Elitist, establishment Republicans like to throw the late William F. Buckley Jr.’s name around as someone who allegedly would not approve of President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Considered the intellectual dean of modern conservatism, Buckley founded National Review in 1955, the nation’s premier conservative magazine for many years, and hosted the PBS political talk show “Firing Line” for 33 years. Well, as someone who started a website to carry on his legacy, Intellectual Conservative, I can tell you the critics are flat out wrong.
Buckley got a bad rap in his later years due to National Review turning somewhat RINO after he left as editor-in-chief in 1990. But the shift had nothing to do with him; he remained a principled conservative until the end, writing a regular column until he died in 2008. I attended his memorial service in New York City.
Proponents of this silly theory point to a remark Buckley made about Trump in 2000, when Trump was considering running for president on the Reform Party platform. Buckley called him a narcissist. Well, I never liked Trump either until he secured the GOP presidential nomination in 2016 (let’s not forget Trump was a Democrat from 2001 to 2009), so criticism of Trump before he became MAGA is like criticizing President Ronald Reagan for previously being a Democrat.
I would go so far as to argue that Buckley was MAGA before MAGA. MAGA brought together various factions — most notably taking back the working class from the Democrats. Similarly, Buckley and President Ronald Reagan brought together social and religious conservatives with economic business conservatives and libertarians.
MAGA is nothing more than principled conservatism, despite the left and its comrades in the fake news claiming it is populist. Populism resents the elite and their wealth — it’s pretty clear from the Trump family’s massive wealth and tax cuts for all that there is a symbiotic relationship with wealthy capitalists. Trump is back on good terms with Elon Musk. Populism views the political parties as a uniparty — there is no evidence Trump or MAGA has given up on the GOP.
Now, did Buckley have a different style than Trump? Of course. Buckley was the epitome of class and elegance; Trump is brass. But they both shared a wicked sense of humor and enjoyed debating others. Buckley wasn’t an elitist; he famously said he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty.
Politics has changed since the days of Buckley. People are more aggressive and vicious, like Trump. The rise of lawfare would have changed Buckley’s trust in the judiciary and legal system. Buckley would have adapted to this trend because he was forward-thinking.
While Buckley opposed tariffs (he occasionally referred to himself as a libertarian), I believe he might have even come around on them once he saw how uncompetitive the U.S. was becoming due to the unfair policies of other countries. And while libertarian-leaning, he was always strongly against illegal immigration. A significant aspect of National Review when Buckley founded it was anti-communist — which has become a significant part of Trump’s platform.
Like Trump, Buckley always tried to work with the loud, strange people in the party, but when they went too far, he dismissed them. Since National Review was the premier conservative magazine in the 1960s, it held a lot of sway. Buckley famously kicked the John Birchers out of the GOP during that decade, denouncing them in his magazine and telling his readers not to associate with them. He said his greatest accomplishment was the “absolute exclusion of anything antisemitic or kooky” from the conservative movement.
He would have been thrilled to discover now that the Birchers no longer have antisemites leading the organization and they actively denounce antisemitism. Their publication, The New American, reads like a standard conservative site.
Buckley also denounced Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism, due to its emphasis on self-interest and lack of belief in God. He viewed Rand’s book, “The Virtue of Selfishness," as contradictory to Biblical teachings.
Similarly, Trump has denounced Republicans whom he perceived as becoming too fringe for the GOP, including Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex Jones.
Buckley’s only child, Christopher Buckley, claimed that his father would have disliked Trump today. However, he split from his father’s conservatism in 2008, endorsing Barack Obama for president and ending his column at National Review. He intervened to stop awards in his father’s name from going to Trump supporters, but was unsuccessful in stopping one going to Rush Limbaugh. This contradicts his father, since his father was a big supporter of Limbaugh.
I would argue that Trump is the modern Buckley of today, the conservative we all look up to. Today’s vicious political culture calls for someone aggressive, and Buckley would have understood that. Many of us conservatives view Trump as one of the greatest presidents, even surpassing Reagan. Buckley would have been amazed to see how much more Trump accomplished for conservatives than Reagan. Also, in 2016, only 63 percent of Republicans identified as conservatives. By 2024, that had sharply increased to 77 percent.
It’s frankly incredible that the most powerful man in the world is a staunch conservative. After Barack Obama, I thought there was no way we’d ever have a real conservative as president again. The fact that Trump pulled it off would draw immense respect from Buckley.
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