Personnel Is Policy: Trump Far More Than Bush Is Relying on Movement Conservatives

The most recent Council for National Policy meeting was highly revealing, and a breath of fresh air.

by Rod D. Martin
November 28, 2016

The Council for National Policy is the nucleus of what Hillary termed “the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy”. It gathers the leaders of the Conservative Movement regularly. It goes out of its way to carry the Reagan flame.

That never sat well with Establishment Republicans, the former “Rockefeller Republicans” today known as RINOs. Those who court their favor are also wary.

But it turns out that Donald Trump absolutely loves the crowd at CNP, which was certainly not a likely outcome in the days when no one was quite sure what he believed, or later when the group rallied strongly behind Ted Cruz.

If there’s anything truly different about CNP in the Trump era, vs. CNP in the Bush era, it’s that in the Bush years, CNP was taken very seriously yet held at arm’s length. There was always representation from the White House: we’d get cabinet members for insider briefings pretty regularly. But unlike the Reagan heyday, there was “them” and there was “us”.

No more.

I pos…