For those who were shocked by the Trump of Davos, and only consoled by the Canadian's clarity of ideas Mark Carney, there's little left to say. At the last Strategic Conference in Munich, in February 2025, several American senators and representatives had asked shocked Europeans to be patient with the harsh criticisms of the vice president. J.D. Vance: the tone would soon change, they said, it was the intemperance of the neophytes of powerA year has passed, but his Secretary of Commerce, the overzealous Howard Lutnick, still wanted to make it clear to the refractory Europeans that "...with President Trump, capitalism has a new sheriff in town."
"Red Caesarism": The One Power Theory That Inspires Trump
The dimensions and ultimate genesis of what is happening in the United States, and to us, emerge well in a September 2020 book, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return (The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return), written by Michael Anton, already in important roles at the White House in 2017–2020, and then returned to Washington in 2025, to the government team. Anton wondered, a little over five years ago, how one should react to a Constitution now embarrassed and his answer was: "red Caesarism". That is, elect a decisive man, capable of "forming a single-helmsman leadership, halfway... between monarchy and tyranny". There was no other way, according to Anton, to save the country than to adhere to a vision where "the word of Caesar replaces constitutionalism and also, ultimately, the law." This is what Trump repeated in his recent interview with New York Times: the only law is my moralityWhich, as is well known, is missing. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and 2.500 years of political reflections gone up in smoke, against the backdrop of a giant, idealized photograph of Donald Trump.
Europe in decline, Russia as a partner: the new American vision
Anton, 56, of Italian-Lebanese origin, is one of the few Trump supporters with a decent education. But his revolutionary zeal erases everything, and led him to join the party that the historian Richard Hofstadter had defined the lunatic fringe, the brotherhood of scoundrels, dusting off an old definition. Anton had held the prestigious role of head of the Policy Planning Staff of the Department of State. This is the structure that was created in the post-war period and entrusted to George F. Kennan, already at the embassy in Moscow, the man who had explained to a confused Washington what Stalin really wanted. But the communist threat is no longer there, Russia is a partner, and the gauntlet must finally be turned inside out. Anton's latest work was the preparation of the National Security Strategy 2025, ready last November, the strategic analysis of global challenges for the US, with the well-known very pessimistic assessment of the loss of Europe's identity, invited to follow the American example, its openness to Russia, and thus Moscow's applause, which it greatly appreciated. From Kennan to Anton: this American trajectory, despite the complexities of the confrontation, speaks for itself.
The ideological genesis of Maga: from terrorism to the internal enemy
Anton had already come to light in September 2016, supporting Trump's first election, with "The Flight 93 Election", an article immediately relaunched by all the far-right networks where it compared the challenge Hillary Clinton–Donald Trump to the last flight of the United Airlines Boeing 757, hijacked on the morning of September 11, 2001, by four Islamic terrorists who intended to crash it into the Capitol Building in Washington. But a rebellion by the 44 passengers and crew caused the plane to crash before flying over the capital. There was a need to rebel.
It wasn't clear whether defeating the enemy required also destroying America, as is at least partially happening, nor did Anton explain it in 2019 in After the Flight 93 Election. There, he said that Trump had saved the Constitution, the same one that, as we've seen, he will then propose to effectively abolish in 2020. Anton transfers to the people Maga and refine the distillate of what the theorists of the end of the Second World War onwards conservatism Rainforest They developed it to respond to an internationalist and cosmopolitan America, that is, an enemy. The "internal enemy," a far-right formula from the 50s that Trump has revived.
The Conservatives' Dilemma: What to Keep from the Constitution
The problem of American proto-conservatives has always been to know what they must and can conserve in a country whose Constitution His amendments have always been, by all accounts, the most significant text of Western liberalism. That is, the doctrine that guarantees the individual and his rights first, and then society and the state. It could not be otherwise in a country that emerged from a revolt against a distant king. Anton clearly stated what must be done with a liberal Constitution when liberals become the "enemy": put it aside.
Ultimately, this is what has begun to emerge since at least the late 80s: the choice made during the Second World War by Russell Kirk, seen by many as the father of the postwar right, the inspiration for Reaganism, and a rather moderate figure compared to his great-grandchildren today. Congress, Kirk said, that is, the voice of the people, was the guarantee against that "globalization," as he called it, that sea of illusions that Roosevelt's presidency was spreading about the new American society and the new postwar world. For Kirk, the assembly was the guarantee against overly casual interpretations of the Constitution. Congress silenced or almost, today everything is instead entrusted to the executive. Under the eyes of a majority of the Supreme Court often to say the least tolerantThe Constitution has been replaced by the supreme leader, Donald Trump. The result is that in one year, from January 20, 2025 to today, Trump's Washington has thrown overboard or weakened, along with the layoffs of over 200 federal employees, numerous other pillars on which three generations of political leaders had consolidated The American Century. It did not rely only on force, it had in the America-Europe binomial and in their very close economic and cultural relationship a key axis, and it guaranteed, to our world at least, 80 years of peace. It ranges from lean diplomacy to the international cooperation dismantled and, finally, to the obsessive insistence on Greenland. This is a real lock pick to blow up the NATO, and the one who insists on using it is Stephen Miller in particular, a man closely listened to by Trump, the powerful number two in the White House staff, and one of the major leaders of the Maga movement.
