I've been feeling a bit sorry for the good old-fashioned conservative movement of yore lately. You remember those people who fought for Ronald Reagan's "three legged stool" of Republican ideology: small government, strong national defense and "traditional values," right? I'm thinking about folks like Richard Viguerie, Morton Blackwell and Phyllis Schlafly, the movement O.G.'s who slaved for years in the trenches training Republicans to embrace such arcane subjects as "free trade," "individual liberty" and "limited government" — only to have a billionaire demagogue throw that all out the window for libertinism, central planning and vendetta by police state.
But there's really no need to feel sad for them. Blackwell and Viguerie are still around and now peddling Trumpism, as did Schlafly before she died in 2016. And we know that later Reagan revolutionaries like Ralph Reed and Roger Stone have been all-in on Donald Trump from the beginning. Still, they deserve more credit than they're getting for the ghastly state of American conservatism and the toxic politics we are living in today. Without them there would be no Trump.
Trump's 2016 presidential campaign was a ramshackle affair with only a few advisers. Stone had been friends with him for years and had advised Trump on his aborted Reform Party campaign back in 2000. He was Trump's window into the right-wing movement that he was going to need to leverage if he wanted to win. Since Trump was more a CNN guy than a Fox News guy in those days, he needed some schooling. Stone did that for him, along with a fellow named Sam Nunberg who provided Trump with right-wing radio talking points in the early days. He quickly picked up important jargon that signaled his membership in the looney-tunes tribe. (Remember his blathering about military deserter Bowe Bergdahl and "common core" during that campaign? Those obscure topics came right out of right-wing talk radio.)
There was a considerable battle during that campaign between more traditional conservative movement types who wanted someone like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and grassroots voters dazzled by Trump's star power. Ultimately, the trad-cons couldn't compete. While a few of them peeled off into Never-Trump land, for the most part the whole movement morphed into MAGA without a second thought. Those operatives who had previously followed the tutelage of O.G. conservatives flipped immediately, and put their training to work for the blustery, billionaire demagogue whose only ideology was about what was good for him.
A case in point is the current acting U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., Ed Martin. He had spent his adult life trying to succeed in conservative politics, working with right-to-life groups and other activists, as well as repeatedly running for office and failing. He got his law degree at Saint Louis University, a Jesuit school that has acknowledged the names and stories of enslaved Black Americans who built the university. Such DEI-style actions can only be an embarrassment to a MAGA true believer like Martin.
Martin got his first break in politics after being hired as chief of staff to Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt in 2006, but was almost immediately enmeshed in an email scandal and was forced to resign after revelations that he'd lied about doing political work on the government's dime. That scandal ended Blunt's career, but Martin kept going.
After several failed attempts at elective office, Martin became the head of the Missouri Republican Party in 2013 and shortly after that got involved with Schlafly's Eagle Forum. Schlafly was elderly and in failing health; her daughter and other members of the board accused Martin of coercing her into endorsing Trump and co-authoring a volume called "The Conservative Case for Trump" which, by ironic coincidence, was published one day day after Schlafly's death. Martin was ejected from Eagle Forum but started a rival organization he called "Phyllis Schlafly's Eagles." Yeah, we're talking about a class act here.
From the moment of Trump's first victory, Martin has been a true-blue MAGA follower, appearing on any radio or TV show that will have him. He famously emerged as one of the most vociferous defenders of the Jan. 6 insurrection and its perpetrators, and finally got his reward by being named as acting U.S. attorney in D.C. and nominated for the permanent position, although he has no previous experience as a prosecutor or a judge.
Martin's brief tenure has given him a reputation as the worst Trump appointment of 2025 — and that's really saying something. He has fired or demoted prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases and dropped one prosecution for which he was still the government's attorney of record. Since he was a participant in the U.S. Capitol festivities that day, and tweeted through it as if it were Mardi Gras, I guess that was the least he could do. He has threatened several elected Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, over issuing alleged threats and has sucked up to Elon Musk with sycophantic public letters promising to protect him from his enemies. He now claims he "forgot" to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee that he has appeared on Russian state media more than 150 times.
His defamatory claims against former Biden officials are just par for the course:
Concerning.
— U.S. Attorney Ed Martin (@USAEdMartin) March 1, 2025
No one is above the law. https://t.co/VrphfuyKuB
Martin has also taken it upon himself to intimidate Georgetown University, saying he won't hire any of the school's law graduates because of its DEI program, which garnered a strong "mind your own business" retort from the dean. He's even been sending weird threats to Wikipedia and medical journals, demanding that they drop their alleged liberal bias.
The attacks on medical journals may provide some context for an odd Truth Social post Trump sent out the other night, touting his lap-dog prosecutor's supposed commitment to making America — wait for it — healthy again. It seems that Martin is in cahoots with one of the other most-terrible Trump appointees, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
1. President Trump has reportedly been making calls to GOP senators, urging them to vote to confirm his pick for U.S. Attorney in D.C., Ed Martin, who has been facing controversy on multiple fronts.
And now, he's rallying the troops via Truth Social by invoking RFK Jr and MAHA.
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yasharali.bsky.social) May 5, 2025 at 8:21 PM
On Tuesday, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., announced he would not vote for Martin's confirmation in the Judiciary Committee, citing his participation in the Jan. 6 riot. (Pretty gutsy, since we know that's a major trigger for Trump.) If Tillis stands firm, Martin's nomination won't make it to the floor. His 120-day interim appointment ends on May 20, so if Trump doesn't name someone else, the 24 judges of the D.C. District Court can name another interim choice until someone is confirmed or the president makes another interim appointment himself.
So Ed Martin's brief and bizarre tenure in the spotlight may be coming to a close soon, but the old-school conservative movement should get credit for all the other operatives, saboteurs and radical henchmen they trained over the last few decades who now carrying out Trump's sweeping vision to turn America into a Christian nationalist autocracy and global pariah. Maybe that's what they really wanted all along.
