In every White House, there’s always a publication that claims to embody the spirit of the sitting president. The New Republic was the in-flight magazine of Air Force One during the Clinton years; the Weekly Standard could be found on coffee tables in George W. Bush’s West Wing; and Barack Obama famously loved the explanatory journalism of Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman. There was no such publication during Donald Trump’s presidency, of course—Trump’s Twitter feed, in conversation with Fox News, was its own sort of sacred text. 

With Trump’s banishment from social media, it is tempting to think that his movement’s intellectual energy, such as it is, has retreated to the hinterlands of Victor Orban fanzines and right-wing blogs. But I’ve been in a contemplative mood in my travels lately, and polled a number of my sources: does a MAGA version of the Weekly Standard exist—something that embodies the thinking person’s argument for Trump’s nationalist-populist and nativist politics?