Ideas

The Anti-Populist

The writer and former white supremacist Richard Hanania was once the toast of MAGA-curious tech barons and reactionary intellectuals. Now he thinks Trumpism has broken their brains.

First published in The Atlantic on July 19, 2026.

by Gilad Edelman, The Atlantic

July 23, 2026 | reading time: 16 Min.

In 1876, as corruption scandals shook the Ulysses S. Grant administration, the poet, diplomat, and founding Atlantic editor James Russell Lowell wondered where the American experiment was headed. “Is ours a ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people,’” he wrote, “or a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?”