Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine: “Michael Anton has been confronted with a dilemma few writers have ever contemplated: how to handle catastrophic success. Anton’s 2016 essay, ‘The Flight 93 Election’, made a then-shocking case to the right-wing intelligentsia in favor of Donald Trump’s election. Anton chose the arresting metaphor of Flight 93, the hijacked plane from September 11, 2001, whose passengers stormed the cockpit in a desperate bid to stave off certain death. Electing Trump, he conceded, was risky (like seizing a plane from terrorists midair), but the alternative of electing Hillary Clinton posed certain political and demographic death.

“Trump won, of course. Anton got a job in the administration, and his millennialist perspective grew so influential that the Trump presidency culminated in a mob of thousands following Anton’s metaphor quite literally, storming the center of government power in a desperate bid to prevent a Democratic presidency. Either out of modesty, or perhaps the advice of a friendly lawyer, Anton does not take credit for inspiring the January 6 insurrection. Still, his new essay labors under the burden of success. He is arguing for a new strategy for the right in the wake of Trump’s presidency crashing and burning. His position is chilling: He urges Republicans to keep rushing the cabin, to make the Flight 93 ’emergency’ more or less a permanent condition.”