Bill Clinton had the New Republic. The Weekly Standard steered Bush White House policy. Barack Obama opened up to The Atlantic. To Curt Mills, who recently joined the American Conservative as a senior writer, the publication is poised to be Donald Trump’s “in-house, in-flight magazine.”

That may seem like wishful thinking given Trump’s media proclivities, driven more by the latest Fox News outrage or blaring Breitbart headline than by conservative ideas hashed out in policy and culture magazines. While it’s unlikely that Trump will ever be spotted reading the magazine cover to cover as Ronald Reagan was known to do with Human Events, TAC has resonated lately in the president’s policy circles. Two communication aides, one serving in the administration and one on the campaign, told me that TAC articles have been regularly passed around and referenced in their workplaces, suggesting the nearly two-decade-old magazine is more of a Trump ideologue’s publication, if not the president’s own choice reading. That’s welcome news to Johnny Burtka, its executive director and acting editor, who sees a correlation between the worldview articulated by the president and TAC’s long-held editorial stances. “I’ve heard the president mention pro-worker, pro-family conservatives in his speeches before,” he said, adding: “Those are all issues that we’ve talked about for years, and those are all important priorities for the Trump administration.”

While TAC was founded in opposition to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, it’s now looking to seize on a realignment of the right that’s shaped by the current Republican president’s populist and anti-interventionist appeals. Since its 2002 launch under founding editor Scott McConnell, the magazine has pushed ideas few other conservative outlets considered, namely opposing America’s wartime economy and the ongoing engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan that fuel it. On domestic and trade policies, TAC’s editorial line has long opposed the international trade agreements championed by adherents of global-market capitalism who ran the party pre-Trump. “We really want…[a more] humane economy, as opposed to just whatever the Wall Street Journal editorial board wants, or big finance and big business want,” Burtka said during a phone interview from his Pennsylvania farm, from which he regularly commuted from to TAC’s offices in Washington, D.C., before the pandemic hit. “We really want to look at what types of economic policies would empower families and local communities…[and to be] good stewards of the environment.”

The sudden emergence of Trump-era populist conservatism has presented “a once-in-a-generation opportunity” for the magazine, said Burtka, and is part of the motivation for recent changes, including a masthead overhaul, a website revamp, and a print redesign. The ambition, said Burtka, is to “become The Atlantic of the right.” TAC has recently added journalists like former Washington Examiner writer Helen Andrews and former Daily Caller opinion editor J. Arthur Bloom; and it will launch podcasts focused on foreign policy and broader domestic and cultural issues. “It’s to our shame if we don’t,” said Mills, when asked if TAC is seizing the moment. The publication that came closest to ”in-flight” status during the 2016 campaign was Breitbart, said Mills, but “that’s just a different type of thing. It’s not a magazine.” “On our best days,” he added, TAC is the primary publication “grappling with the ideas” of the current White House.

While TAC likely isn’t one of the outlets that regularly pops up on the president’s Twitter feed, Burtka said the website has seen a readership boom under the current administration. “Our page views have grown significantly,” he told me, noting that in 2019 they reached 36 million. The site is close to doubling its traffic since the previous presidential election cycle, he said, and saw traffic increase about 30% from February to March. While Burtka acknowledged that their audience is nowhere near the scale of “a Fox or a Breitbart,” the focus with TAC’s readership “is always going to be quality over quantity.” But Burtka’s figures, which are based on Google Analytics, conflict with TAC’s ranking on Comscore, a company that measures web traffic. “The American Conservative numbers for March are soft. March 2020 uniques are 319K, which is down 38% from March 2019 when TAC generated 515K uniques,” said Howard Polskin, a media analyst who tracks the page views of right-leaning outlets on his website, TheRighting, using Comscore data. He added that TAC “doesn’t even come close to cracking TheRighting’s top 20 conservative websites.” (Burtka countered that the magazine’s page views are up 46% from last March, and that TAC’s publishes “about five original articles a day,” as opposed to the volume produced by some other conservative sites.)

A key figure in broadcasting TAC’s perspective to the masses—and perhaps to the president—is Tucker Carlson, a member of the magazine’s advisory board who refers to it, along with the Spectator, as his favorite read, according to a person close to the Fox News host. For its writers, Carlson’s prime-time program is their high-profile media destination; he has hosted TAC’s former editor Jim Antle, who recently left for the Washington Examiner; executive editor Kelley Vlahos, Mills, and Burtka in recent months. The love between TAC and the cable-news show—rated number one or number two on any given night—goes both ways. “You do need a spokesman or spokeswoman for this movement,” said Burtka, referencing Carlson and Josh Hawley, Missouri’s junior senator. “Obviously, the tone in sort of a middlebrow print magazine is going to be different than the tone on a major cable-news evening show. But I think in terms of the issues themselves, there’s a lot of affinity between [TAC and] most of the issues that Tucker has been talking about for the last year. If you can call it the Tucker Carlson wing of the GOP, I think that’s the future, and the Paul Ryan wing of the GOP is the past.”

