Jan Resseger writes here about the Trump administration’s open flouting of the law to achieve the goals outlined in Project 2025. What would be considered outrageous and illegal has been normalized since Trump took office in January. This second of his presidency is not merely a continuation of the first term. It’s the culmination of four years of planning by far-right ideologues to redesign the federal government in radical ways, mainly to take from the poor and give to the super-rich. They want to shrink the responsibility of the federal government, back to what they were a century ago.

Resseger focuses on the effects of Trump’s actions on public schools and vulnerable children. This post is the first of two.

She writes:

Despite that the federal government shutdown has ended, SNAP funds are being distributed, and airplanes are returning to their expected schedules, many of us are feeling disoriented and troubled by the way the federal government seems to be operating under Donald Trump’s leadership. We have been observing the Trump administration violating core principles we learned in civics class are at the heart of our democratic society. And we thought the Constitution was supposed to protect every one of us. In today’s post, I’ll try to name and explore some of the principles that President Trump seems to be violating as he attempts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. On Thursday, in Part 2, I’ll explore three serious constitutional violations. All of this is undermining the well-being of our nation’s massive institution of K-12 public schools, the leaders of 13,000 public school districts, over three million public school teachers, and more than 50 million students enrolled.

NY Times economic reporter Tony Romm reflects on the deeper meaning of the recent federal government shutdown: “(T)he president has frequently bent the rules of (the) budget, primarily to reap political benefits or exact retribution. He has found new and untested ways to spare certain Americans, like the military, from the pain of the government closure, while claiming he has no power to help others, including low-income individuals who rely on benefits like SNAP. The result is a shutdown unlike any other, one that has posed disparate and debilitating risks for those unlucky enough to depend on the many functions of government that Mr. Trump has long aspired to cut… At the heart of Mr. Trump’s actions is a belief that the president possesses vast power over the nation’s spending, even though the Constitution vests that authority with Congress. Mr. Trump and his budget director, Russell T. Vought have dismantled entire agencies, fired thousands of workers and canceled or halted billions of dollars in federal spending—all without the express permission of lawmakers.” Romm is not writing about public education, but you will recognize that his concerns apply to public schools and all the rest of our society’s primary institutions.

Trump Seizes the Power of the Purse

The NY Times Editorial Board enumerates three ways the President has grabbed power from Congress  by violating “the power of the purse” granted to Congress in the Constitution: “First, he has refused to spend money that Congress allocated… Second, Mr. Trump has spent money that Congress has not allocated… Third, the president has taken steps that effectively overturn Congress’s spending decisions. In these cases, he has not added or subtracted federal funds, but he has taken other steps that make it so an agency cannot carry out the mission that Congress envisioned for it.”

All year, and at a new and radical level during the recent federal shutdown, President Trump has ordered Education Secretary Linda McMahon and his other appointees in the Department of Education to usurp the power of the purse primarily by slashing the expenditure of Congressionally appropriated funds to staff the department, along with announcing the goal of eliminating the department and its federal role altogether.  The administration’s imposition of permanent layoffs during the federal shutdown focused on firing the professionals responsible for carrying out the very reason a U.S. Department of Education was established back in the fall of 1979, during President Jimmy Carter’s administration: to gather together and administer programs that equalize opportunity for students across the states, where there had historically been unequal protection of students’ rights depending on children’s family income, race, primary language, immigrant status, sexuality or disability.  Huge grant programs like Title I and IDEA and myriad smaller programs ensure that public schools, no matter where a student lives, meet the specific learning needs of all students including those whose primary language is not English and students with disabilities.

During the shutdown, the Trump administration appeared intent on violating the power of the purse at the U.S. Department of Education by radically reducing the staff who do the work—impounding funds congressionally appropriated for paying the staff who enable the Department of Education to fulfill its primary mission.  For example, Education Week‘s Brooke Schultz examines the implication of the shutdown staff cuts for the Office for Civil Rights, on top of massive staff cuts last spring: “Though the latest layoffs are on hold, an enforcement staff that had 560 members spread across 12 offices… will shrink by more than 70% if they go through… Experts worry that without federal enforcement, a fractured interpretation of civil rights laws and protections could take shape across the country—leading to conflicting and politicized handling of cases depending on where students live and what laws are on the books. They worry students in one state might not have the same protections at school as students in another… (S)ome state lawmakers are worried about civil rights complaints not being handled at all.”

