Michael Anton’s quietly distinctive, and distinctively quiet, persona among his fellow Trumpworld alumni ensured that he was noted less for kerfuffles and feuds in both Trump administrations than for how serving in them shaped his own trajectory.
The “most interesting man in the White House”, as POLITICO once put it, moved seamlessly from Beltway gossip to white paper footnotes and long-form think-pieces. His appointment as the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning in December 2024 drew personal praise from the boss himself. Trump applauded the author of “The Flight 93 Election” for spending “the last eight years explaining what an America First foreign policy truly means”.
That was six years after Anton, a trained chef, famously made the White House kitchen his last duty call before deserting as spokesman on Trump 1.0’s National Security Council. “Anton’s grand finale” is what the Times called the bilateral France-US state dinner that evening — shrimp canapés for Macron, and brain candy for the press corp.
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Anton remained in the heat of some kitchen or other. His service record includes drafting the most disruptive National Security Strategy (NSS) in a generation, attempting to avert war as head of Steve Witkoff’s expert team in a key round of US-Iran talks, and helping negotiate a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire, all while travelling with Secretary Rubio across the world.
He had been unsettling the categories of Trumpology since at least 2017. That year, Anton emerged from under various pen names. He had doubled as “Publius Decius Mus”, of “Flight 93” fame, as “Manton”, a Styleforum blogger with 40,000 menswear posts to his name, and as Nicholas Antongiovanni, the author of a complete sartorialist’s guide, The Suit, modeled on Machiavelli’s The Prince (Anton is currently at work on a treatise about the Florentine author). The media’s Trumpworld madhouse was by then fully mapped out — yet the bespectacled, dandyish, pocket-square-disciplined dilettante who had been hailed as the entire project’s sense-maker turned out a discreet oddity. He eluded both mere derision and serious characterisation.
Anton left Foggy Bottom last September amid alleged disagreements with Sergio Gor, Elbridge Colby, Sebastian Gorka and “the process” (he’d quit his first role on the NSC on the eve of John Bolton’s arrival as National Security Advisor). Four months earlier, he’d been passed over for Mike Walz’s spot as NSA. Yet this was no obvious time to quit — the 2025 National Security Strategy he’d drafted was yet to send ripples across European capitals, and US-Iran talks seemed to be approaching entente territory. The waters of intra-right discord were by no means placid, but the cyclone unleashed by the Tucker-Fuentes interview was still a month away. The war, in particular, now makes this quite the moment for Anton to don the writer’s apron.
In Dispatches from the Late Republic (2025), Anton has compiled the editorial equivalent of ropa vieja — an anthology of passion pieces that may please his admirers yet leave Trumpworld watchers wanting. In its frustrating potential for the scrutinisers, this is an insuperably Antonian project.
The compilation is a liberally patched, only slightly updated, and often self-effacing hodge-podge of genres — part-self-curated authorial reader, part-anthology-of-self. It blends fifteen years’ worth of oscillations between wonky policy essays, “diversions”, and paeans to mentors and “heroes”.
Biographical material appears tangentially if at all — to be scavenged in footnotes and oblique references — and Anton’s time in Trumpworld is all but omitted. One must look at obsolete essays for cryptic attempts at vindication in ongoing policy fights. If one were keen to view the book through the lens of the evolving state of Trumpism — and if one viewed that state as one of intellectual bankruptcy — the book may even read like a sort of black box recording of salvageable insights as Anton exits the proverbial “Flight 93” cockpit of a nosediving plane, unable to steer it out of a crash.
It could be telling that, as “Flight 93” nears its tenth anniversary, the soon-to-be 250-year-old institutional experiment that Anton had bet on Trump to salvage from implosion remains, in his very title here, a “late” Republic. Some essays, granted, were penned under Biden. Even in conditions of incumbency, doomsday allusions to a broken America can be a potent rhetorical mobiliser. But the notion of some gap between Trumpism as articulated by Anton, and Trumpism as it actually exists, is hard not to infer from Anton’s return to writing — a notion reinforced, perhaps, by his choice to scarcely dwell on it.
