I highly recommend a thoughtful NYT column about the Republican Party’s devolution from William F. Buckley, a man I worked very hard to understand fifty years ago when he was a conservative Sisyfus climbing America’s liberal mountain, to the “idiot” Sean Hannity. Buckley’s vocabulary was intentionally intimidating. For example, I still remember looking up the meaning of the word “avuncular” from one of his columns. That was back when I kept a pocket sized notepad chock full of fifty-cent words that were new to me.
Looking back on Buckley its hard not to appreciate a man who wrote this appraisal of our current President almost twenty years ago – the text taken from the NYT column:
“In March 2000, he trained his sights on ‘the narcissist’ and ‘demagogue’ Donald Trump. ‘When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized By its reflection,’ he wrote in a prophetic short essay in Cigar Aficionado. ‘The resistance to corrupting demagogy’ he warned, ‘should take first priority’ for Americans.”
