It’s the strangest thing: Grand juries in Washington, D.C. just keep declining to indict people arrested by federal officers amid Trump’s capital crime crackdown—a very rare phenomenon normally, but one that has happened at least six times since that crackdown began. Longtime lawyers are gobsmacked: “Not only have I never heard of this happening, I’ve never heard of a prosecutor who’s heard of this happening,” a former federal prosecutor told CBS News. Happy Thursday.

A Day with the NatCons

by Andrew Egger

One thing you learn about this year’s National Conservatism Conference just by chatting with those in attendance at the Westin DC Downtown is that the National Conservatism Conference apparently sucks now. The old pleasurable sense of hip transgression—the punk of it all—just isn’t hitting the way it used to, back when they were taking an AMERICA FIRST-brand flamethrower to all the hoary old conservative institutions, from fusionism to CPAC.

Looking around at the rows and rows of empty ballroom seats, hearing the occasional speaker’s admonishment that young NatCons should be more grateful for Trump’s second-term achievements, observing the “sure, you can clap” surprise from daytime main-stage speakers whenever the audience bestirred itself to scattered applause, you could definitely see why they felt that way.

The juxtaposition was odd: National conservatism, as a political force, has never been stronger. Many of the young right-wing strivers who filled these seats in former years are now spending their weekdays in government buildings instead, pounding out policy for the Trump administration. The long list of White House officials who addressed the meager crowd speaks to its outsized political reach.¹

This gang of erstwhile outsiders is plainly enjoying its newfound power. Over and over, conference speakers repeated the same refrain: “You can just do things!” The problem is that, having obtained the power to do things, it’s quickly becoming clear that the NatCons are anything but united about what it is they actually want to do.

The glue that binds the NatCon coalition is their contempt for the proceduralism of the conservatism that preceded them, their conviction that Republicans’ old focus on small government and personal liberty amounted to nothing more than unilateral disarmament against the teeming hordes of the left. Seizing and wielding federal political power, not restraining it, is the mission.

This, of course, helps explain why the NatCons have become the intellectual power base² of the GOP of today: Their grievances and hangups map conveniently onto Donald Trump’s own. They share all his enemies: not just the left, but free traders, civil libertarians, and neoconservatives. And they are in agreement that he should crack the whip of the state as hard as he likes against all these groups.

The NatCons are aware, however, that a working alliance with any one president can only take them so far. They’re not just interested in running the GOP of today; they want to hold on to the GOP of tomorrow, too. In his Wednesday speech, OMB Director Russell Vought emphasized the importance of maintaining national conservatism as a “durable event”—not just “an unhealthy stream built around the personality of one person and their ability to win elections,” but “a durable intellectual river that becomes a flood that cuts through the work of saving this country.”

Frankly, this is going to be difficult. Because the other major takeaways from NatCon this week were, first, that a group oriented toward a shared love of coalition-purging vengeance may not be particularly suited to coalition-building. And second, the NatCons are all chasing a vision of national greatness, but it turns out that “national greatness” is a concept with as many definitions as there are NatCons.

Peter Thiel has a vision of national greatness. The gay tech gazillionaire, who was the NatCon conference’s original bankroller, envisions a future characterized by a great secular fusion of populism and tech, a prosperous America led into a new golden age by a tech industry both purged of wokeness and let off the leash.

Thiel, however, wasn’t at NatCon this week. And many who were there denounced his secular tech-happy approach as benighted. In her day-one speech, the Conservative Partnership Institute’s Rachel Bovard singled out “Silicon Valley disrupters” as a leading danger to the NatCon movement, warning that their embrace of tech transhumanism presented an “existential threat to human dignity.” AI was out; going outside and touching grass was in. And changing attitudes on tech were far from the only swerve away from Thiel. Thursday’s programming ended with a primetime panel moderated by the editor of the Christian-right journal First Things on the need to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges and end the national right to gay marriage.

The conference’s lean into an overtly Christian form of nationalism raised other thorny coalitional questions, too. For instance: What to do about all these Jews? For conference honcho Yoram Hazony—who is Jewish himself—the right’s growing strain of antisemitism was something to be sublimated for the good of the coalition. “Nobody ever said that to be a good NatCon you have to love Jews,” he said in his Tuesday speech. “Go take a look at our statement of principles, it’s not a requirement.”

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One of Wednesday’s breakout sessions involved a sequence of mini-discussions on “the Bible and American Renewal,” featuring three talks from Christian nationalists—William Wolfe of the Center for Baptis