During the shutdown, the Trump’s administration also eliminated most of the remaining staff in the Office for Elementary and Secondary Education who administer the huge and essential Title I grants for school districts serving concentrations of students living in poverty. Trump and McMahon also reduced staff in the Office of Special Education Programs, which oversees IDEA grants, from around 200 to five.  Everyone has understood those proposed shutdown layoffs as the Trump administration’s threat to move special education programming from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services, despite that the mission of that department emphasizes treatment instead of education. During the shutdown, Federal District Court Judge for the Northern District of California, Susan Illston temporarily blocked the proposed permanent staff layoffs and their implications for undermining the mission of the U.S. Department of Education, though, of course her pause on the staff firings had no effect while the shutdown continued.

The end of the shutdown did temporarily end all the shutdown layoffs. We shall have to wait a couple of months to see what happens. K-12 Dive‘s Kara Arundel explains: “The continuing resolution signed into law Wednesday funds federal education programs at fiscal year 2025 levels. This temporary spending plan expires Jan. 30, unless Congress agrees to a more permanent budget before that deadline.  The deal nullifies the reduction-in-force notices sent to 465 agency employees on Oct. 10. The Education Department is also prohibited from issuing additional RIFs through the end of January and must provide back pay to all employees who did not receive compensation during the shutdown.” Clearly Trump and Vought’s power grab to eliminate much of the staff in a department established and funded by Congress has been blocked only temporarily.

Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman adds that prior to the shutdown, “The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan federal watchdog funded by Congress, had been investigating more than 40 instances of the Trump administration potentially violating the Nixon-era federal law that prohibits the executive branch from impounding… funds appropriated by Congress… The GAO had already published decisions before Oct. 1 finding that the administration broke the law by withholding funding from programs supporting school infrastructure upgrades, library and museum services, Head Start, and disaster preparation.”

Supreme Court Gives Trump Power through the Shadow Docket

We have also watched all year as Federal District Court judges have temporarily blocked Trump’s executive orders, but lacked the power to declare them permanently unconstitutional or in violation of federal law. Only the U.S. Supreme Court can do that. These cases then become part of “the shadow docket”— cases decided temporarily on an emergency basis but awaiting a full hearing and final decision. The number of these cases derailed to “the shadow docket” has grown rapidly in this first year of Trump’s second term.

In March, the Department of Education fired nearly 2,200 of its 4,133 staff.  After a Federal District Court judge blocked the layoffs temporarily, the case was subsequently appealed. On July 15, Diane Ravitch reported in her blog: “Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the President could continue to lay off the employees of the Department of Education while leaving aside the legal question of his power to destroy a Department created by Congress 45 years ago… If the Supreme Court ever gets around to deciding whether Trump has the legal authority to abolish the Department of Education, it will already be gone.”

After a Federal District Court case is appealed, the Supreme Court releases a temporary, emergency decision, putting off a formal hearing, oral arguments, and what the NY Times‘ Adam Liptak calls, “an explanation of the court’s rationale” until some future time when the case could be scheduled for hearings on what Liptak calls the Supreme Court’s “merits docket.” Liptak explains: “The question of whether the nation’s highest court owes the public an explanation for its actions has grown along with the rise of the ’emergency docket,’ which uses truncated procedures to produce terse, provisional orders meant to remain in effect only while the courts consider the lawfulness of the challenged actions. In practice, the orders often effectively resolve the case.” His implication here is what Diane Ravitch worries about. By the time the Supreme Court fully considers and decides the case, perhaps years from now, it may be too late.

The shutdown has ended, but it is not clear what will happen to the U.S. Department of Education and the many federal programs that support public school equity across our nation.  Part 2 of this post on Thursday will explore what appear to be serious constitutional violations as they impact children and public schools.

