The Depth of MAGA’s Moral Collapse The Atlantic by George Packer / Oct 17, 2025 at 11:55 AM When leaders of Young Republican groups around the country exchange texts that say “I love Hitler”; that joke about gas chambers and rape, approve of slavery, sneer about “watermelon people” and monkeys in zoos, and throw around words like faggot and retarded, they aren’t just exposing their own anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, and misogyny. To see only the varieties of bigotry with which we’re painfully familiar is to miss the depth of MAGA’s moral collapse. Professing love for Hitler is more than anti-Semitic—it’s antihuman. It’s a proud refusal to be bound by the most basic standard of goodness, a deliberate expression of contempt for everything decent. The texts degrade all of us. And they’re hardly surprising. Cruelty and humiliation have become the Trump administration’s common currency. With permission from President Donald Trump’s coarse rhetoric and vows of hatred, Elon Musk’s Nazi...
early and often 18 Scarily Stupid Moments From Trump and Hegseth’s Generals Meeting Portrait of Margaret Hartmann By Margaret Hartmann, senior editor for Intelligencer who has worked at New York since 2012 2:52 P.M. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Reuters Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered more than 800 of the country’s military commanders to gather at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. Many flew in from thousands of miles away on short notice, so presumably Hegseth and President Donald Trump had something very important to tell them. Instead, Hegseth called military leaders “fat” and Trump delivered a rambling, rally-style speech. The president spoke in a wheezy, sleepy tone for more than an hour, on a stage clearly meant to resemble the movie Patton. His prepared remarks were full of dictatorlike complaints about “the enemy within,” and justifications for using the military to police U.S. cities. But it was hard to track the major themes, as there were so many long, self-...