In the end, Chris Buckley says,

people always ask me, what would my father have thought about Trump?

And his answer is, well, he wrote dozens of books

and recorded hours and hours and hours of TV. Why don't you look at it and make up your own mind

about what he would have said?

Which, you know, I understand that as an answer and it's an annoying thing to be asked, I'm sure,

but I don't actually know if there was an implication in his answer.

Yes, I disagree with Christopher Buckley's premise. You actually can't predict how Buckley

would have handled Trump based on the so-called principles

elucidated over a few decades of columns and newspaper magazines because what

you do about Trump is a faculty of judgment which is where you apply your

principles to specific cases.

And as we know, in specific cases, Buckley frequently had very bad judgment.

So I don't know.

Right.

If you say, well, he was a principled principled man this is the conservatism he believed in etc

etc look at all the people who for decades made their living in the conservative

welfare state spinning out the magazine articles about the virtues of fusionism and free markets and family

values and all that.

And they threw them all the way in a second for Trump.

People think, oh, they abandoned their principles, all those principled opinions they put in

the anti-Trump national review issue. It's well they thought he was going to lose like they were certain he was going to lose so it wasn't like they had these great principles that then they abandoned.

...