Meeting with Publius Decius Mus, author of the influential article, "The Flight 93 Election."

In "Intellectuals for Trump/A rogue group of conservative thinkers tries to build a governing ideology around a President-elect who disdains ideology" — in the January 9th issue of The New Yorker — Kelefa Sanneh seeks out and talks to the pseudonymous writer:

In September, on the Web site of the Claremont Review of Books, Decius published “The Flight 93 Election,” which likened the country to a hijacked airplane, and argued that voting for Trump was like charging the cockpit: the consequences were possibly dire, but the consequences of inaction were surely so....

Before he began to speak, he held out an iPhone showing a picture of his family: if he was unmasked, he said, his family would suffer, because he works for a company that might not want to be connected to an apostle of Trumpism....

Decius... had grown frustrated with the Republican Party’s devotion to laissez-faire economics... which left Republican politicians ill-prepared to address rising inequality.... He rejects what he calls “punitive taxation”—like many conservatives, he suspects that Democrats’ complaints about inequality are calculated to mask the Party’s true identity as the political home of the cosmopolitan élite. But he suggests that a government might justifiably hamper international trade, or subsidize an ailing industry, in order to sustain particular communities and particular jobs. A farm subsidy, a tariff, a targeted tax incentive, a restrictive approach to immigration: these may be defensible, he thought, not on narrowly economic grounds but as expressions of a country’s determination to preserve its own ways of life, and as evidence of the fundamental principle that the citizenry has the right to ignore economic experts, especially when their track records are dubious.... Most important, he thinks that conservatives should pay more attention to the shifting needs of the citizens whom government ought to serve, instead of assuming that Reagan’s solutions will always and everywhere be applicable....

Decius takes perverse pride in having been late to come around to Trump; as a populist, he likes the fact that everyday American voters recognized Trump’s potential before he did. When Decius started paying serious attention, around January, he discerned the outlines of a simple and, in his view, eminently sensible political program: “less foreign intervention, less trade, and more immigration restrictions.”...

There is a reason for that, of course. Trump has routinely said things that would, in previous elections, have been considered scandalous and disqualifying. His outlandish and often incompatible claims, along with his refusal to admit mistakes, make it impossible to determine which of his notions are likely to become policies, and can foster the sinister impression that, as President, Trump will be accountable to no one, not even himself. Decius says that he learned to accept what he calls Trump’s “unconventionality as a candidate,” and maintains that his support never wavered, even when Trump said things that he found indefensible... But he also thinks that Trump’s occasional crudeness and more than occasional intemperance are inseparable from his “larger-than-life personality,” which was what allowed him to challenge conservative orthodoxy in the first place.

Trump’s disdain for what he calls political correctness, and often for common courtesy, made him seem uncompromising, even though a passion for dealmaking—that is, for finding advantageous ways to compromise—lies at the heart of his origin story. “Personality” and “media antics” might not have been sufficient to explain Trump’s success, but neither were they incidental to it. “Let’s say we get to define what Trumpism is, and hypothesize a perfect candidate who goes out with scripted speeches and policy papers and campaign staff,” Decius said. “Would he get the same traction as this guy? The answer, in my opinion, is no.”