A senior Republican congressional staffer says conservative organizations spent years choosing ideological loyalty over competence. Now he says they have created “a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”
Sometimes a political movement explains itself better than its opponents ever could.
According to a senior Republican congressional staffer quoted by Politico, conservative organizations have spent much of the past decade choosing ideological loyalty over competence and intelligence.
His assessment of the result was not delicate:
“We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”
Those are not the words of a Democratic campaign consultant. They are not from MSNBC. They come from inside Republican politics.
And they describe a problem that should surprise absolutely no one.
For years, Donald Trump has imposed one overriding qualification on the people around him: loyalty.
Not loyalty to the Republican Party.
Not loyalty to conservative philosophy.
Not even loyalty to a particular policy agenda.
Loyalty to Donald Trump.
Once that becomes the entrance examination, every other qualification becomes secondary.
The Loyalty Test
Traditional political organizations recruit people because they know something.
Lawyers understand law. Economists understand economics. Foreign-policy specialists know something about the world. Congressional staffers learn legislation, budgets, and parliamentary procedure.
Competence is not exciting, but governments cannot function very long without it.
Trumpism changed the incentive.
Knowing the right answer became less important than giving the answer the movement wanted to hear.
People learned quickly.
Question Trump and you might be called a RINO.
Accept an election result he rejected, and you could end your political career.
Disagree publicly, and someone more loyal would be waiting to replace you.
Eventually institutions begin selecting for obedience.
And when you repeatedly select for obedience, you should not be surprised when you stop selecting for ability.
Heritage Learned the Lesson
The Heritage Foundation may be one of the best examples.
For decades it was one of the most influential conservative institutions in Washington, producing research, developing policy and supplying Republican administrations with ideas and personnel.
Then came Trump.
Heritage remade itself around the new movement. Longtime scholars and staffers left or were pushed out. Project 2025 became an enormous effort to create a ready-made governing agenda and personnel operation for the next Republican administration.
Then, according to the account cited in the article, Trump became irritated because Project 2025 received too much attention and too much credit for influencing his agenda.
Think about that.
An organization reorganizes itself around a man.
It helps prepare an agenda for that man.
Then the man becomes angry because the organization gets credit for helping him.
There is a lesson there for anyone who thinks loyalty to one individual is a substitute for an institution having an identity of its own.
More MAGA Than MAGA
Republican politicians learned the same lesson.
Being conservative was no longer sufficient.
They needed to become MAGA.
Then being MAGA was not sufficient because somebody else could always be more MAGA.
That creates a political arms race in which candidates compete not over who can govern better but over who can sound angrier, attack harder and demonstrate greater loyalty.
The excerpt points to Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who lost his Republican primary this year to a challenger running farther into the MAGA movement.
Whatever anyone thinks of Cornyn, he spent decades building a conventional Republican résumé.
In today’s Republican Party, that résumé may become a liability rather than an advantage.
Experience can mean establishment.
Compromise can mean betrayal.
Understanding government can mean you have spent too much time inside the swamp.
The safest credential becomes proving that you hate the same people your voters hate.
And Then You Need Somebody Who Knows How to Govern
This works beautifully until you win.
Campaigning and governing are different professions.
A person can become famous online by screaming about government without knowing how government works.
A television personality can attract millions of followers without knowing how to write legislation.
A young activist can learn every approved phrase of a political movement without learning anything about economics, constitutional law, diplomacy, or public administration.
Eventually somebody has to run the place.
That appears to be the concern behind the Politico quote about the conservative staffing pipeline.
For years, conservative organizations built systems for bringing young people to Washington and preparing them for careers in government, think tanks and nonprofits.
But if ideological purity becomes the primary hiring requirement, the talent pool eventually changes.
The smartest applicant may ask inconvenient questions.
The ambitious applicant learns not to.
Guess which one rises faster?
After enough years, you arrive at the Republican staffer’s memorable diagnosis:
“We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”
Even the Audience May Be Getting Tired
There may be another warning sign.
The article cites Similarweb data showing that nine of the ten leading right-wing websites experienced traffic declines between May 2025 and May 2026.
That does not mean MAGA has disappeared.
It does suggest something else may be happening.
For nearly a decade, an entire media economy has depended upon Donald Trump generating outrage every day.
Trump says something.
People become angry.
Websites publish stories about it.
Supporters click.
Opponents click.
Everybody gets mad.
Then everybody returns tomorrow to do it again.
That machine has made people famous and made other people rich.
But even outrage has a shelf life.
If Trump’s political era is approaching its final chapter, some organizations that built their identities entirely around him may discover that they forgot to build anything that can survive him.
They Built What They Rewarded
None of this is mysterious.
Organizations eventually become whatever behavior they reward.
Reward scholarship and you attract scholars.
Reward creativity, and you attract creative people.
Reward competence and competent people have a reason to stay.
Reward unquestioning loyalty, and eventually you are surrounded by people whose greatest qualification is that they never tell you that you are wrong.
Republicans spent years purging people accused of insufficient loyalty to Donald Trump.
Now Republicans themselves are complaining about the quality of the people left behind.
Perhaps the problem is not that an entire generation of conservative operatives suddenly became incompetent.
Perhaps the system worked exactly as designed.
They asked for loyalty instead of competence.
They got it.