Outside of the D.C. conservative bubble, TAC has garnered high-profile cosigns from the likes of the New York Times’ David Brooks, who wrote in 2012 that it is “one of the more dynamic” conservative publications, praising its willingness to identify how “capitalism can erode community,” and author J. D. Vance, who credited TAC for making sales of Hillbilly Elegy “explode” after a 2016 interview with senior editor Rod Dreher. Vance spoke at TAC’s annual gala in Washington, D.C., last year, lauding the magazine as he called for a new "vision of conservative politics,” that’s “pro-family, pro-worker, pro-American.”

While Dreher, 53, is almost certainly TAC’s most-well-known writer, his contributions are often its most-widely criticized. A orthodox Christian and author of The Benedict Option, Dreher seems to relish in the culture wars. In a 2018 op-ed, “The Trans Teen Industrial Complex,” he attacked the media for “propagandizing for gay marriage…as far back as 2005;” in a Spectator USA piece several months ago, he described Chick-fil-A’s choice to cease donations to groups with anti-LGBTQ histories as a “Germans-marching-down-the-Champs-Élysées moment.” In 2018, he defended Trump’s “shithole countries” comment, which he said was “crude, obnoxious, and wrong,” before writing, “If word got out that the government was planning to build a housing project for the poor in your neighborhood, how would you feel about it?…Drive over to the poor part of town, and see what a shithole it is. Do you want the people who turned their neighborhood [into] a shithole to bring the shithole to your street?”

For TAC’s younger writers, Dreher’s crusade is low-priority. “I just think the culture war is over, just put it down,” said Mills, a 29-year-old D.C. native. “A ban on gay marriage is like, not seriously an offer, right?…The idea that we’re gonna have a national ban on abortion—it’s pretty far-fetched.” Burtka, 30, said the majority of writers on the masthead are under 35. He sees this as an advantage; they watched the Republican Party’s aughts-era fumbling from the sidelines while right-wing intellectual types elsewhere, many of whom are in their 40s and 50s, were in the thick of it, cheering on Bush. “It seems like younger conservatives are more plugged into ‘conservative realignment’ type issues,” he wrote in a text, chalking it up to a sense of disillusionment following the “failed War on Terror and the 2008 financial crisis.”

Like Tucker Carlson talking Trump down from a war with Iran, TAC has shown a consistent willingness to check the president. Senior editor Daniel Larison called Trump’s 2017 attack on a Syrian airfield “an act of war” with “no legal basis,” writing, “If we actually cared about constitutional government in this country, [Trump] would be called to account for this.” When asked about the instances in which Trump has flipped on his own anti-interventionist messaging, such as the record number of bombs he dropped on the Middle East in his first year, Burtka highlighted the lack of doves in his administration, but also suggested that the president’s id deserves some of the blame: “He certainly likes to display strength, you know, and project American power.” Former national security adviser John Bolton was one of the hawks on Trump’s shoulder. Last September, Mills described Bolton as a “bureaucratic arsonist” and a “real danger” to the president’s reelection plans, but predicted he was “following the well-worn trajectory of dumped Trump deputies.” A day later, Bolton was dramatically and publicly forced out.

By now, the phrase “The Atlantic of the right” has become something of a trope in right-wing media. During its earliest stages in 2013, the editors of The Federalist—a conservative website that reads more like a holdover from the blogosphere than its self-appointed magazine descriptor—tossed around the exact same phrase while envisioning its future, a founding Federalist writer told me. But under the editorial leadership of Ben Domenech, an alleged serial plagiarist and quote fabricator, and onetime subcontractor of the Malaysian government, and Sean Davis, a sometime Trump sycophant, this dream was never realized. The outlet has instead morphed into a cesspool of contrarian opinions and conspiracies that almost no other outlet will touch. (Twitter recently reprimanded The Federalist after it published a post arguing that Americans should strive to infect each other with COVID-19 as quickly as possible in order to boost immunity.) A former long-time editor at another conservative publication, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they also sought to become a right-leaning publication styled after The Atlantic in their early days, but pivoted after running afoul of diverging donor and reader interests.

TAC believes it’s in a unique position to move past these hurdles. It’s almost entirely donor funded, meaning week-to-week traffic numbers aren’t a priority, and editorial choices aren’t influenced by overbearing executives or a controlling foundation, a pitfall for many other conservative publications. “If your model is mostly advertising, the only way you can really make money is having relatively lowbrow content that follows the party line perfectly, bows down to whatever a Republican administration is doing, and, more or less, just throw[s] cheap shots at the left. That’s what gets 50 and 100 million page views and then you can pay the bills,” Burtka said of other conservative outlets, which he wouldn’t “mention” by name but added, “You know what they are.”

Of the $2.5 million in revenue TAC netted in 2019, according to an internal report the magazine shared with the Hive, 92% came from individual donor and foundation contributions; subscription and ad sales accounted for the remaining 8%. In 2018, TAC received nearly $139,000 in grants from the Charles Koch Foundation, a consistent donor that has gifted half-a-million dollars over the years, while the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors have contributed grants totaling $225,000 and $66,000, respectively. George O'Neill Jr., a conservative Rockefeller heir, serves on the board of trustees. “They love reading the pieces, you know, and they might not agree with them,” Burtka said of TAC’s donors, before calling back to a past TAC editor, Dan McCarthy, who once said, “If your favorite publication doesn’t piss you off every once in a while, it’s not doing its job.”

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