Onishi, the academic and podcaster, said that while the kind of proposals contained in Up from Conservatism had little electoral appeal, the New Right often envisioned a process of imposing them from above via a president – like Trump – keen on wielding immense personal power in a government packed with loyalists.
“They want a government that expands the executive branch in order to bypass the processes that are often arduous in the legislative and even in the judicial branches,” he said. “If you can expand the executive branch, and then get the agencies under the purview of the executive to operate on a loyalist basis, then you can do all the things that folks in this volume want to do by way of a president who is almost a king.”