Note: This is adapted from a speech given at the National Conservatism Conference on Sept. 2, 2025.

The last seven months under President Donald Trump has repudiated — once and for all — the self-serving, craven “long game” of the Republican Establishment. Contrary to a generation of failed GOP leaders, you really can just do things.

After decades of unchecked invasion, our Southern border is secure. ICE Director Tom Homan’s enforcement strategy is so successful that it’s already reshaping the labor market. Over the last four months, native born Americans have gained 2.6 million new jobs and foreign-born workers have lost 1.6 million.

You can just do things.

Thousands of once untouchable Deep State bureaucrats have been fired. Thousands more have taken buyouts to leave voluntarily. Bobby Kennedy fired the entire corrupt Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices. No study. Not after three years of contemplation. No blue-ribbon commission. Gone. Fired.

USAID is gone. I sat in my office and watched them take down the sign. DEI is now illegal in federal offices and contractors and universities. Planned Parenthood and NPR are cut off. The Department of Education is being shut down – the old chestnut that every Republican in my lifetime has run on doing but never did. Three NatCons ago, I told a member of the audience to stop asking for the Department of Education to be eliminated. Because it never would be.

Well, I was wrong. It’s happening. And why? Because it turns out, you can just do things.

Donald Trump is the first Republican ever to seriously try to dismantle the federal government as a left-wing power base. For most of modern history, Republican presidents took the oath and then just sat atop a system designed to undermine them without making any significant change.

Donald Trump really is the living embodiment of “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” I guess we finally know what that phrase means now.

Only time will tell how much he accomplishes. But if you want any indication about its success so far, consider that since President Trump took up his sledgehammer, the Democrat Party’s net approval rating has fallen to 30 points under water.

They’re heading into the midterms with a platform against safe streets, civil rights, and hot chicks in jeans. Keep swinging, Mr. President.

The New Baseline

As satisfying as the last seven months have been, what comes next will be far more important for our movement and our country. After the Right’s stunning winning streak in 2025, it’s not enough for us to say “This is what I voted for.” From now on, this needs to be the only thing we will ever vote for, ever again.

Don’t listen to the establishment or the media. For all his unique style, Donald Trump is not sui generis.

His populist politics, nationalist vision, and permanent-offense strategy needs to become the baseline for Republican presidential candidates from now on.

No more “polite” Republicans who crave social acceptance in the editorial pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

No more Republicans who misunderstand the stakes of what we’re up against: an amoral elite that will use every inch of their institutional power to impoverish and disenfranchise their countrymen, jail and bankrupt their political opponents, and shower our money on every foreign interest that lines their wallets.

This is important for two reasons.

First, because the work of re-Americanizing the federal government is going to take more than another three-and-a-half years to complete. The Left’s march through the institutions lasted decades — so will America’s exorcism of them.

And second, because reports of the Republican Establishment’s demise are greatly exaggerated. Susan Collins still chairs the Appropriations Committee. Mitch McConnell, the Rules Committee and the defense appropriations subcommittee. Neocons are still stalling realist foreign policy nominations and together with K street quietly steering policy back toward Bush-Cheney-Romney-ism.

Congressional Republicans are openly talking about bringing back earmarks and amnesty for illegal immigrants. They want to protect the Establishment from Trump instead of protecting America from the Establishment.

And if we let up — they will succeed. We know this because we’ve been here before.

Taking the Wheel

Thirty-five years ago, the conservative movement won its defining victory over Soviet Communism. The wall came down. The Evil Empire disbanded. The West’s long-twilight struggle was over.

Forty years of Cold War promises came due. About peace, the peace dividend, and a reorientation of American policy back toward our nation, our people.

Yet within months of the Right’s global, generational “Mission Accomplished,” a Republican president declared a “New World Order,” took us to war in the Middle East, and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Everyday conservatives who delivered Republicans landslides for decades looked on as the backseat drivers of our coalition — Wall Street elites, neoconservatives, and corporate libertarians — took the wheel. A bipartisan uniparty formed and entrenched itself while delivering voters, at best, less than what they voted for and, at worst, the opposite of what they voted for.

The timely tactics of 1980s fusionism ossified first into dogma and then into political irrelevance. A generation of supposedly wise, prudent leaders steered our party, our nation, and much of the West into the culture-shredding maelstrom of globalism, intersectionality, and American empire.

If we don’t think it could happen again… we can rest assured that it will.

Because just like Nixon and Reagan’s coalition a generation ago, today’s MAGA majority is already attracting allies whose personal, political, and philosophical goals are irreconcilable with ours. And not just in the Washington establishment.

There are debates coming — very quickly — that will challenge our new coalition. Debates over drone technology. Over eugenics dressed up as “reproductive technology.” And over algorithmically empowered commercial mass surveillance performed a scope and scale we have never before witnessed – and a cost that we haven’t even begun to contemplate.

