The Morning News: Brave Protesters in Iran, Lying Idiot(s) in the White House, Distracted Drivers in Washington

by Dan Savage • Jan 2, 2018 at 8:56 am
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Awful People Embrace Awful Person: Young Trump supporters on college campuses are taking over College Republican groups — where trolls hung out before the Internet came along — and "falling in line" behind Trump because of course they are.

The Future of Trumpism Is on Campus

At colleges across the country, young supporters of the president are demanding that College Republicans fall into line.

ELAINE GODFREY 9:54 AM ET

In August of 2016, Michael Straw had just gaveled in the year’s first meeting of the Penn State College Republicans. The classroom was packed, with students filling every seat and lining the walls. Many were returning members, and some were brand new. But a few weren’t members at all—and they were angry. Halfway through the meeting, they erupted into chants of “Trump, Trump, Trump.” ... From the back of the room, someone shouted, “Cuck!”

The week before the meeting—which was captured on video—the College Republicans announced that they would not endorse Donald Trump for president. Straw, a senior at Penn State and the group’s president, had surveyed dues-paying members, and found that most didn’t support the party’s nominee. Thus, the executive board took to Facebook to post the club’s first unendorsement of a Republican candidate: “Conservative ideals must be defended from individuals who have tried to extinguish them in the past,” the statement concluded. “Future generations depend on us to defend these principles so they may enjoy them as well.”



The Bull-Moose Party, the school’s pro-Trump group, accused Straw of holding a fraudulent vote. Zach Bartman, then the chair of the Pennsylvania Federation of College Republicans—the umbrella organization for all College Republicans in the state—called on him to resign for not supporting the GOP nominee. But Straw refused.

And so it was that members of the Bull-Moose Party showed up at the first gathering of the College Republicans to demand a new election of the group’s executive board. An image topping a Daily Collegian article from the night captured the dramatic scene: Straw, in a sleek blue suit, stood resolutely behind a lectern with his eyebrows raised, while a t-shirt-clad young man in a baseball cap gestured toward him in an emphatic appeal for change.