Olga Lautman is the go-to source on Russia and Ukraine. A Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, she writes about foreign policy in Eastern Europe and organized crime networks in Russia. She writes here about the “peace plan” that Trump has worked out with Putin. The Trump administration’s fealty to Putin puts us on the sidelines–or worse, as facilitators– as Putin rains death on Ukrainian homes, schools, and civilian populations every night.

Lautman writes:

Today was another sickening day — as Russia carried out one of its more deadly terrorist attacks across Ukraine while Putin’s puppets, Trump and Steve Witkoff, continue preparing yet another Kremlin attempt to force Ukraine into surrender. Russia launched 476 drones and 48 missiles in coordinated strikes that killed 26 civilians — including three children — wounded 141 more, and leveled residential buildings in the Ukrainian city of Ternopil, tearing families apart as they slept. It is part of Russia’s deliberate, systematic effort to ensure that no Ukrainian, not even a sleeping child, is safe anywhere in their homeland. The attack violated NATO airspace, forced Poland and Romania to scramble fighter jets and activate their highest air-defense posture, and exposed once again that Russia continues to escalate because it knows the West, paralyzed by caution and U.S. political dysfunction, will do absolutely nothing to stop it.

And as Ukrainians were still digging survivors out from under rubble, Trump’s hand-picked “envoy,” real estate developer Steve Witkoff, managed to accidentally reveal the Russian source behind an Axios article by posting on X what he believed was a private DM: “He must have got this from K.” “K” is Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s money man, messenger, and the sanctioned operative who, according to Axios, spent three days in Miami, last month, drafting a secret Ukraine plan with Witkoff and other Trump loyalists. 

Witkoff’s blunder confirmed that Trump’s so-called plan is effectively being drafted by the Kremlin and exposed, yet again, that Trump is preparing to force Ukraine into territorial concessions Russia has repeatedly failed to seize on the battlefield — marking the fourth or fifth time he has attempted to coerce Kyiv into capitulation. Witkoff’s incompetence is also not new, as this is the same man who was swept up in the “Signal-gate” scandal while at a meeting with Putin in Russia, and who relied on a Russian intelligence operative as his translator under the belief that the U.S. Embassy had sent her. 

Everything about Trump and Witkoff’s behavior makes it unmistakably clear that they are operating to advance Russian interests, driven by the lure of financial deals, Kremlin-approved business ventures, and future profit streams almost certainly dangling behind their relentless enthusiasm to give Moscow exactly what it wants.

According to Axios, the 28-point framework is built entirely around Russian demands, security concerns, and territorial ambitions — a document so skewed toward Moscow’s interests that Kirill Dmitriev bragged that “the Russian position is really being heard,” which, of course, it is, because they wrote the plan. 

The absurd proposal uses polite, diplomatic language like “security guarantees” and “security in Europe,” yet behind those sanitized phrases, it would force the international community to illegally recognize Crimea and Donbas as “lawful” Russian territory, while compelling Ukraine to cut the size of its armed forces and surrender parts of its weapon stockpiles. It is a plan that ignores Russia’s ongoing genocide, its mass kidnapping of more than 21,000 Ukrainian children, its deportations, torture chambers, filtration camps, and its daily missile and drone attacks on civilian homes and infrastructure. The entire scheme is explicitly designed to pressure Ukraine into legitimizing Russian territorial theft and genocide. And despite this glaring reality, Trump views this Kremlin-drafted blueprint as if it were a serious initiative to end Russia’s aggressions, when in truth it is exactly what it is: a surrender written to the Kremlin’s specifications and carried forward by a U.S. regime eager to act as the Kremlin’s delivery service.

Then came another revelation when a senior White House official told reporters a deal could come “as soon as this week,” and when asked about Europe’s stance, responded: “We don’t really care about the Europeans.” 

Meanwhile, as Ukraine continues to be under Russia’s daily genocidal assault, the Trump regime decided to welcome clergy and lobbyists tied to the Russian Orthodox Church — an arm of Russia’s intelligence. These individuals are being given White House access to promote Russia’s long-running anti-Ukrainian propaganda campaign that Ukraine “persecutes Orthodox Christians,” a narrative manufactured by Russia as it bombs churches across Ukraine. 