But the most pressing of these debates is over artificial intelligence. Specifically: whether artificial intelligence will innovate us to a more efficient and secure future, or result in a technology-driven totalitarianism.

Indeed, these debates are foundational to the conservative movement. They will determine whether this new American conservative coalition will remain American or conservative at all.

AI and Transhumanism

Now. Like everyone else in this room, I am grateful to the tech right for being part of the coalition that elected Donald Trump. I commend President Trump for drawing Silicon Valley’s anti-woke disruptors to his campaign last year. And I support the Trump Administration, including Vice President Vance, for their confident but clear-eyed policy toward the new technology.

Moreover, I get it. So-called techno-optimists are cool. They offer to the Right an alluring frisson of subversive edge and intellectual swagger.

But in techno-optimism as in all human endeavors, the line between confidence and hubris — between ambition and horror — can be very thin. The so-called trans-humanist movement – the belief that technology can enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities beyond current human limitations – is on the other side of that line.

AI raises important and difficult questions: about public policy, about children and families, about labor and education and economic competitiveness. It raises profound and fundamental questions about human dignity and the care and stewarding of the soul.

Trans-humanism also raises important questions — just not difficult ones. Trans-humanism is not cool. It is not interesting. It is an existential threat to human dignity straight from the mephitic boardrooms of hell.

Nor — let’s be very clear — is trans-humanism new. It is stale and boring. It is literally one of the oldest recorded ideas in the world. And I quote:

“And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die… your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods[.]”

Today’s post-humanism and genetic optimization and bio-enhancement cults are just yesterday’s eugenics, child sacrifice, and euthanasia – this time with V.C. backing.

We do not need to speculate about how these technologies would be used. They will be used to exterminate supposedly inferior children – like those with Down syndrome, flat feet, or — in time — the wrong color hair or eyes.

They will be used to spare the consciences of middle-aged children and government health budgets from the burdens of caring for the elderly. Permanently.

They will be used to manipulate, exploit, and abuse children. Facebook’s AI chatbot was already caught grooming kids.

This tech will be used to scale the manufacturing and re-engineering of helpless human life for the self-care routines of the glamorous and powerful. And you thought the tech right was only bad on H1-B visas.

The trans-humanist cult directly rejects the Truth about human dignity, our Creator, and the exquisite and unrepeatable Imago Dei imprinted on every human soul.

The problems with trans-humanism are legion — in every sense of the word. Conservatism is about human dignity and human flourishing. By definition, there is no such thing as a trans-human conservative.

Lest anyone misunderstand or misstate this point, conservatives should not cower in a Luddite crouch. We have a future to win.

AI is going to be a powerful, transformative tool — and we should be encouraging its appropriate development here at home, and staying ahead of America’s foreign adversaries in this space, and with the absolutely necessary civil liberties protections that ensure our cool and edgy defense contractor friends don’t blow away the Fourth Amendment.   

AI research, yes. AI-enabled data analysis… health care… transportation… absolutely. AI is going to be the defining problem-solving technology of the 21st century. But human dignity is not a problem to be solved.

And as for man’s fallen nature, we already have a solution for that problem, too. He died on a cross outside Jerusalem 2,000 years ago.

Taking the Wheel

None of this is to say we must read Tech Bros or AI engineers out of the conservative coalition. No. We want them — we should want all of them. Politics is about addition. And to win the fights ahead of us — against the Left, the Establishment, and billionaire trans-humanist Screwtapes — the Right needs to get very good at politics.

Short term alliances are necessary. But conservatives have just clawed our way out of one dead fusionism – we cannot be doe-eyed about entering another.

As with any political alliance, we must be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves, as the Gospel of Matthew tells us. Or, as Michael Anton might put it, we must be Machiavellian in our coalition-building and ruthless in protecting our values.

Conservatives cannot outsource our mission because we know from painful experience that no one else shares it, including many of our most powerful allies — on Wall Street, K Street, in the military industrial complex, or in Silicon Valley.

We must constantly strive, therefore, to grow our coalition, while remembering that is OUR coalition. And coalitions are only means, not ends. We pursue the good, the beautiful, and the true, not the donors, stakeholders, or consultants.

This is what we fought for all those years, under Bush and Dole and Bush and Cheney and Romney and McConnell — the chance to fight and to win. The chance to lead. It’s finally here.

For the first time in our lives, the success or failure of our coalition — at home and abroad, on economic, foreign, and social policy — is up to us. It’s up to you.

The Right is growing. The Left is cracking up. The country and our culture are healing.

Across the West, brave, conservative leaders are standing up and fighting back. For their faith. For their freedom. For their neighbors, nations, and in service to the Burkean covenant between those who have gone before, those who are here, and those yet to come.