Anton’s tone about the national security mandarinate was already blasé in the pre-White House essays that have made the cut. He had been roped into Trumpworld from intellectual conservatism, which in turn poached him from finance, where he’d begun writing, per his introduction, on “weekends off from my career as a Manhattan corporate drone”. A serial speechwriter early in his career — for Pete Wilson, Rudy Giuliani and G.W. Bush — by way of Wall Street and the Manhattan Institute, foreign policy was a “side career” that the “autodidact” Anton “fell into by chance”, sidetracked from his “career as a college professor”. He is even less disguisedly aloof when he claims the field is “more about memory than IQ”.
Anton’s famous 2016 essay resonated for indicting open borders, free trade, and foreign misadventures while much of the self-serving “conservative” machinery advocated them, in keeping with its sterile pursuit of fundraising, white papers, and policies as ends-unto-themselves. In the full breadth of his Dispatches, Anton comes out as a less sectarian player in intra-right debates. He commends the never-Trumpism of the late Michael Uhlmann, a professor, as springing from a “deep well of decency”, and approvingly quotes the social commentary of living never-Trump authors such as David Brooks in “San Francisco Values”. On the other hand, Anton’s intra-right targets have not only not shifted but expanded. That latter essay, about California as an oligarchic, money-meets-hippie-activism harbinger of national trends, appears here updated with a jab at the “tech right” in the wake of the Musk-Trump rupture. In courting Silicon Valley, the right risked importing its culturally progressive patterns of though.
Anton’s writing has had an elliptic, Straussian quality, and his selected essays seem arranged in a similar esoteric or interstitial way. Little is left to chance. Even the acontextual foreign policy takes betray a meta-critical, up-from-conservatism critical prism, whether on the madness of Taiwan absolutism, the illiberalism of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) or the “nuclear autumn” of 1983, an echo to our current Ukraine quagmire.
Among the mentors Anton pays tribute to — Tom Wolfe is revered far above Harry Jaffa, Tom West and Angelo Codevilla — Anton has slipped in a review essay on his foreign policy maître-à-penser, George Kennan, written before he stepped into the latter’s shoes at the State Department. Anton inveighs against the foreign policy blob for idolising Kennan while keeping his namesake philosophy “contained” — a misreading by his liberal idolizers and incurious Republicans. But Kennan comes in as a case study of a larger indictment that transcends policy substance, and that Anton has hashed out at greater length in a review of Laura K. Field’s Furious Minds (2026), left out of the Dispatches. Never-Trump “collaborationists” — no word-mincer, Anton — have sought to sever the pro-Trump right, he argues, from its intellectual moorings. He restates the point elsewhere when alluding to the agreement between John Marini, another idol and theoriser of the administrative state, and James Burnham, of Managerial Revolution fame. Between the “pre-collaborationist right” and its Trumpist descendants stands only the anti-Trump right, the real outlier.
Anton is most ill-suited to the mold of the Trumpian sycophant when addressing the right’s generational fracture, or ticking bomb, or “problem”. Those who lump Anton in the “alt-right” category would do well to read his review of the dogmatic pamphlet by Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), Bronze Age Mindset — a copy of which Curtis Yarvin once brought to a dinner party at his home.
Anton here is at his reviewing finest. He concedes a sheer lack of authority over the young, online element of MAGA — they’re “not listening to us” — and tracks the sour wellsprings of its anti-“equalism” to a sense of being disregarded by their elders. Yet Anton comes down ruthlessly against the book’s grammatical horrors and amateurish philosophy, against its “effusive praise for strength and daring, untampered by the corresponding gestures to wisdom and moderation”. He demonstrates a way of understanding BAPist nihilism precisely in the way he damns it. If its selection into the book is addressed to the right’s crises and dilemmas in the era of Tucker and Fuentes, the essay remains too cryptic. It doesn’t really help us conjecture Anton’s role in the future of MAGA either. Yet seeing it make the cut is a reassuring sign — as reassuring, perhaps, as one could have asked of Anton.
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