Trump and the Welcome Demise of the Neocon Catholic Pontificate

As the Catholic Church in the United States grapples with the implications of the first American pope, another important development affecting American Catholics has gone largely unnoticed: the death of the decades-long project of neoconservative Catholic elites to dominate and dictate the policy debate within the Republican Party. The return of Donald Trump to the White House has exposed this contingent as committed enemies of Trump’s America First populist agenda and subsequently reduced their influence with the new administration and within the GOP to a new level of irrelevance.

A standard trope of the Never-Trump Republicans who oppose the president’s successful reorientation of the party towards an America First agenda is to bemoan Trump’s supposed departures from “authentic conservatism.” Donald Trump’s devastating critique of the post-Reagan GOP’s uncritical endorsement of unlimited immigration, foreign interventionism, and so-called free trade earned him not only a new populist political coalition unrivaled since the Reagan era but also the undying enmity of establishment Republicans deeply invested in the failed neocon policy agenda. The only aspect of the first Trump administration exempt from their criticism was his handling of judicial appointments, since the choice of nominees to the Supreme Court and to the federal judiciary was largely delegated to billionaire and Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo, a stalwart Catholic neocon who has long acted as éminence grise with regard to constitutional law and judicial philosophy among establishment Republicans. In Trump’s first term, Leo used his networks and influence to push through the nominations of Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, all products of Leo’s Federalist Society. Three other members of the Court, including Chief Justice Roberts, also have Federalist Society pedigrees.

Although the President often touts his first-term appointments to the Court, the Trump appointees—particularly Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett—have often proven to be meddlesome obstacles to the implementation of his populist MAGA agenda. Already, early in his second term, the two justices have sided with the Court’s liberals on numerous crucial rulings, including one related to the deportation of illegal aliens. Barrett and Chief Justice Roberts joined the progressives to prevent the freezing of foreign aid spending not in alignment with the administration’s priorities. Those rulings, which caused a popular uproar among Trump supporters, merely highlight the yawning gap between the libertarian-leaning, pro-corporate, and laissez-faire judicial philosophy of Leo’s Federalist Society and the jurisprudence of the rising generation of MAGA-oriented legal thinkers, more sympathetic to economic nationalism and the vigorous exercise of executive authority to protect vital national interests.

His waning influence was only cemented when the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a neocon nonprofit legal group with significant backing from both Leo and Never-Trumper libertarian Charles Koch, decided to bring the Trump administration to federal court in Florida last month, arguing that the president lacks the constitutional authority to impose tariffs without legislation. The fact that the significant authority of the executive branch to set tariff policy affecting national security has gone largely unchallenged for the last thirty years (when the main policy thrust has been to remove existing U.S. tariff barriers to foreign competitors) should come as no surprise given the growth of the pro-China corporate lobby. Only now, as China-aligned interests in the U.S. face the prospect of tariffs targeting unfair trade practices and national security threats—including fentanyl trafficking—are longtime pro-China neocons starting to balk.

It is clear that in the second term, Leo is no longer calling the shots in terms of judicial appointments. Indeed, Mike Davis, former counsel to Senator Chuck Grassley and founder of The Article III Project, has noted that Trump has privately pledged to “go beyond the garden-variety Federalist Society choices” that made up his judicial nominees in the first administration in order to put forward “even more bold and fearless” choices that better reflect his America First principles.

Leo’s loss of clout within the administration and the party is indicative of a broader trend worth noting: the decrepit neoconservative Catholic project to dictate the limits of acceptable intellectual discourse on the political right since the 1980s has finally broken down with the comeback of Donald Trump. Figures like Leo and Princeton Professor Robert George, who have spent decades gatekeeping on behalf of a pro-interventionist, pro-corporate, institutionalist consensus against the heresies of “protectionism” and “isolationism,” are now largely irrelevant. Their declarations of anathema sit against the vulgar populist likes of Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump in a rearguard action to protect the crumbling American establishment and a corrupt GOP that has consistently betrayed its own base no longer resonate with anyone, even among the so-called Catholic intelligentsia. The American pontificate of Popes Leo and George is now a thing of the past.

***

Rob Wasinger is co-founder of The Ragnar Group. He was director of Senate relations for the Trump transition team in 2016 and the first White House liaison at the State Department during the Trump administration.