Every month, for several years, I’ve had dinner with a dozen Ivy League-educated conservatives (and libertarians) in a DC suburb.
This informal group started meeting when an older Yale alum was at an event talking to two young conservatives and they all realized they’d attended an elite college, and thought they should start a kind of therapy group for people who spent four years as a small minority on campus constantly harassed and under threat, as if they were Jews at UCLA or Columbia.
I don’t fit this group but they let me in. I was a student at the University of Chicago where we had a largely Friedmanite business school, economics department, and law school, as well as Straussians and neoconservatives in political science and the humanities, alongside the usual Marxists and socialist feminists. I was invited in by someone who graduated from Beijing University before getting a math PhD from Duke.
The group already had some people who technically didn’t go to an Ivy League school: but the overwhelming majority of them did, usually undergrad at one Ivy followed by Wharton or another for graduate degrees. Lots of the regulars are in their 60s (the ones in their 20s tend to disappear to Boston or elsewhere for law and grad school), and a sizable percentage, maybe half, have served in either the current or first Trump administration, a Bush administration, state and local government, worked on state political campaigns or in state Republican organizations.
It’s a group shot through with squishes. At the beginning of the last presidential campaign the group had a number of Haley supporters, and there were only two of us who were for Trump. And we said Trump would be the nominee more than we’d argue that he should be. There were also DeSantis backers, who came around easily to Trump.
In the days of Trump 45 many of the DC area libertarians I knew, or knew of, at the Cato Institute or the Charles Koch Institute, ended up in the Trump administration, even if on Mike Pence’s staff or at some federal agency. At one point it seemed the only familiar names at the libertarian think tanks were the late David Boaz (trying to hold things together), Alex Nowrasteh, and recently-imported Eastern European and South African free market economists who were here on work visas.
Trump may have not expected to win in 2016. He hadn’t picked a staff and appointees in advance. Many establishment Republicans wouldn’t take a job in that administration, cowed by the media onslaught or the hoax that Trump would be exposed as a Russian asset.
The people who turned on Trump, writing books denouncing him or appearing before the Potemkin committee hearings run by Pelosi, Cheney etc. weren’t usually these libertarians. Many were opportunists from Trump’s non-political careers that he’d turned to when he couldn’t find staff.
But now Trump can get staffers. He has a brilliant cabinet, despite their falling for the Signal misstep that seems to have been planned by their deep state opponents and executed by a saboteur.
In my Ivy dinner group there are very, very low level Trump appointees, and I suspect more will join them. They’re often nice people. I like most of them, but they’re squishes. In our last dinner they were complaining about how DOGE was rolled out wrong, and we should really do smaller cuts and much later. A current low-level Trump appointee said it was ridiculous to demand that federal workers report what five things they worked on the previous week. I pointed out that he lived inside the Beltway, a bubble unlike the rest of America.
I hope the Trump administration can weed out the deep-state saboteurs and stop appointing these wets. The Trump regime shouldn’t hire Haley supporters who’ve served on some minor state agency, state GOP committee or in the Bush administration, just because they have law or business school credentials from an Ivy. They should be combing through independent media for pro-Trump writers and hiring us!