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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 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.)