One of the leading public intellectuals who formulated and argued on behalf of a coherent ideology around Donald Trump now says he “sorely regrets” supporting the Republican president. Writing Thursday in the New York Times, Julius Krein says his optimism about Trump and Trumpism was “unfounded.”
“I can’t stand by this disgraceful administration any longer, and I would urge anyone who once supported him as I did to stop defending the 45th president,” he writes.
Krein is no run-of-the-mill Trump supporter. He was one of the earliest intellectuals to gravitate toward Trump. Here in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, he wrote a piece published in September 2015—when Trump was leading in the Republican primary polls but was months from winning his first contest—praising Trump as a “traitor to his class” who deserved to be taken more seriously as a force on behalf of a popular movement. Harvard educated and with a short career in finance, Krein began the anonymous Journal of American Greatness blog during the 2016 election, which evolved into an intellectual journal, American Affairs, that began publishing shortly after Trump’s victory.
What Krein and his other JAG contributors argued was that American conservatism, as then constituted, had failed to stem the cultural and political shifts leftward in recent decades. “We are American patriots aghast at the stupidity and corruption of American politics, particularly in the Republican Party, and above all in what passes for the ‘conservative’ intellectual movement,” the original JAG website (which has since been shut down) wrote of its writers and purpose. “We support Trumpism, defined as secure borders, economic nationalism, interests-based foreign policy, and above all judging every government action through a single lens: does this help or harm Americans? For now, the principal vehicle of Trumpism is Trump.”
Among the pseudonymous contributors to JAG was Publius Decius Mus, whose essays critiquing the modern conservative movement were originally rejected by the Claremont Review of Books. The CRB did eventually publish Decius’s most famous pro-Trump essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” in September 2016. Decius was actually Michael Anton, a former communications aide in the George W. Bush White House. Anton is now the top spokesman for Donald Trump’s National Security Council.
In founding American Affairs, Krein set out to “fill the void left by a conservative intellectual establishment more focused on opposing” Trump, as a New York Times profile of him in March 2017 described it. At the time, Krein cautioned that his journal did not take “intellectual cues” from the new president.
“These are our ideas,” he told the Times. “We hope there’s some overlap, but we aren’t going to sit around cheerleading the administration.”
Writing in the same paper just five months later, Krein notes he had found in candidate Trump a “willingness to move past partisan stalemates [that] could begin a process of renewal.” That renewal, which he says he still hopes for, isn’t happening under President Trump.
“Far from making America great again, Mr. Trump has betrayed the foundations of our common citizenship. And his actions are jeopardizing any prospect of enacting an agenda that might restore the promise of American life,” writes Krein.
