When my colleague David Brooks — no fan of Donald Trump — was choosing his Sidney Award winners for last year’s best essays, he included a pro-Trump entry “to give the winning side its due.” Brooks chose “The Flight 93 Election,” an anonymously published piece arguing that the election of Hillary Clinton would be the equivalent of a catastrophic plane crash for both conservatism and America.

Clinton would crush conservatives, the author wrote, through “vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent.” And rising immigration would doom the country in the long term: “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.”

These racially tinged apocalyptical fears led the author to argue for Trump as the man who could potentially halt the decline. Trump’s willingness to tear down the status quo was the one hope for “my party,” “my country” and “my people,” the author wrote.

On Thursday, Michael Warren of The Weekly Standard unmasked the previously anonymous writer as a “fast-talking 47-year-old intellectual” named Michael Anton.

Anton previously worked as an aide to Rudy Giuliani and George W. Bush; in the Bush administration, he pushed for the Iraq war, which he has since disavowed. In the last 12 years, Anton was a speechwriter for Rupert Murdoch, Citigroup’s director of communications and a managing director at BlackRock, the investment firm.

Care to guess where he works now?

The White House. Anton is a senior national-security official in the Trump administration.

No matter how odious you find them — and, to be clear, I find them deeply so — Anton’s arguments are important to understanding the ideology with which Trump (along with Steve Bannon) is governing the country. There are clear strains of Anton’s dark anti-otherness in Trump’s immigration ban, the talk of a border wall and the appeals to evangelical Christians.

As Kelefa Sanneh wrote in The New Yorker last month, Anton’s essay was “the most cogent argument for electing Donald Trump.” Ross Douthat, Michael Gerson and Jonathan Chait have also offered critiques.

A central question for liberals is why Anton’s and Trump’s ideas have appealed more successfully to the white working class than the Democrats’ arguments — and what liberals might do to change the situation.

To that end, be sure to read Thomas Edsall’s latest Op-Ed, on populism vs. left-leaning post-materialism. I also recommend the second episode of The Times’s new podcast, The Daily, to hear recordings of Bannon talking about Islam.

The full Opinion report from The Times follows, including Angelina Jolie on refugees, Senator Jeff Merkley on Neil Gorsuch and Alec MacGillis on Mitch McConnell.

David Leonhardt
Op-Ed Columnist