When Donald J Trump took over the Republican movement in the mid-2010s, party moderates cooked up a myth: Trump had stolen the Grand Old Party from without; he wasn’t even a real conservative. Pushing this narrative was the centre-right magazine National Review, whose founder, William F Buckley (1925–2008), offered an alternative model of conservatism. In the 1960s, they said, the sophisticated and amiable Buckley had taken a movement riddled with cranks and turned it into something fit for government, uniting social and fiscal conservatives under the umbrella of anti-communism. Buckley gave us Ronald Reagan; Reagan gave us ‘morning in America’. Trump, with his immigrant-bashing, tariff-loving, constitutional vandalism, was a cloud that came from nowhere.

Sam Tanenhaus’s new biography of Buckley, written with Buckley’s blessing and access to his private papers, might have been commissioned to burnish its subject’s reputation, yet it winds up doing the opposite. Some twenty-seven years of research reveal that Trump is nothing new – just the latest iteration of the Right’s historical character. 

Does Trump hate university elites? So did our subject. In 1951, Buckley warned that ‘an intellectual collectivist atmosphere pervades the campus’, brainwashing ‘hundreds of thousands’ of students, whose left-wing biases are ‘translated into legislative and public policy’. The Ivy League radical ‘exerts disproportionate influence because of his dedication to his