Racism Isn't the Only Legacy That Trump Passed Down to the Young Republicans

After news broke of the world’s most racist group chat last week, the New York Young Republicans decided to disband in order to spend more time with their racist memes families.

But before they disintegrated, they stiffed a whole lot of people—including other Republicans. It seems that the Young Republican types like to dine out, having fancy meals and expensive drinks, and run up enormous bills. But what they do not like is paying for it.

Last year, the racists held their summer awards ceremony at a hotel in Syracuse, New York. The hotel didn’t make them pay in advance, which meant that they just tried not to pay at all. After running up a $23,000 bill, 31-year-old Peter Giunta—one of the racists from the group chat—offered what the president of the Greater Syracuse Hospitality and Tourism Association called “every excuse in the book.”  The hotel spent four months trying to collect on it, with Giunta making sporadic payments to bring it down to around $7,000 before he stepped down in September, partly over the group’s failure to pay a $14,000 bill to the National Women’s Republican Club for a 2023 Christmas party. 

The group also allegedly stiffed Nashville’s Redneck Riviera Bar & BBQ about $7,000. The bar is owned by transphobic and pro-Trump country star John Rich. So again, just stealing from their own allies.  It’s ridiculous that we have to pretend that conservatives are somehow the more morally grounded people when they’re literally led by a con artist who begets smaller, weaker, even stupider con artists.

Long before becoming a politician, Trump was infamous for refusing to pay his bills. During his 2016 campaign, USA Today reviewed at least 60 lawsuits and hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings against Trump for failing to pay.  Remember the Washington, D.C., Trump Hotel? Five separate contractors had to sue him to try to get paid.  And once he took to the campaign trail, Trump found other people to screw over in new and exciting ways. His refusal to pony up to cities for his unpaid bills after rallies was endemic. At the end of his 2024 campaign, he still owed Albuquerque nearly $450,000—and that was just one of more than a dozen cities he is indebted to. 

He wouldn’t even pay police bills. Way to back the blue, right?  Since then, of course, Trump has turned the federal government into a personal grift machine. Those racist Young Republicans should’ve just held on a little longer, and they probably would have gotten jobs in the administration.  They’d fit right in.