Phyllis Schlafly Endorses Trump in Final Political Act, Passing Torch to Populist Movement

Phyllis Schlafly, 91 years old, endorses Donald Trump’s candidacy for president in March 2016, when the GOP primary has narrowed and conservatives are choosing between Trump and Texas Senator Ted Cruz. The endorsement becomes one of Trump’s earliest and most influential endorsements from the conservative movement establishment, lending crucial legitimacy to his insurgent campaign among social conservatives and grassroots activists. The endorsement triggers a breach in the Eagle Forum board, with six dissident members—including Schlafly’s own daughter, Anne Cori, and Cathie Adams, former chair of the Texas Republican Party—opposing the endorsement and supporting Cruz instead as a more traditional conservative choice. Schlafly and her supporters describe the board opposition as a ‘coup attempt,’ which she survives, maintaining control of the organization she founded. Schlafly’s final book, ‘The Conservative Case for Trump,’ is published on September 6, 2016—one day after her death from cancer at age 92 at her home in Ladue, Missouri. Trump delivers a subdued eulogy at Schlafly’s funeral at a St. Louis basilica, reading from prepared text: ‘She never stopped fighting for the fundamental idea that the American people ought to have their needs come before anyone and anything else.’ Trump’s electoral victory two months after Schlafly’s death is viewed as the final victory of the grassroots conservative movement she led for over half a century—Schlafly viewed Trump as the culmination of her populist, anti-establishment approach to politics. The endorsement demonstrates ideological continuity from Schlafly’s 1964 attack on Republican elites in ‘A Choice Not an Echo’ to Trump’s 2016 insurgency, passing the torch from the architect of modern conservative grassroots organizing to a movement that embodies her anti-establishment, populist, and culturally conservative principles.