.S. President Donald Trump boards Air Force One as he departs for a state visit to Britain, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., September 16, 2025. REUTERS Kevin Lamarque
American Conservative Editor and former Cato Institute writer Spencer Neale says President Donald Trump is just “window dressing” for the MAGA ideals he promised.
Trump’s behavior was already making this clear, but the president vocally jettisoned “America First” in his weekend interview on CBS and then again, by action, on Monday — giving traditional conservatives heartburn.
“As … I spent 20-odd minutes listening to Trump threaten [Venezuela leader Nicolás] Maduro and defend [Israel leader Bejamin] Netanyahu and claim that every domestic issue is still somehow Biden’s fault, I couldn’t help but sense that things aren’t exactly heading in the direction many of us had hoped for last November,” said Neale. “And that was all before I glanced over at my X feed where I saw yet another clip of Trump discussing the plight of people in a country far, far away and threatening to use American troops to set it right. This time he was discussing Nigeria and the 'mass slaughter' of Christians that is occurring in the West African nation.”
“Yet again, here was our ‘America First’ commander-in-chief involving our people and our troops and our money in the problems of others 5,000 miles away from our closest shore at the behest of a group of religiously motivated evangelicals in Congress,” Neale said, citing recent news leaks of Trump’s plan to send U.S. troops into Mexico to target drug cartels, according to current U.S. officials.
“All of it, from Nigeria to Venezuela to Mexico to Israel to CZ, is eerily reminiscent of the horrid days of the neocons, when the evangelical right dictated the ins and outs of a foreign policy meant purely to bleed the globe of its treasures under the cover of safety and security,” said Neale.
But when asked about domestic issues by O’Donnell, Neale said “Trump merely waved his hand and claimed that grocery prices, despite what our eyes and pocketbooks clearly tell us, are, in fact, falling; even if they aren’t, it is all President [Joe] Biden’s fault.”
“Nice. Nothing like a healthy dose of partisanship as the winter approaches. That’ll help the Walmart caste,” said Neale. “… Such is the MAGA that we have received: a shadow of the MAGA promised. A man who probably hasn’t visited a grocery store in decades, who has his run-around help do the shopping for him, lectures the rest of us about what reality in Middle America looks and feels like.”
“Essentially every major pollster not named Rasmussen,” is screaming alarms to the president especially pertaining to inflation and the economy, but Trump can’t stop dismissing Americans’ struggle while protecting his crypto billionaire friends. Trump denied being aware of the convicted crypto king he recently pardoned, claiming “I know nothing about [the man] because I’m too busy,” while claiming in the same breath that the man’s sentence was “a witch hunt” conducted by the Biden administration.
“But for Trump, who lives a well-insulated lifestyle among billionaires and the crypto-rich, denialism has become a common calling card of his administration,” said Neale. “With millions of Americans about to fall off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program without court intervention, Trump attended a Roaring ’20s themed Great Gatsby party at Mar-a-Lago on Halloween that featured half-naked dancers romping to ABBA.”
“For a political movement so concerned with the alleged degeneracy of the ‘radical left,’ the festivities at Mar-a-Lago were just more evidence that so much of the Trump movement is simply window dressing.”
Trump “still has time to turn things around,” said Neale, but “America is likely to be in for a big dose of the old song and dance.”