Strange as it is to write, I was there at the start of the movement that created Donald Trump.
It was 50 years ago. August 9, 1974. I was an intern at Human Events magazine, then as now one of the leading voices of the “New Right.” A few weeks before, I’d gone up the street and brought back to our editor a wagonload of papers from the House Judiciary Committee, which was considering Nixon’s impeachment. The following Monday, my editor wrote that Nixon must go.
He wasn’t happy about it. No one in the office was happy about it. As Nixon’s helicopter flew over our heads the late Howard Phillips began singing “Aloha Hoy.” We all joined in, waving and smiling.
Howie (we always called him Howie) and our other editors were, even then, pushing the Heritage Society think tank to the right. To their way of thinking, Nixon’s problem was that he was too liberal. He was too gentle, too willing to accommodate liberals, too conventional, and too tied to Eisenhower.
The Movement
They wanted a fight. They went right to work, helping found a host of “new” institutions that would explicitly reject and replace their “liberal” equivalents. The Federalist Society, founded in 1982, is the most important. Where once the American Bar Association judged judicial qualifications, today no judge is offered by a Republican executive who hasn’t passed muster with the Federalists. They are in fact anti-Federalists, as the Bolsheviks who called themselves a majority in the Soviet Union were a minority.
Federalist Society judges opened the floodgates to the modern era with their Citizens United decision in 2010. This made any effort to limit the impact of money on campaigns unconstitutional, at a stroke. It means that while you may have 1 vote, a billionaire has billions of them. If this decision can be overturned, we might one day have a normal politics.
The money from Citizens United needed foot soldiers, and they came from two strains of thought. One strain was led by Pat Robertson, who like Afghan’s Taliban saw religion and politics as one. The other strain was led by Rush Limbaugh, a radio blowhard who saw his own liberty to be an asshole threatened by everyone else’s exercise of their own.
Trump is the product of all this nonsense. He doesn’t have to make sense. He is an empty vessel. Heritage and the Federalist Society give him his positions. Limbaugh and Robertson offer him foot soldiers. Citizens United shows him the money. Alliances with Russia and the National Enquirer made Trump President.
The Fight
All this is being exposed right now, along with the fact that Father Time is Undefeated. Trump is decompensating before our eyes. But absolute power for Heritage is so close, so tantalizingly close, that no one is supposed to know how empty the vessel has become.
I can’t tell you what will happen in November, although a counter movement has been building for years to take these jamokes on. The difference between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is one of approach, not policy. Biden, who has been around for all of this, who was already in the Senate while we waved Nixon away, treats them as a legitimate democratic political force. Harris sees them them as what they are, a bunch of rich weirdos rejecting the history of America’s first 200 years.
She’s right. What Project 2025 amounts to is a return, not to the 1950s, but to the 1850s. Absolute rule by Christian slaveowners, Andrew Jackson’s Spoils System replacing Chester A. Arthur’s Pendleton Act. Organized capital keeping labor unorganized, and women sent back to the kitchen. It’s all there. Read it. I’ll even give you the right’s own link to it.
Then buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy night.
