Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration was full of ominous developments -- including a tranche of racist and anti-Semitic chats by prominent Young Republicans. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, defended Tucker Carlson after his softball interview with Nazi wannabe Nick Fuentes.
Conversations with four senior Republican congressional staffers, as well as think tank scholars, Heritage expats, academics who study think tanks and up-and-coming young Republicans reflected a widening generational split and mutual distrust over the issue.
“Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence,” said a senior GOP congressional staffer, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel issues. “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”
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“I think there is certainly a pipeline problem on the Republican side,” said E.J. Fagan, an associate professor at the University of Illinois Chicago and author of The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics. Even beyond foreign policy, Fagan said that “normie expertise” has been sidelined in favor of producing “chum for the conservative media machine,” at Heritage in particular. “You’re hiring a lot of people who don’t have the chops that they used to,” he said.
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The Heritage Foundation offers a case study in how conservative talent cultivation has traditionally worked, and how it’s changed in the Trump era — including through the accommodation of viewpoints once considered fringe on the right. The institution was a major feeder organization for GOP staff jobs in D.C. for decades. A 2024 Legistorm analysis found that nearly a third of GOP congressional offices employed a Heritage alum, and the institution’s own marketing materials claim the Trump administration has adopted 64 percent of its policy ideas. The Heritage spokesperson said there are 290 Heritage alumni serving in the current Trump administration, as well as 235 “staff/intern/program” alumni working on the Hill.
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Luke Coffey, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, another conservative think tank, experienced the shift firsthand. “The Heritage I joined in 2012 was Reaganite,” he said. “The Heritage I left was more MAGA than Trump.” He said the emphasis on ideology had costs when it came to experience, citing an intern questionnaire that screened applicants for anti-abortion views. For an intern in the Middle East program, he said, “I wanted the guy or girl who studied abroad in Jordan and spoke intermediate Arabic and backpacked across Israel and believed in American leadership on the global stage. I didn’t really care where they stood on the pro-life or pro-choice debate.”
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The anxiety over groyperism in the GOP talent pool corresponds to a rise in antisemitism across the political spectrum, including among young conservatives. A Yale Youth survey found “extremely conservative” young people the most likely to agree with antisemitic sentiments such as “Jews in the United States have too much power.” A Manhattan Institute poll found that a full 25 percent of Republicans under 50 self-identified as having antisemitic views, and 31 percent as holding racist ones. Pew has asked different questions about young voters’ opinions of “the Israeli people,” which have declined across the board since 2022, though a majority of Republicans still view them favorably, compared to a minority of Democrats. (On the separate question of attitudes toward the Israeli government, it’s certainly clear that elected Republicans are far more supportive than their Democratic counterparts.)
