The Groypers’ Battle Within the GOP
As Donald Trump takes office, various factions within the GOP are vying to assert their dominance. Among them are the “Groypers,” the furthest-right fringe of Trump’s coalition, who want the party to adopt an overtly white nationalist agenda.
Groyper figurehead Nick Fuentes speaks at a "Stop the Steal" rally in Georgia on November 19, 2020. (Zach Roberts / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In the fall of 1964, the Democratic Party seemed to have seized decisive control of US national politics. Returning from the terrible setback of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy the previous year, former vice president and now incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson had beaten his hyperconservative Republican challenger Barry Goldwater by an almost unprecedented margin. Johnson won more states’ electoral votes and more of the popular vote, with 61 percent, than any candidate since 1820. The Democrats swept through the congressional election as well, gaining a total of thirty-six seats to secure a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives. It was the best election the Democrats had ever had in their nearly 150-year history.
Rather than laying the foundation for a Democratic-dominated national politics, however, the Johnson-Goldwater election inspired a generation of right-wing strategists and organizers. After Johnson’s victory in 1964, only one other Democrat (Jimmy Carter) managed to win the presidency until 1992, and the Republican Party — and in many ways US politics as a whole — shifted decisively rightward. This was in large part the result of successful organizing by a movement that came to be known as the New Right, organizing that looked to outside observers like embarrassing infighting inside the Republican Party between the centrist Republicans and so-called Goldwater Republicans. Rather than hurting the GOP, this right-wing civil war was the precursor to the ascendance of the Christian right that would dominate the party for the next several decades.
A similar pattern may be repeating itself in today’s Republican Party, this time not in the wake of a terrible loss but a decisive victory. Having hitched itself to Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s coalition is in turmoil. And as in the case of the Goldwater campaign, the extreme and now marginal wing of the party could expand its influence.
The Groyper Fringe
The people who tried and failed to get Goldwater elected didn’t take their ball and go home. They stayed in politics for years and decades afterward, working hard to get their ideas into the mainstream. Fighting not just against the Democrats but against moderate forces inside the GOP, these young radicals would go on to found and staff dozens of leading right-wing organizations, from the Moral Majority to the Heritage Foundation. Some of their leaders became famous: Phyllis Schlafly, who led the successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, or Paul Weyrich, who developed the Heritage Foundation and laid the groundwork for whole new cadres of extreme right-wing leaders. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 and George W. Bush’s in 2000 were the fruits of their labor, a complete transformation of the Republican Party from a less ideological party of big business to a coalition of evangelicals and “free market” devotees.
We may currently be seeing something similar inside the Trump campaign and among the wider Right. Unsurprisingly, many campaign staffers were significantly more conservative than the infamously nonideological Trump. Story after story has been showing that the offices of many right-wing GOP politicians are now staffed by “Groypers,” a fascist movement following the young leader Nick Fuentes.
A particularly noxious subset of the “alt-right” that gained media notoriety in the wake of Trump’s 2016 win, the Groypers arrived on the scene in 2019, just before Trump’s reelection loss (as the New Right emerged from Goldwater’s 1964 defeat). Groypers represent the extreme right of US politics, the bleeding edge between fascist outsiders and the Christian nationalist faction attempting to ride Trump’s campaign into the heart of the GOP. They are overtly antisemitic, spreading threats against Jewish people and openly empathizing with Hitler. They are Christian and white nationalists, using imagery and language associated with the Crusades to describe their angry posts and their violence. They are also proudly misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ, reversing the pro-choice “my body, my choice” slogan as “your body, my choice,” underlining their opposition to abortion and their naked support for patriarchal domination. They’re mostly young, and there aren’t a lot of them. But they are loud, active, and intent on transforming US politics.
Prior to Trump’s reelection, their most public coup was a 2022 dinner meeting attended by Donald Trump, Fuentes, and Ye (the rapper formerly known as Kanye West), but their bread and butter has been organizing alternative far-right conferences outside the Conservative Political Action Conference and Turning Point USA. More recently, they’ve fired the first shots in the contest over the GOP’s internal power structure, in this case over the use of H-1B visas to entice experts from other countries to work at US companies.
According to the Groypers and their extreme-right allies, these visas encourage immigration, dilute the natural whiteness of the US population, and take jobs away from Americans. They characterize their opposition in the GOP as “globalists,” in league with big business (and implicitly a global Jewish conspiracy), in opposition to their own openly nationalist and racist position. This other faction of the GOP might more neutrally be called “technocrats,” as they’ve been labeled by Laura Loomer, a onetime GOP candidate for Congress and far-right informal Trump advisor (at least at one point).
The Groypers didn’t wait until Trump won to start contesting control of the Republican Party. Last summer, the Groypers “declared war” on the Trump campaign in the hopes of moving the former president further to the right. Their hope is to “save” Trump from what they consider to be his biggest failing — listening to the more moderate Republicans still on his payroll, as well as his support for Israel in its war in Gaza and Lebanon, which they oppose not out of solidarity with Palestinians but because of their antisemitism. Since launching their “war” on Trump and the mainstream right, they’ve expressed pride in their power to move the needle of right-wing politics by being “in Donald Trump’s replies” and influencing the online conversation.
What Comes Next?
The Groypers have been undeniably successful at carving a space for their ideas in Republican politics as their talking points and rhetoric enter the everyday lexicon of the party. The fact that their opposition to H-1B visas was enough to cause days of stories about a GOP civil war is evidence enough of their influence, in addition the fact that they’ve helped push extremist language about male supremacy, white nationalism, and antisemitism to the mainstream of Republican discourse.
While Trump seems to be siding with his donors on the H-1B visa issue, and some observers are heralding it as evidence that when push comes to shove Trump will work with billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg rather than the most extreme elements of his base. They might be right. But this is only the first battle in what is certainly to become a long war for leadership of the Trump coalition, and the Groypers, like the Goldwater Republicans of an earlier era, are getting ready for a protracted fight.