And what’s missing from these discussions is Russia’s most monstrous crimes: the systematic abduction of more than 21,000 Ukrainian children — torn from their homes, transported into Russia, stripped of their names, identities, language, and, in many cases, their families — then thrown into indoctrination camps built to sever every tie to Ukraine and reprogram them as Russians. Investigations show that many of these children are also being funneled into military training programs, meaning Russia is not simply kidnapping them but preparing the oldest to eventually fight against their own country. 

While all these atrocities are taking place openly in the eyes of the world, much of the American media is covering the entire sequence of events like a show — as if the Kremlin shaping U.S. foreign policy, a Trump envoy assisting the Kremlin to write a surrender plan, and Russian Orthodox influence agents receiving White House access are simply another batch of political “scoops” rather than evidence of a national-security crisis with life and death implications. Headlines focused on Witkoff’s DM “fail,” the intrigue around a “secret plan,” and the gossip-worthy drama of politics — trivializing a moment when Russia continues slaughtering civilians and Trump is attempting to reward Kremlin genocide and cede sovereign territory that doesn’t even belong to the U.S.

Europe, meanwhile, is staring directly into the abyss as it allows Russian missiles to cut across its airspace on their way to killing Ukrainians instead of shooting them down. During yesterday’s attack, Romania confirmed that a Russian drone penetrated five miles into its territory. Poland is already bracing for more strikes near its borders, and NATO fighter jets scrambled multiple times throughout the night as Russian missiles and drones approached alliance airspace.

And this is happening as Russia escalates its warfare against NATO countries, with saboteurs attempting to blow up a train on a Polish railway line essential for delivering military aid to Ukraine, escalating incursions in Belgium, Germany, Sweden, and beyond, repeated airspace breaches, surveillance flights, and a growing series of attempts to destabilize European infrastructure — all of it underscoring that Moscow feels emboldened, unchallenged, and increasingly willing to test how far it can push.

As reprehensible as Trump’s latest attempt to force Ukraine into surrender may be, he cannot make it happen. Ukraine will never cede its land to terrorists, and Ukrainians will continue defending the country — with or without the United States. What is happening, however, is that America is sliding into complicity in Russia’s genocide and betraying European security. Despite all of this, one truth remains: Ukraine will never surrender.

Would you be surprised to learn that a small group of plutocrats has plotted to perpetuate MAGA, subvert democracy, and maintain their control over our nation? I was not. I expected that this was happening, that Trump was the dummy manipulated by right-wing extremists who want to keep their taxes low while ignoring the welfare of the American people.

Elizabeth Dworkin of The Washington Post told the story recently. It’s as dangerous as I imagined.

Dwoskin reports:

In 2019, a small group of right-wing donors rented a resort outside the 100-person town of Rockbridge, Ohio, for a summit to secure the future of the MAGA movement. They aimed to turn a singular candidate — President Donald Trump — into an enduring political coalition, with a pipeline of voters, donors and candidates that would cement a radical transformation of the GOP.

Convened by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and JD Vance, then an investor who had written a best-selling memoir, the meeting included hedge fund heiress Rebekah Mercer, then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson and economist Oren Cass, according to two people familiar with the meeting. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private gathering, details of which have not been previously reported.

But the person in the room who would solidify the group’s ambitions was someone with a decidedly lower profile: an Arizona insurance entrepreneur and conservative media figure named Chris Buskirk.

Today, Buskirk helms the Rockbridge Network, a secretive organization birthed out of the weekend gathering that has established itself as one of the most influential forces in GOP politics. Political strategists credit the close-knit network of businessmen-cum-donors with helping fuel the president’s reelection last year and propelling one of its own — Vance — into the vice presidency.

With significant funding from tech leaders, Rockbridge aims to equip MAGA to outlive Trump. The group has no website or public-facing entity, but it has assembled pollsters, data crunchers, online advertisers and even a documentary film arm. It is gearing up to deploy its arsenal in the 2026 midterms and in the 2028 presidential contest, in which many Rockbridge members hope Vance will be the nominee. The group has assembled a database with deep profiles of potential voters through nonpolitical memberships, including outdoors groups and churches, according to a person directly familiar with the organization.

