Career
Anton was a speechwriter and press secretary for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He later took a mid-level job at the United States National Security Council (NSC) in the administration of President George W. Bush. He worked as the press secretary of national security advisor Condoleezza Rice. In 2005,Anton left the U.S. government and became a speechwriter for Rupert Murdoch at News Corp. He then worked as director of communications at the investment bank Citigroup,and a year and a half as managing director of investing firm BlackRock. [8] [9] [7]
Anton joined the U.S. National Security Council as deputy assistant to the president for strategic communications in February 2017. [10] He resigned on April 8,2018,the evening before John R. Bolton became Trump's national security advisor. [11] [12] [13] [14] He then joined Hillsdale College's Kirby Center Graduate School of Government. [15]
In December 2020,Trump appointed Anton to a four-year term on the National Board for Education Sciences,which advises the Department of Education on scientific research and investments. [16] [17]
According to The Washington Post in November 2024,Anton was a leading candidate to be deputy national security advisor under President-elect Donald Trump's second term,but removed himself from consideration after learning the National Security Council would include a position for Sebastian Gorka. [18] In December 2024,President-elect Trump nominated Anton to serve as the director of policy planning at the US State Department. [19] Anton participated in the 2025 Iran-United States negotiations at the expert level. [20]
In August 2025,Anton was set to leave the Department of State after having written the national security strategy; [21] sources told Politico that Anton grew frustrated with Sergio Gor and foreign policy processes of the administration. [22]
Views
Anton is considered to be a notable West Coast Straussian, as a student of Leo Strauss by way of tutor Harry V. Jaffa. [23] Anton has contributed to Project 2025. [24]
Against pluralism
Anton has derided American diversity in his writing, arguing in a pseudonymous March 2016 essay that "'Diversity' is not 'our strength'; it's a source of weakness, tension and disunion." [25] In the same essay, written under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus (after the ancient Roman consul), Anton defended Donald Trump's use of the slogan "America First" by arguing that the America First Committee (which included prominent antisemites and opposed the United States entering World War II) had been "unfairly maligned." [26] He also argued that Islam "is a militant faith", and that "only an insane society" would take in Muslim immigrants after the 9/11 attacks. [27]
After the Flight 93 Election
His pseudonymous September 2016 editorial "The Flight 93 Election", published in the Claremont Review of Books , compared the prospect of conservatives letting Hillary Clinton win the 2016 United States presidential election with passengers not charging the cockpit of the United Airlines aircraft hijacked by Al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks. [28] [29] [31] [32] [33] [25] In the essay, Anton criticized conservatives who were skeptical of Donald Trump, [35] and he also decried the "ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners," called for "no more importing poverty, crime, and alien cultures", called the idea of Islamophobia and the Black Lives Matter movement "inanities", and argued that the American left was waging "wars on 'cis-genderism'". [35] [36] Rush Limbaugh devoted the bulk of a radio show in September 2016 to a reading of the editorial. [37]
In 2019, Anton turned his essay into a book, titled After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote that Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose. In it he argued that Trump constituted "the first serious national-political defense of the Constitution in a generation." [35] Trump praised the book. [35] According to Carlos Lozada, Anton primarily added to his 2016 editorial long rants against the liberalism. [35] Lozada wrote, "Anton spends virtually no time detailing or defending particular policies of the Trump administration; all that matters is the enemy. For Anton, Hillary Clinton is no longer the chief nemesis—the entire left is, along with sellout conservatives and any other forces countering the president. They contribute to a 'spiritual sickness' and 'existential despair' pervading not just the United States but all the West ... Apparently, Flight 93 did not end with the 2016 vote; we are forever on the plane, endlessly in danger, no matter who has seized the controls." [35]
Coup conspiracy
In September 2020, Anton wrote an essay titled "The Coming Coup?" in The American Mind; in the essay, Anton suggested that Democrats, aided by George Soros, were planning a coup d'état to take over the United States [26] [40] by way of a domestic color revolution coordinated by the so-called Deep State and influential operatives of the Democratic Party. [41] The widely shared article was called a tipping point in spreading the false claim, which was further popularized by The Federalist , DJHJ Media and Dan Bongino. [40] Anton has referred to the U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan as a "Cold War relic," stating that it is not in the interest of the U.S. to defend it. [42]
Regime propaganda
Anton wrote an essay in The American Mind on rhetoric strategies. [43] In it he coined the term "celebration parallax" to describe a feature of political discourse, by which the merit of what is said depends on who says it. Right-wing political commentator Jeremy Carl went on to complain about the phenomenon regarding mass immigration. [44]
Red caesarism
In his 2020 book, The Stakes, Anton developed the concept of "red caesarism": the idea that the republic is only safeguarded by an elected strong man "form of one-man rule: halfway ... between monarchy and tyranny". [45] According to this doctrine, "Caesar's word replaces constitutionalism and even, in the final analysis, law". [24]
Personal life
Anton said he is a classically trained chef and a francophile; after resigning from the National Security Council in 2018, he worked one last day as a line cook to prepare a state dinner for Emmanuel Macron. [46]
Anton has written over 40,000 posts on Styleforum.net, focusing on tailoring and classic menswear. [47] [48] Under the pseudonym "Nicholas Antongiavanni", he wrote in 2006 The Suit, a parody of Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince . [49]
This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
