I'm not a believer in the Big Conspiracy. That said, strange circumstances make strange bedfellows, and there's a wide array of folk in and around the Trump White House that have their own particular vector of zaniness and/or menace.
One such person seems to be Michael Anton, who is presently the senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council, but during the election posted a series of pseudonymous essays (as Publius Decius Mus), providing an ideological framework for "Trumpism," couching it as a last-chance, Flight 93 "rush the cockpit" alternative to the horrors of liberalism and diversity and immigration and the sort of historians who think the anti-Semitic, anti-anti-Nazi isolationists of "America First" in the 1930s were a Bad Thing.[1]
It gets deeper and more intellectual and more oddball beyond that, including comparisons to Cark Schmitt, the guy who stood as the intellectual defender of the literal Nazis in Germany (also in the 1930s), and who saw the battle against the Left in similarly violent and apocalyptic tones.
Weird stuff — but just one of the strains of thought running through our current White House. And, again, this guy is now senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council.
Sleep tight!
[h/t +Yonatan Zunger]
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[1] E.g., http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-election/ and http://www.unz.com/article/toward-a-sensible-coherent-trumpism/
Dark Essays By White House Staffer Are the Intellectual Source Code of Trumpism
Michael Anton was hired onto the National Security Council after writing a series of essays that were criticized for prejudice and were connected to a Nazi-era philosopher, Carl Schmitt.
Isn't it a stretch to repackage Trumpism as a coherent straightforward philosophy? I know that some are detecting themes that go back to The Art of the Deal, but much of Trumpism seems opportunistic.
+John E. Bredehoft That;'s the fascinating / scary thing, watching a variety of philosophical memes taking this opportunity to infect the government. Nationalism, kleptocracy, Dominionism, all with their own sometimes-complementary / occasionally-conflicting baggage. Who will end up winning? Or will anyone?