Buskirk’s ties to Trump’s orbit go beyond Rockbridge. 1789 Capital, the venture capital firm he co-founded with investor Omeed Malik, focuses on what the partners call “patriotic capitalism” and now counts Donald Trump Jr. as a partner. The pair — along with administration officials and friends — recently launched Executive Branch, a $500,000-a-head membership club for Trump-supporting business leaders to hobnob in D.C.

These organizations have a collective ambition, according to Buskirk, which is to give the businesspeople he sees as vital to the country’s future a role shaping government and lasting political power.

Their efforts are grounded in a controversial theory of social progress: that a select group of elites are exactly the right people to move the country forward, a position Buskirk argues is not in defiance of MAGA’s populism. Putting industry leaders in positions of power is a hallmark of Trump’s presidency — from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to tech titan Elon Musk — and Buskirk says the MAGA movement has energized a new generation of stewards for the country.

His various projects echo what some on the right call “aristopopulism” and aim to build a bridge between wealthy capitalists and the working-class people they intend to represent, according to interviews with Buskirk and nine other people in his inner circle, profitably reindustrializing the country and tying their interests to that of their base.

“You either have an extractive elite — an oligarchy — or you have a productive elite — an aristocracy — in every society,” he said in an interview in his office in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Many innovative periods in history have been driven by such an aristocracy, Buskirk argues, a point he makes in his 2023 book, “America and the Art of the Possible.” “In the classic Greek sense,” the term isn’t pejorative, he says, but “a proper elite that takes care of the country and governs it well so that everyone prospers.”

As Buskirk sees it, he has approached the political market as a businessman, identifying a gap and taking deliberate steps to close it. The right had what he calls a “coordination problem” — voters who had unexpectedly elected Trump and a nascent group of wealthy people who had become alienated by the progressive left. But the sides lacked organizing infrastructure.

Buskirk uses a one-liner to describe his efforts: “Brains-plus-money-plus-base.”
Others describe his impact more forcefully. Though people still see Trump’s support as “a cult of personality,” said Cass, chief economist of the conservative think tank American Compass, a powerful ecosystem now backs the MAGA movement.

“Chris is the convener of that ecosystem,” he added.

He declined to comment on Rockbridge’s founding event. Thiel declined to comment. Mercer did not respond to a request for comment.
Relatively unknown outside his rarefied circle of business leaders and tacticians, Buskirk is an unusual figure to step into a role once dominated by the Koch brothers, the deep-pocketed Republican megadonors who have opposed many of Trump’s trade policies. He is not a meme-throwing MAGA firebrand; friends describe Buskirk as a dogged tactician who is fiercely perceptive. He was “the first mover” to recognize that there were going to be thousands of well-off people who “no longer felt at home in the Democratic Party,” said Malik, Buskirk’s partner and co-founder of 1789 Capital.

Vance told The Post in a statement that Buskirk is an “original thinker” who saw, “before almost anyone,” how the “right combination of ideas, organizing and funding can ensure lasting political success for the Republican Party.”
Outside of electoral politics, Buskirk’s projects aim to push unrestrained capitalism into American life. 1789 Capital, he says, serves as a testing ground for the idea that homegrown innovation can revive America’s industrial base, what the firm’s partners pitch on their website as “the next chapter of American exceptionalism.” The firm, which has invested in roughly 30 companies, has funded start-ups tied to “anti-woke” politics and to the Trump administration’s economic agenda, including companies that mine rare earth minerals, build AI factories for war or 3D-print rocket fuel.
As Buskirk’s network has become entwined with the Trump administration, the cohort has formed a party circuit for Washington’s new power broker class. Rockbridge’s semiannual conference, at the Ritz-Carlton on Key Biscayne, Florida, in April, which featured “Make America Healthy Again”-themed breath work and yoga sessions, included Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff. Buskirk’s friend, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., attended the opening of Executive Branch in June, which serves high-end wine and sushi but no seed oils.

Those in Buskirk’s network view their growing clout as evidence of government finally working to cheerlead rather than chastise society’s innovators — unleashing a pent-up economic engine that they say was suppressed during the Biden administration.

