Elitist, establishment Republicans like to throw the late William F. Buckley Jr.’s name around as someone who allegedly would not approve of President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Considered the intellectual dean of modern conservatism, Buckley founded National Review in 1955, the nation’s premier conservative magazine for many years, and hosted the PBS political talk show “Firing Line” for 33 years. Well, as someone who started a website to carry on his legacy, Intellectual Conservative, I can tell you the critics are flat out wrong.

Buckley got a bad rap in his later years due to National Review turning somewhat RINO after he left as editor-in-chief in 1990. But the shift had nothing to do with him; he remained a principled conservative until the end, writing a regular column until he died in 2008. I attended his memorial service in New York City.

Proponents of this silly theory point to a remark Buckley made about Trump in 2000, when Trump was considering running for president on the Reform Party platform. Buckley called him a narcissist. Well, I never liked Trump either until he secured the GOP presidential nomination in 2016 (let’s not forget Trump was a Democrat from 2001 to 2009), so criticism of Trump before he became MAGA is like criticizing President Ronald Reagan for previously being a Democrat. 

I would go so far as to argue that Buckley was MAGA before MAGA. MAGA brought together various factions — most notably taking back the........

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