Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr. share a joke in 1983.
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William F. Buckley Set the Stage for Donald Trump
Turns out the shift from “Firing Line” to “You're fired!” wasn’t that big.
When Donald Trump tells a truth, it can be as striking as it is rare. So when he went on ABC’s This Week during the 2016 presidential race and told George Stephanopoulos, “this is called the Republican Party, it’s not called the Conservative Party,” old-fashioned Republicans should have considered themselves on notice.
Instead, a shocking mass of self-proclaimed conservatives bought into Trump’s not-very-conservative-at-all agenda of tariffs, budget deficits and authoritarian love-fests. Yeah, they backed a winning horse, but in the process they have seemingly abandoned a coherent and respectable political movement with deep ideological roots. What happened?