate from Yale Law School that President Donald Trump could become “America’s Hitler.”
Host Abby Phillip reminded Ferguson, “Trump has repeatedly called his democratic opponents ‘fascists’ so that argument does not hold much water.”