President Donald Trump doesn’t care much for reading, but he does like magazines—when his face is on the cover. He’s boasted (falsely) about having “the all-time record in the history of Time magazine” for most appearances on the front cover. He keeps multiple copies of periodicals that celebrate his triumphs and hangs framed covers of himself on his office walls. But it’s unlikely Trump will know what to do with American Affairs. An austere intellectual journal, without glossy paper or pictures, American Affairs is the latest effort to turn Trump’s inchoate and sometimes incoherent political musings into a lucid political philosophy.

The quest to intellectualize Trumpism strikes many people as foolish, if not doomed to failure. As columnist Damon Linker argued in The Week, there are many reasons why American Affairs is a quixotic enterprise. “There is, to begin with, Trump himself, a thoroughly anti-intellectual man who lacks the patience or interest to dabble even superficially in ideas,” he wrote. “Then there’s the fact that some of his closest advisers appear to have ideological commitments that place them in opposition to core liberal democratic ideals. When those tendencies are combined with Trump’s myriad ethical deficiencies and early signs of managerial incompetence, we’re left with the possibility of potentially fruitful ideas for reform (and the journals that promote them) ending up permanently tarnished by their association with such a deeply flawed tribune.”

Linker’s objections are valid, and one could also add that the main agenda of the first issue of American Affairs is not so much articulating Trumpism as making it more palatable. The magazine tries to make Trump’s ideology seem centrist and unobjectionable by recasting it in the blandest possible terms. Thus, University of Notre Dame political science professor Gladden Pappin calls Trump a proponent of “civic friendship” who wants people in economically depressed areas to work together. This is deliberate obfuscation, eliding a polarizing nationalism that Trumps uses to divide the world into good Americans (those who support him) and “bad” people (criminal immigrants, duplicitous foreigners).

Given how American Affairs whitewashes Trump’s actual politics, the journal can also be seen as developing Trumpism less as an ideology than a mythology—one that aims to hoodwink elite conservatives into believing that Trump is just like them.

The origins of American Affairs lie in two websites, the shuttered The Journal of American Greatness and still-active American Greatness, both of which were outgrowths of the Claremont Institute, a California think tank which is a haven for a school of thought known as West Coast Straussianism. Straussians are followers of Leo Strauss, one of the most influential conservative political thinkers of the last century. After he died in 1973, his followers split into two camps, West Coast Straussians (led by the late Claremont McKenna College political science professor Harry Jaffa) and East Coast Straussians (led by the late University of Chicago Professor Allan Bloom). Jaffa and Bloom had been friends while Strauss was alive, even collaborating on the 1964 book Shakespeare’s Politics. (American Affairs editor Julius Krein studied at Harvard under Harvey Mansfield, one of the rare Straussians friendly with both sides of the coastal divide, but the magazine is decidedly oriented towards West Coast Straussianism.)