National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton, also known as Publius Decius Mus, is leaving the White House.
Politico reports that the man who anonymously penned “the Flight 93 Election” essay is heading for the exit after 13 months in the Trump administration. Anton will float down to the Kirby Center, Hillsdale College’s little Beltway Alamo, as a writer and lecturer.
And as Anton prepares to jump ship, it’s worth examining his central thesis: After America stormed the cockpit to let Trump take the controls, is the republic at a safe cruising altitude, or is it in a tailspin?
Anton’s anonymous essay whacked the conservative electorate over the head two months before the 2016 election by likening the country to hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, and liberals to the Islamic terrorists on 9/11. “Charge the cockpit,” Anton wrote in the Claremont Review of Books, “or you die.” Elect Donald Trump or let Hillary Clinton ruin the U.S.
The essay tore through conservative intelligentsia like an 8.8cm flak gun. It sparked rebuttals in places like National Review and the Daily Wire. It also inspired plenty of praise, most notably from Rush Limbaugh, who read just about all of it on air. Critics ridiculed its analogy as overwrought and its arguments as dishonest. Fans said it was full of thumos and realism. Either way, that argument is over.
Anton won the debate and Trump won the election. But an ungenerous analysis might conclude that the Right exhausted itself during the electoral overthrow. It’s possible that conservatives gave their last measure of devotion to win the election, and then immediately stalled after the inauguration.
Trump has given us a first-rate Supreme Court justice and some truly wonderful tax breaks, generic but not insignificant Republican accomplishments. But Trump has not only failed to repeal Obamacare, he has also grown the size of government by increasing spending. What’s more, the president has inspired a vicious backlash that seems likely to hand Democrats control of the House of Representatives.
None of this is to say that Anton was disingenuous. He never said Trump was a good pilot. “You may die anyway,” Anton wrote, “You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.” Until he gives an interview, it’s not clear whether he thinks the coup was successful.
Anton and his ilk at the Claremont Institute (who let me into their excellent fellowship last summer) are incredibly influential in their efforts to create a cohesive conservative ideology out of Trump’s populism. Hillsdale (my alma mater) now gives Anton another ivory control tower from which to continue his work.
