Republicans suffered a key defeat as one of Donald Trump’s nominees went down in flames on Tuesday.
An embarrassing spectacle played out over the course of several days on the Hill as the president’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel saw members of the GOP come out one by one to oppose his nomination. Paul Ingrassia withdrew his bid Tuesday evening after it became clear he was not going to receive enough votes for even a simple majority in a chamber where Republicans hold 53 votes out of 100 seats.
The reason for Ingrassia’s unpopularity was obvious: reports revealed that Ingrassia allegedly claimed to have “a Nazi streak” in texts sent to other Republicans. He is also accused of using racist slurs and allegedly referred to Martin Luther King Jr., the American civil rights champion, as “the 1960s George Floyd,” adding that “his ‘holiday’ should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs.”
The headlines came as Trump and his allied MAGA Republicans in Washington have eagerly leaned into depictions of the American left as a group of violent thugs and avowed antisemites, aided at times by Democrats who line the party’s conservative wing. But Ingrassia’s downfall was only the latest crack in the foundations of that argument, not hardly the first.
As Republicans were pressed about Ingrassia’s alleged “Nazi” admission into Tuesday, their party is still dealing with the fallout from a completely separate scandal involving the authoritarian German regime from World War II: a leaked groupchat wherein prominent leaders of Young Republicans chapters around the country openly expressed support for racist beliefs, used racist and homophobic slurs hundreds of times, and joked about sending their enemies to gas chambers. A Vermont state senator was forced to resign in disgrace after the texts leaked.
Still another anti-Semitism scandal is brewing in New Jersey, home to a key election for governor in a few weeks. The Republican nominee, Jack Ciattarelli, was introduced onstage at an event Saturday by an unpaid adviser to his campaign who opened for the would-be governor by insisting that he (the adviser) was not “taking money from Jews”. The adviser, Ibrar Nadeem, also called for a ban on same-sex marriage in the same remarks.
What’s really in danger isn’t Donald Trump’s ability to get a nominee through the Senate, which remains (for the most part) rock steady. It’s the broader ability of the GOP to guide the depictions of its enemies, even at a moment when the Democratic Party is functionally leaderless and the party’s base seems at war with its remaining leadership in Washington.
Republicans entered 2025 with a clear ability to divide an already splintering left political coalition that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden failed to piece back together last year. First on the Laken Riley Act and later on a government shutdown threat in March, the GOP was successful in dominating the narrative and forcing their foes into politicized defeats.
That ability appears to have faded, with Democrats seemingly finding their unity in Congress and Republicans repeatedly hamstrung by factors that have undermined the president’s attempts to paint the left as violent radicals. Republicans continue to rage against the surging campaign of Zohran Mamdani in New York; Rep. Elise Stefanik, formerly a member of House Republican leadership, referred to him with an Islamophobic slur (“jihadist”) on X, while on Fox News, a host falsely claimed on Tuesday that Mamdani wanted to “eliminate” New York City’s entire Jewish community.
The smears have largely failed to land, and Mamdani remains above 50 percent in most polling. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans are facing questions about so many issues related to anti-Semitism within their party that it’s now the right struggling to maintain message discipline, right as a federal government shutdown enters its fourth week.
Millions of Americans poured into the streets this past Saturday for “No Kings” rallies in all 50 states, a clear show of the left’s strength that came despite blistering denunciations of the demonstrations and the Democratic Party from both the White House and congressional Republicans, who called the supporters of America’s main opposition party “terrorists” who hated their own country.
Many of those protesters turned up to events in wild and wacky costumes, including in D.C., where demonstrators at a dance party on the outskirts of a 200,000-strong crowd told The Independent that they aimed to counter the narrative of “violent” protesters on the left. Despite events taking place in every state, no significant incidents of violence took place at the protests on Saturday.
Even the momentum the right seemed to reclaim over September in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk during a speaking engagement at Utah Valley University seems to have fizzled. While Republicans seemed poised to use the issue to create a one-sided view of political violence in the U.S., on Tuesday Speaker Mike Johnson found himself dodging a question about a pardoned January 6 rioter who’s now charged with plotting to assassinate Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader.
Polls can only show so much in terms of how effective either party is at winning the Washington messaging war, which is only mildly effective so far out from the midterm elections next year. But real electoral tests are coming up to measure the strength of each party’s brand, including most imminently the races in Virginia and New Jersey. Republicans could find themselves shifting strategy as this shutdown drags on and if it becomes clear that their foes are coming out of the post-2024 funk.