Yet in entities like Rockbridge and 1789, some critics see something more pernicious — the rise of a group of unelected American oligarchs who are undermining Trump’s promises to benefit working people. Since coming into office, the Trump White House has rolled out a raft of new policies that benefit tech entrepreneurs, including lifting export controls on AI technology and signing executive orders and legislation promoting cryptocurrency. “President Trump’s first and only focus is restoring prosperity for the working-class Americans who resoundingly re-elected him back to the White House,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement.
Since Trump Jr. joined 1789 as a partner last November, the firm has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and now has more than $1 billion in assets, according to two people familiar with the firm. This summer the government dropped two Biden-era federal investigations into Polymarket, a blockchain-based betting start-up that 1789 has invested in and where Trump Jr. now sits on an advisory board.
“It’s generally the case that what’s good for business is good for America, but I don’t think the people surrounding the president are representative of American business,” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, which has received funding from the Kochs’ philanthropic network. “The government’s job is to advance the prosperity of the nation and not the prosperity of wealthy individuals, founders and executives.”
To Buskirk, these critiques miss the point. He says he is determined to bring the businesspeople who put Trump back in the White House to Washington, even if he doesn’t much like the city. He describes politics as “venal” and D.C. think tanks as “every cliché, squared,” saying the culture must be rebuilt from the ground up.

“So that’s not an attractive place to spend time, but it’s also really necessary,” he said. “Self-government means you have to actually be involved in something you don’t want to do.”
‘A coordination problem’
Ask Buskirk to rattle off where he is on any given day, and the 56-year-old father of four might name seven different cities. He splits his time between his Scottsdale family office; Palm Beach, Florida, where 1789 Capital is headquartered; Dallas; San Francisco; Austin; and, reluctantly, D.C. He says he is on the phone from the moment he wakes up until bedtime, always making time for Vance when the vice president’s schedule allows.
But Buskirk’s early life was spent almost entirely in Arizona. Though he was born on a military base in Germany, where his father was stationed in the Army during the Cold War, he grew up in Scottsdale. He spent weekends working at the family company, which insured homes and small businesses across the state. The household was “patriotic to the nth degree,” Buskirk recalls, and they were stalwart subscribers to the conservative magazine the National Review.

As a young adult, Buskirk pursued a master’s degree in political theory and interned at the Claremont Institute, the right-wing think tank inspired by the political philosopher Leo Strauss.
But he quit both the think tank and the degree, judging academia too impractical. He returned home to Scottsdale to start an insurance firm, doing underwriting for ambulance vendors and other unconventional businesses. Over the next two decades, he built and sold four other insurance-related companies.
His family had become alienated from politics. The Buskirks canceled their National Review subscriptions in the mid-2000s, disgusted by a Republican establishment they believed had led the country astray. The Iraq War had become “a smoke screen,” Buskirk said, distracting from the stark economic problems emerging before his eyes.

Visiting close family in Michigan, he watched as entire “factories were literally just packed up, crated into 40-foot containers and sent to China” after the country joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, he said. Americans, he said, were going to work in low-paying service jobs: $8 an hour at McDonald’s vs. $25 at the Ford plant. Then illegal immigrants came and took those jobs too, he said.

He raged to friends that the American Dream, “that you don’t have to do anything extraordinary to live a dignified life,” was becoming harder, but he felt powerless. “I was just, like, some guy in Arizona,” he recalled. “What am I going to do?”
When President Barack Obama came on the scene in the late aughts, Buskirk watched as he electrified the culture. In contrast, he felt the GOP and its institutions had languished on autopilot.
During those years, Buskirk had sold off the last of the insurance businesses he had built with his father. By the time Trump came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential candidacy in 2015, Buskirk had more time on his hands.
The Arizona entrepreneur was initially skeptical of the New York reality show host who he worried viewed the presidency as a publicity stunt. But when he watched old interviews with Trump, he heard a drumbeat about how American leaders were not putting Americans first.
“I’m like, he’s actually been saying the same thing for 40 years!” Buskirk recalled. “And that’s when I realized, okay, he’s for real. And the people that are saying he is not serious are lying.”

