Michael Anton

On April 8, 2018, the White House confirmed that Anton would be leaving his position in the Trump administration. News reports state that Anton resigned on April 8, 2018, the evening before new National Security Advisor John R. Bolton began his new position in the Trump administration.

In a March 2016 essay written under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, Anton said, while defending the "America First" slogan, that the America First Committee which had opposed the U.S. engaging in World War II had been "unfairly maligned"; he also argued that Islam "is a militant faith", and that "only an insane society" would take in Muslim immigrants after the September 11 attacks.

His pseudonymous September 2016 editorial "The Flight 93 Election" compared the prospect of conservatives letting Hillary Clinton win with passengers not charging the cockpit of the United Airlines aircraft hijacked by Al-Qaeda. In the essay, Anton criticized conservatives who were skeptical of Trump. Anton also decried the "ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners," and called for "no more importing poverty, crime, and alien cultures." In Anton's 2019 book After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote that Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose, Anton argued that Trump constituted "the first serious national-political defense of the Constitution in a generation." Trump praised the book. According to Carlos Lozada, book critic for The Washington Post, Anton's book primarily reprints text from his 2016 editorial, but with a newly added rumination of how dangerous the American left is. Lozada wrote, "Anton spends virtually no time detailing or defending particular policies of the Trump administration; all that matters is the enemy. For Anton, Hillary Clinton is no longer the chief nemesis—the entire left is, along with sellout conservatives and any other forces countering the president. They contribute to a 'spiritual sickness' and 'existential despair' pervading not just the United States but all the West ... Apparently, Flight 93 did not end with the 2016 vote; we are forever on the plane, endlessly in danger, no matter who has seized the controls."

Michael Anton (born 1970) is an American former senior national security official in the Trump administration. He is best known for his pseudonymous essays written during the 2016 presidential campaign in which he supported Donald Trump and collaborated on the pro-Trump Journal of American Greatness blog. Anton was named Deputy Assistant to the President for Strategic Communications on the United States National Security Council. He is a former speechwriter for Rudy Giuliani and George W. Bush's National Security Council, and has worked as director of communications at investment bank Citigroup and as managing director of investing firm BlackRock.