I’ve been feeling a little bit sorry for the good old-fashioned conservative movement of yore lately. You remember those people who fought for Ronald Reagan’s “three legged stool” of Republican ideology: small government, strong national defense and “traditional”values for decades, right? I’m thinking about people like Richard Viguerie, Morton Blackwell and Phyllis Schlafly, the movement OGs who slaved for years in the trenches training Republicans to embrace such arcane subjects as “free trade,” “individual liberty” and “limited government” only to have a billionaire demagogue throw that all out the window for libertinism, incoherent protectionism, central planning and vendetta by police state.
But there’s really no need to feel sad for them. Blackwell and Viguerie are still around, and they’re now peddling Trumpism, as was Schlafly before she died in 2016. And we know that some of the later Reagan revolutionaries like Ralph Reed and Roger Stone have been all-in on Trump from the beginning. Still, they deserve more credit than they’re getting for the ghastly state of American conservatism and the toxic politics we are living in today. Without them there would be no Donald Trump.
Trump’s 2015 campaign was a ramshackle affair and had very few advisers. Stone had been friends with him for years and had advised Trump on his aborted Reform party bid in 2000. He was Trump’s window into the right wing movement that he was going to need to win and since Trump was actually more of a CNN guy than a Fox guy in those days, he needed to be schooled. Stone did that for him along with with a fellow named Sam Nunberg who provided Trump with right wing radio talking points in the early days. He quickly picked up some important jargon that signaled his membership in the right wing club. (Remember his blathering about a soldier named Bow Bergdahl and “common core” during that campaign? Those obscure topics came right out of right wing radio.)
There was quite a battle during that first campaign among the more traditional conservative movement types who wanted someone like Texas Senator Ted Cruz and the grassroots voters who were dazzled by Trump’s star power. The traditional conservatives couldn’t compete in the end and while a few peeled off into Never Trumpland, for the most part the whole movement morphed into MAGA without a second thought. And the operatives who had followed the tutelage of the OGs immediately put their training to work for this blustery, billionaire demagogue whose only ideology was what was good for him.
A case in point is the current acting U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C., Ed Martin. He had spent his adult life trying to succeed in conservative politics, working with right to life groups, activist groups and repeatedly running for office and failing. He got his law degree at the Jesuit St. Louis University (which must embarrass him since they have openly acknowledged the names and stories of enslaved Black Americans who built the university. Such “DEI” actions are very Jesuit but extremely non-MAGA.)
Martin got his first break in politics being hired as chief of staff to the new Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt in 2006 but immediately got enmeshed in an email scandal in which he wrongly fired a whistleblower and was subsequently forced to resign once it turned out that he had lied about doing political work on the government’s dime. Gov. Blunt’s career was over but Martin kept at it.
After several failed attempts at elective office he finally gave up and became the head of the Missouri GOP in 2013 after which he became involved with the OG movement organization Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. Schlafly was very old at the time and her daughter and other members of the board accused him of coercing her to endorse Trump, co-writing a book called “The Conservative Case for Trump”, published the day after she died in 2016.. That battle ended up with Martin being removed and starting a rival activist organization he cleverly called “Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagles.”
From the moment Trump won, Martin has been a true blue MAGA follower, appearing on any radio or television show that will have him and emerged as one of the most vociferous defenders of the insurrection and its perpetrators on January 6th. He was finally rewarded for his years of effort by being named the Acting United States Attorney for the District of Columbia and nominated for the permanent position despite having no experience as a prosecutor or a judge, the normal requirements for the job.
His tenure as acting federal prosecutor has given him the reputation as the worst Trump appointment of 2025 and that’s saying something. He has fired the lawyers and demoted others who were assigned the January 6th cases and dropped a case on which he was still the attorney of record. (Of course he was a participant in the festivities that day, tweeting that it was like Mardi Gras so I suppose that’s the least he could do for his client and fellow insurrectionist. ) He’s threatened elected Democrats from minority leader Chuck Schumer to house members over issuing alleged threats like “he will reap the whirlwind” and publicly sucked up to Elon Musk by posting sycophantic letters promising to protect him from his enemies. He “forgot” to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee that he’d appeared on Russian state media over 150 times.
Boosting the following defamatory claim against former Biden officials is par for the course:
And he has taken it upon himself to intimidate Georgetown University by saying he would not hire any of their graduates because of its DEI program which garnered a strong “mind your own business” retort from the Dean. And he’s weirdly sending threats to Wikipedia and medical journals demanding that they stop being biased.
The medical journal thing may explain why Trump sent out this odd Truth Social post the other night in which he touted this Acting U.S. Attorney’s commitment to making America healthy again. Apparently, Martin is in cahoots with the other shockingly terrible Trump appointment, HHS Sec. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Yesterday, N. Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis said he will not vote for Martin in committee citing his participation in January 6th. (I thought that was actually pretty gutsy since we know that January 6th is a trigger for Trump.) But if Tillis stands firm, Martin’s nomination will not make it to the floor. His 120-day interim appointment is up on May 20th and if Trump doesn’t name someone else, the 24 judge panel on the D.C. District Court can name another interim choice until someone is confirmed — or Trump could name another interim himself.
Martin’s brief and utterly bizarre tenure in the spotlight may be coming to a close but the conservative movement should get credit for all the other operatives, saboteurs and radical henchmen they trained over the many decades who now carrying out Trump’s sweeping vision to turn America into a Christian nationalist autocracy and global pariah. Maybe that’s what they wanted after all. If so they’ve certainly gotten their wish.
Salon