In July 2016, Buskirk founded an online magazine, American Greatness, which highlighted an “undeniable” need for a new articulation of conservatism. It received funding from Thiel, who had shocked liberal Silicon Valley with his million-dollar donation to Trump and had recently been introduced to Buskirk by a friend. “The soil of the conservative movement is exhausted,” the editors wrote in an opening manifesto. “It needs fertilization, resowing, and diligent cultivation if it is to thrive again.”
Thiel put Buskirk in touch with his protégé, “Hillbilly Elegy” author Vance. Vance and Buskirk became fast friends.
The men spent a year and a half “just nerding out,” with no particular end in mind, Buskirk recalls, just a feeling that “we should create something.”

Vice President-elect Mike Pence, left, and PayPal founder Peter Thiel listen to President-elect Donald Trump during a meeting with technology industry leaders at Trump Tower in New York in 2016. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
In 2019, Vance and Thiel summoned a dozen or so people to an inn in rural Ohio, located just outside the tiny town that would become the organization’s namesake. Some attendees were staunchly pro-Trump, like Buskirk. Others had their doubts. But all of them felt that any successes that took place during the Trump years could easily become a fluke if a Democrat retook the White House, said Blake Masters, an investor who met Buskirk that weekend.

“We spent so much time bemoaning the effectiveness of the left,” Masters adds. “They had a pretty terrible agenda … but they are very effective at organizing. … The right had just been coasting for a long time, and its institutions had just started to decay.”
It became clear to some of those present that MAGA had a network problem. While donors on the right, such as the Kochs, had spent years building their organizations, wealthy people who supported Trump and the emerging constellation of right-wing viewpoints he represented “didn’t really know each other,” Buskirk said. And people who had voted for Trump — including a working-class cohort — weren’t organized either.
“There’s no coordination. No management. No planning. It all just kind of happened,” he recalled. “What if we just said, okay, look, these are two problems that, if solved, would make everything else work better and be more effective. Let’s set about solving that.”
The making of a movement
Buskirk returned from the summit energized, and he became a student of political organizing. He started from first principles, reading “Roots to Power,” an influential left-wing organizing manual from the ’80s.

Along with Vance, he began creating case studies of political organizations on the left and right, documenting their failures and successes. The National Rifle Association stood out. The NRA, Buskirk and his partners concluded, had been very successful at organizing one of its two constituencies: Second Amendment advocates. But its other constituency, outdoorsmen who loved hunting, was not as well organized, and they were unlikely to register to vote.
But outdoorsmen, a Democratic coalition from the ’60s, had significant overlap with demographics that voted for Trump.
“This is actually going to be a hole that needs to be filled,” he said, if he could find something “that makes it worth their time to actually pay attention.”

Chris Buskirk took it upon himself to become a student of political organizing. (Ash Ponders/For The Washington Post)
Buskirk will not go into many details about Rockbridge operations, but he says that on a high level he devised a classic online sales funnel to entice people to join social media groups based on affiliations. This included small-business owners, outdoorsmen and church attendees.

This is the opposite of how political organizations tend to function, persuading people to come to your side by “brute force,” Buskirk said, blasting out ads right before an election. Rockbridge, by contrast, took a more gradual approach: “Build a trust relationship and give people some sort of benefit. Only then you can ask them to do something.”
By April 2022, Vance was making his first, long-shot bid for political office. Malik hosted a small fundraiser for him at a restaurant in Palm Beach. The investor had relocated from New York City the previous year, after defecting from the Democratic Party over coronavirus restrictions and tech platforms’ policing of speech about the coronavirus. Buskirk attended, along with Don Jr.
The group hopped over to Mar-a-Lago, where Buskirk was throwing a Rockbridge conference.
The men spent the week bonding over their rage about what they viewed as online censorship and a feeling that innovation was being stymied in favor of liberal priorities such as sustainability and diversity initiatives.

