The DOGE scandal shows what Republicans really mean when they say they believe in free speech. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that a staffer at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) resigned after the paper inquired about some racist social media posts from an account linked to him.
The swift resignation was, at least at first, a breath of fresh air. President Donald Trump and his allies have repeatedly refused to adhere to basic societal norms or moral codes and have faced little to no consequences. Elon Musk refused to apologize for a gesture that, at the very least, appeared identical to a Nazi salute. A senior State Department official once tweeted that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.” It could seem like public shaming no longer worked as a guardrail against corrupt or irresponsible governance.
So when Marko Elez — the 25-year-old staffer who had gained access to the Treasury Department’s central payment system — felt enough pressure to quit, it looked like maybe there was still a line that Trump and his allies couldn’t cross.
That is, until the following day, when Elon Musk, who leads DOGE, asked his followers on X to answer this poll: “Bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym?”
Vice President JD Vance then shared Musk’s tweet. “I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” Vance wrote. “So I say bring him back.” By Friday afternoon, Musk announced that Elez will get his job back.
To put this all in perspective, here’s a sampling of the kinds of things Elez said online:
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”
“Normalize Indian hate.”
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”
The truth is everyone says something they will one day regret. And it’s reasonable to say that people shouldn’t be punished for things they said or did as a kid — especially if they’ve demonstrated that they’ve changed and matured. But Elez — an adult in a position of significant power — said all of these things within the past year. The idea that he shouldn’t face any consequences for making such offensive remarks, or that he should have access to people’s data, is on its face absurd.
But this story is not really about Elez. It’s about what Republicans really mean when they say they believe in free speech. Musk styles himself as an outspoken supporter of the First Amendment, saying he initially invested in Twitter (which he renamed X) because he wanted it to be “the platform for free speech around the globe.” Vance, in a follow-up tweet, said that he didn’t want his children to worry about whether “a flippant comment or a wrong viewpoint will follow them around for the rest of their lives.”
In other words, our speech, however offensive, should not only be legal but socially permissible.
But the Republican Party doesn’t really believe in that absolutist ideal. In fact, the first few weeks of the Trump administration, and the Elez fiasco in particular, have exemplified the contradiction at the heart of the right’s free speech rallying cry. What they actually want is the freedom to say the most offensive, racist things without getting any pushback, while also using the power of the state to suppress speech that they personally don’t like.
The GOP’s conflicting messaging on free speech
The Republican Party is not, by any means, the party of free speech.
Over the past several years, the GOP has been the main party willing to wield government might to actually suppress or punish speech that it deems unacceptable. This ranges from banning books to retaliating against private companies for taking political stances to unleashing law enforcement agencies to squash protests. (To be sure, Democrats have also used similar tactics.)
The first three weeks of the Trump administration have also underscored how Republicans aren’t the free speech absolutists they claim to be.
Just last week, for example, Trump issued an executive order that aims to deport foreign students who took part in pro-Palestinian protests last year. A fact sheet about the order says that it will target “Hamas sympathizers” and revoke student visas. “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” Trump said in a statement. “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
The Trump administration is taking tangible steps, in other words, to not just discourage some forms of speech but to actually deport people for attending a protest where people expressed opinions the administration finds offensive. So while someone who says “normalize Indian hate” can have a place in Trump’s government without facing significant professional consequences — because, apparently, kids say the darnedest things — people who have views or ideas that Republicans don’t like are not even welcome to enter the country.
This is not merely a case of the typical hypocrisy we expect from politicians. It is a coherent worldview coming into form: The Trump administration has been making clear that while it has plenty of tolerance for not just radical ideas but outright racist words and gestures, it has no room whatsoever for dissent or disagreement.
As Vance and Musk prepare to bring Elez back to his post at DOGE, they might argue that he simply made a mistake and, like it or not, the First Amendment protects all kinds of speech. And they would be right — the First Amendment mostly does.
But the Trump administration certainly does not, and the speech they’re personally choosing to protect should tell you everything about how they view the world.