The Origins of the American Right: Taft and the Defeat of 1952
The history of the American right is so varied and rich in trends, so long relegated to secondary corners of society, that it is impossible to summarize in a few lines. But the timing of its modern evolution and the influence of at least a few figures must be mentioned. Nor should we forget its strong ties to the most typical and important European conservative thought, in the wake of the distant Edmund Burke and, in the twentieth century, leo strauss e Friedrich A. Hayek.
The attempt to build a “new” right combative is born with the end of the last illusion, the failed conquest with the Republican senator Robert Taft Ohio White House in 1952. Taft had many of the ideal characteristics for a Republican right: he had been against the New Deal, against the expansion of the federal government, and was among the few senators to have voted against the US joining the UN. He was at times a little too sensitive to certain social issues, such as public housing, but he had reluctantly accepted the Marshall Plan, and had voted against NATO, even if it was to support the integrity of Europe, but not militarily. And he believed, as he said in his last speech to the Senate, that the United States should never have confronted the USSR on the ground in Europe, nor China in Asia. The right will split on this, in the name of anti-communism, but Taft left his mark.
Narrowly defeated at the July 1952 Convention by General Dwight Eisenhower, hired by the liberal Republicans to block his path, Taft died a year later. In 1954, the party lost its majority in the House, a position it would hold until 1994, a burning proof of the triumph of liberal, globalist, Atlanticist America, heir to the New Deal.
The Conservative Resurgence: Kirk, Kendall, and the Construction of Identity
It was a long journey through the desert, in Congress, which the Republican presidencies only managed to ease, and which paved the way for the recovery. Two men were the main protagonists, on the field. And a third was the most influential ideologist. While Russell Kirk codified in his 1953 The Conservative Mind the very European family tree and the creed of true American conservatives, Willmoore Kendall, a professor at Yale in those years, claimed that true American conservatism was not an ideology made up of abstract liberal principles, but something that people carried close to their side, a common, traditional way of life. Kendall was the mentor of William Buckley Jr., destined to play a central role in the new right with his National Review. And Kendall provided the trail to the first of the immediate precursors of the era that America lives in today, Pat Buchanan, at the White House with Nixon e Reagan, then presidential candidate in his own right in '92, in '96 and again in 2000. It is from Kendall, above all, that the inspiration comes to be able to speak in 1990 of "America First, and Second and Third", to launch in December '91 the marching orders Make America Great Again and thus invented the MAGAs, against globalism, against the establishment, for protectionism, and for closing the doors to immigration. At the 1992 Houston Convention, Buchanan launched the credo that Trump would embrace decades later, speaking of "a religious war being fought in our country for the soul of America, and for a vote that will define our culture." Against free trade, against Europe, against Asia, against everything that had distanced the splendor of the magnificent 50s, when every dream was possible.
The Gingrich Revolution: Order, Aggression, and Discipline
Work equivalent to what Buchanan did with the electoral campaigns, where he regularly lost but demonstrated that there were about three million votes for his ideas in the Republican primaries, was done in Congress by Newt Gingrich, a Georgia history and geography professor who was elected to the House of Representatives in 1978. He began early to reorganize the Republican group on strict rules, he imposed the use of language bordering on the offensive when dealing with the Democrats ("weak, traitors, corrupt, incapable...") and above all he organised the boycott of all moderate Republican deputies, with extensive use of the label Rino (Republican in Name Only), widely used then and still today from Donald TrumpIn 1995, finally back in the majority, he became Speaker of the Chamber, and in 1999 he resigned to avoid various unpleasant investigations into his behavior. But by then the party was, in the Chamber, a battalion ready for war.
Trump and the breakdown of the international order
Trump, who never gives much credit to his predecessors, has grafted himself onto this fertile ground. But it's clear that, as much as Trump exacerbates the problem with his singular personality, the problem would still exist for Europe and the world even without him. He's in charge. America and he no longer wants Europe, if not on a leash. Judging her incapable of taking care of herself, as two wars involving the United States confirm, he accepts her only if she is obedient and ready to pay. The new sheriff has spoken. The revolutionaries, however, have the serious flaw of confusing the dream, in this case Maga, with risk, then with a reckless move, and finally with disaster. On the last Foreign Affairs Two political scientists, Daniel Drezner of Tufts University and Elizabeth Saunders of Columbia, argue that Trump has demonstrated how effective the power system built by its predecessors: with just a few moves, in fact, the United States managed to humiliate what remained of the international order that they had largely created, to bring the world to anarchy, without the certainty that this, which still allows for some rules of prudence, will not fall into chaos, which it has none of. All this is also beginning to weaken and to threaten inside those democratic institutions which have been the guarantee of America's international role. If the new sheriff is in town, he is not the Gary Cooper of Mezzogiorno di fuoco, but Gene Hackman of The ruthless.