“A lot of us are also about the same age,” noted Malik, who said he feels the group is ushering in “a generational shift.”
Malik and Buskirk went into business together the following year, starting 1789 Capital, named after the year the Bill of Rights was proposed. It initially focused on what Malik had dubbed “anti-woke companies.” Their first investment was in Last Country Inc., a new media and entertainment company founded by Tucker Carlson, who had been pushed out of Fox News. The partners went on to invest in GrabAGun, an online gun marketplace; Enhanced Games, which allows athletes to take performance-enhancing drugs; and Hadrian, a start-up making AI factories for defense. (The partners have also taken positions in three of Elon Musk’s companies: SpaceX, Neuralink and xAI.)
Will Edwards, whose Dallas-based start-up Firehawk Aerospace specializes in 3D-printing solid rocket fuel to be used in missiles, said many Silicon Valley venture capitalists had rejected his pitches outright because they didn’t want to fund companies selling exclusively to the military.
“Chris thought that was absurd,” Edwards said.

Buskirk, who has since led a funding round that put $60 million into Firehawk, took a particular interest, traveling to Dallas to tour Edwards’s factory, where, he said, workers without college degrees can make six-figure incomes.
Buskirk believes Edwards’s company is economic proof of the investors’ political arguments: The United States is unlikely to make iPhones and Nike shoes again, he says. But it can revive its industrial base — particularly in national defense — and help restore the middle class.
This goal is one President Joe Biden also tried to accomplish when he signed the $52 billion Chips Act in 2022, which aimed to re-shore advanced manufacturing jobs with the largest support package for domestic chips manufacturing in a generation. Trump has criticized the grants as wasteful and clawed back some of the funds.
Strain, the American Enterprise Institute economist, said the political rhetoric of the MAGA movement misconstrues the nation’s actual economic picture. Technological innovation — and not outsourcing — has been the main driver of the loss of manufacturing jobs, he said, adding that many of those arguing that homegrown manufacturing will revive America are the same investors pushing major labor displacement through artificial intelligence.

Cass, of American Compass, said the scale of investment required to rebuild working-class communities is far greater than what 1789 or other like-minded investors can spend. But the experiments Buskirk and his partners are funding are important, he said, because they “blaze a trail.”
The impact of Rockbridge and super PACs on the 2024 election is not well understood. Rockbridge’s affiliated super PAC, Turnout for America, was one of a handful of groups that canvassed swing states on behalf of the Trump campaign, including Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action. Turnout for America spent $34.5 million on the 2024 cycle, according to FEC records, far less than the $261 million from Elon Musk’s America PAC.
But internal Rockbridge data suggests some measure of effectiveness, which insiders attribute to its years-long voter profiling and mobilization efforts. The super PAC identified several million citizens — low-propensity voters in seven swing states — that they believed would vote for Trump if nudged to go to the polls. The group calculated that Trump would win those states if they could motivate 40 percent of those voters to go to the polls. In the end, Rockbridge’s 3,000 canvassers turned out 50 percent, said two people with direct knowledge of internal stats.
Today, the group’s vibe is euphoric. Interest has surged since the election, according to Buskirk, with roughly half of new members coming from the tech industry. Several of the group’s members are billionaires; prominent investors Marc Andreessen and David Sacks are already members.

Still, Firehawk founder Edwards, who joined Rockbridge with an invitation from Buskirk, said the events feel warm, “like a close group of people who enjoy each other’s company.” Edwards said he lives in a duplex and drives a Toyota. A wide age range is represented, including NextGen, an under-30 division that includes Buskirk’s son, Chris, a recent college graduate.
Richard Painter, a corporate law professor at the University of Minnesota who served as chief ethics lawyer in the Bush White House, said this influx of interest in Rockbridge, 1789 and Executive Branch creates the appearance of a “pay to play” network, of people who are paying to get access to administration officials or the Trump family. (He also said he would have advised administration officials not to attend these gatherings if they happened in his time.)
Buskirk declined to address this criticism.
In a text message sent while overseas on business, he said that American greatness will only be accomplished “by the intentional cultivation of talented, high-agency people working together in high-trust environments.”

His book lists historical moments when elite networks moved society forward, including Florence during the Renaissance, mid-century America, and the county of Lancashire, England, during the Industrial Revolution. The Scottish Enlightenment was actually “the work of a few dozen people,” he notes, who “developed long-term friendships” at a private social club called the Select Society.
Parallels to remarkably innovative historical periods were starting to happen, he said, but “the full flourishing of America’s latent potential” was not guaranteed.
“I pray that it is,” he said. “There is much to be done.”