Julius Krein is one of a number of people whose life has been complicated by the election of Donald Trump, although in his case it is a happy sort of complication. On Tuesday night, at the launch party for his new journal, American Affairs, he was holding court at the Harvard Club of New York City, celebrating the new enterprise and reminiscing about an old one. “We wanted to preserve some of the elements of the critique that Trump raised,” Krein said. “And then he won.”

A year ago, adopting the pseudonym Plautus, Krein had joined with a small crew of like-minded intellectuals to launch an online publication called the Journal of American Greatness, which promoted a political philosophy that its writers sometimes referred to as Trumpism. The idea was to make scholarly arguments on behalf of a Presidential candidate who refused to do any such thing. Plautus celebrated Trump’s “rebellion against this elite and its culture,” and argued that Trump’s muscular nationalism could revive American politics, notwithstanding his “avoidance of policy specifics.” Another Journal contributor, who called himself Publius Decius Mus, was convinced that “Trump articulated, if incompletely and inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues—immigration, trade, and war—right from the beginning.”

No doubt these Trumpists wanted their candidate to win, but they were prepared for a loss—as, it seems, was Trump himself. The Journal of American Greatness shut down well before Election Day and was replaced by a less mysterious, more plainspoken publication called American Greatness. The original contributors moved on. After Trump’s surprise victory, Decius eventually accepted a job at the National Security Council, and he allowed himself to be unmasked: his name is Michael Anton, and he is both a veteran of the Bush Administration and an unapologetic dandy. Meanwhile, Krein dropped his pseudonym, too, and began putting together the first issue of American Affairs, an old-fashioned, small-format, perfect-bound journal of politics that aims to rethink policy for the age of Trump, and beyond. Krein says that the publication does not pledge fealty to the President, but it certainly is not unsympathetic to him, a fact that sets it apart from just about every other tweedy little magazine in existence.

Krein is precocious in a way that makes him seem not preternaturally old but preternaturally young: Politico recently called him a whiz kid, even though he is thirty-one years old. He counts among his intellectual mentors the enormously influential political scientist Harvey Mansfield, with whom he studied at Harvard, and Bill Kristol, another former Mansfield student and the founder of the stoutly anti-Trump conservative magazine The Weekly Standard. Kristol was at the Harvard Club on Tuesday night, too, supporting his protégé even if he could not quite support Krein’s ideological project. “The world needs more money-losing magazines,” Kristol told Krein, with a smile.

The party got under way, and Krein worked the room for about an hour before ascending the stage to show off his magazine, and to introduce the night’s headline speakers: Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur and investor, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the political scientist and former State Department official. Neither is affiliated with the magazine, although both are evidently interested in the conversation that Krein is trying to start. Thiel is a high-profile supporter of the President, and apparently a fan of the Journal of American Greatness. (Thiel and Anton have known each other for decades, and Anton says that it was Thiel who helped him get his job at the National Security Council.) Slaughter, by contrast, is a firm critic of the new Administration. They talked for an hour, and their conversation was unlike most political conversations in 2017: neither of them mentioned Trump.

Thiel and Slaughter mainly discussed globalization, about which both were pessimistic: Thiel suggested that globalization had led to “nihilistic imitation,” in which countries copied one another instead of pursuing innovation; Slaughter worried that globalization, having promised a prosperity it couldn’t deliver, was instead breeding “deep anger and resentment.” Only near the end did Thiel address, rather obliquely, the concern about immigration that is so central to the current moment, and to Trump’s political program. “I think there was a natural pro-immigration position in the United States in the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties, when you had tremendous growth, and the more people you had, the faster the growth would happen,” he said. “And at a point where it’s a fixed pie we get to this very different debate, where more people might mean that you have to divide it up more ways. And it all of a sudden takes on a very different cadence.” In Thiel’s view, a desire to reduce immigration is primarily a reaction to the country’s changing economic prospects.

In a sense, Trump’s election has made life more difficult for Trumpist intellectuals. Had he lost, they would have been free to formulate their ideas without him, while assuring skeptics that such a political program would be popular, if only it hadn’t been tethered to such an erratic figure. With Trump in the White House, intellectuals know that any populist expression could be interpreted as a statement of support for the President and his policies. “It’s a lot more complicated,” Krein said, when considering how Trump’s victory had affected his new publication. “But also, obviously, it could be more influential.”

Generally speaking, an upstart journal should be both invigorating and somewhat strange, and American Affairs succeeds on both counts. In the first issue, Joshua Mitchell, a political philosopher at Georgetown, argues that Trump might reorient the country’s foreign policy in a more realistic direction, “not because he has a deep theological grasp of the world, but because of the absence, in his thinking, of the deeply flawed theological understandings of his two predecessors.” Anton contributes an essay—adapted, with softer language, from old essays that he originally published as Decius—on how Trump might reassess the “liberal international order.” (Anton sent an e-mail to the editors of American Affairs acknowledging his split literary personality: “Michael Anton is a much nicer person than Decius, who could be sort of an asshole.”) And, in the journal’s final essay, Krein reconsiders the work of James Burnham, the mid-century Communist turned conservative, who suggested that capitalism had been supplanted by managerialism, which he considered less dynamic and, in a sense, less free, because these new managers answer neither to shareholders nor to voters. Krein writes: