God and Man at Yale became a New York Times best seller, and Buckley followed it up with a defense of Joseph McCarthy written with his brother-in-law Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning.18 Like his defense of segregation in the National Review, the McCarthy book is a reminder for those who today, in the age of Trump, like to cast William Buckley as the lost soul of true conservatism: that for all his well-crafted sentences and love of language, Buckley was often a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.
