Michael Anton is nothing if not resolute. A former Bush speechwriter and private-equity executive, he has dedicated himself these past few years to a lonely and self-evidently futile goal: to convince America that President Donald Trump is a statesman with a coherent philosophy—or really anything other than an erratic, egomaniacal ethno-nationalist.

Anton first rocketed into public consciousness in 2017, when it was revealed that he had been behind the most famous essay of the 2016 election, comparing the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency to the hijacking of Flight 93 on September 11. Conservatives, the piece had suggested—even those put off by Trump’s obvious unsuitability—had a duty to storm the cockpit. By the time of his unmasking, Anton was already ensconced as a spokesman in Trump’s National Security Council, the task of making an unserious candidacy seem serious replaced by the task of making an unhinged presidency seem non-nuclear.

Armed with a few years of Western Civ and a Machiavelli crush acquired through his undergraduate and Master’s studies, he undertook the role of highbrow window-dresser, sprinkling pinches of erudition like the world’s most perfunctory fire retardant over the dumpster blaze of the early Trump White House. Since leaving the administration in April 2018, he’s returned to the written word, still determined to find rationality and gravitas in the president’s zigzags, though this time more like a hapless Beijing Marxist trying to match Xi Jinping pronouncements to Das Kapital through strategic use of a paper shredder.

His latest salvo in this quixotic mission comes in the form of a roughly 4,200-word essay in the latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine—a work of almost admirable audacity that somehow manages more clearly than any attempt yet to expose the farcical nature of Anton’s three-year project.

In Anton’s essay, adapted from a lecture given at Princeton University, he insists that not only is there a method to Trump’s foreign policy madness, but an entire Trump Doctrine, which he describes thus: “Let’s all put our own countries first, and be candid about it, and recognize that it’s nothing to be ashamed of.… If there is a Trump Doctrine, that’s it.”