Will Sommer and Asawin Suebsaeng: The Groypers Have Taken over Trumpland

**Will Sommer** (0:12)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm Will Sommer, your host here today, sitting in for Tim while he's beachside in Mexico. Tim is back next Monday. All right. Today, I want to bring you a guest I'm close with, I've worked with before. It's Asawin Suebsaeng. He's a senior correspondent at Zeteo, a contributing writer at Rolling Stone and co-author of the excellent first Trump administration underworld book, Sinking in the Swamp, How Trump's Minions and Misfits Poison Washington. He's as obsessed with the MAGA underbelly as I am. Most importantly, we used to host a podcast together called Fever Dreams. I know a couple of people have been demanding a Fever Dreams reunion. So we got against his better judgment, Tim has brought us back together. It's Asawin Suebsaeng, Swin, welcome back to the podcast.

**Asawin Suebsaeng** (1:00)
I'm incredibly touched that you're having me on right now, and it will be a break from our older days of podcasting together when we talked about basically like the gateway pundit exclusively, maybe a little bit of the White House and Alex Jones. But I'm not sure if Jim Hoft is coming up today, is he?

**Will Sommer** (1:15)
Well, this is part of what's fun about the second Trump administration or what's daunting about it to cover, is it's a whole new cast of characters. This is the swamp you swim in, as it were. So let's dive right in. This morning, New York Times Magazine has a story about trouble at the Heritage Foundation, sort of the key think tank in the conservative movement, although, I don't know, maybe not anymore given the trouble there. You know, folks may remember for a few months now, Heritage has been roiled by drama, fights over everything from, you know, evangelical Christianity versus Catholicism, fights over Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, and how close, you know, Heritage is going to be in support of that, the white nationalists, the Groypers.
Swin, what do you make of this? I mean, there's a lot of accusations that the right and Trump world is sort of being infiltrated by these racist Groypers. I mean, what are you seeing out there?

**Asawin Suebsaeng** (2:08)
Well, it's one of these things where we talk about is being infiltrated, could be infiltrated. There is a takeover going on. I mean, I think we're way past the point of trying to talk about this as a hypothetical or something that is going on. In my mind, basically already has happened is like, is Donald Trump being the leader of the free world literally the same as say, someone like Nick Fuentes being elected president of the United States?
No, not entirely, not necessarily. But when you look at the people who are running the show right now in the Republican Party, and we can get to Heritage specifically in a moment, but because of how closely linked they are to the Trump White House, you have obviously Stephen Miller just making policy, basically having a blank check to write domestic policy in the United States during the second Trump era, and you have Donald Trump up there doing two minutes hate, some of the most blatantly racist things I've heard in my entire life, not even coded or dog whistle, just completely like balls to the wall, racist against Somalis and people like that. Anytime he wants to, to the cameras in the Oval Office. We have kind of reached a point where in my mind, it's like, okay, has the Groyperism, has the anime Nazi style racism of the quote unquote new right or the new, new, new, new right, whatever you want to call it. Has that taken over the mainstream elite of the Republican Party? Of course it has. It's kind of immaterial to me if someone like Nick Fuentes is or isn't Deputy Chief of Staff in the White House, Stephen Miller is there.
That train has left the station.

**Will Sommer** (3:38)
That's a good point. Yes, at this point, you don't really need Nick Fuentes in the administration itself.
This article from Elizabeth Zyrowski gets into the Stalinist purges happening at the Heritage Foundation. I think the Nick Fuentes stuff got a lot of attention, but what this article points out is that there's been trouble there beforehand. Because this is such a key part of the conservative movement, typically we wouldn't be like, what's up with the shakeup at the think tank? But this is really, as you said, hand in hand with the Trump agenda. Let me read a quote from a former staffer. Someone says, people would just get disappeared. There would be a weekend where you'd come in and be like, wait, I'm sorry, how many people are no longer here? Staff members called it the Heritage Hunger Games. I mean, this is cutthroat stuff. What do you make of this?