His name is David McIntosh, and he is a Republican. Specifically, a member of the Republican establishment who was once rumored to be replacing Newt Gingrich as House speaker (in the ’90s!), who toiled in the George H.W. Bush administration and who helped Ronald Reagan create the Economic Bill of Rights. Oh, how the right has split. McIntosh, a 57-year-old former congressman, is the man behind the conservative political action committee Club for Growth Action, which has made a mission of tackling Trump head-on, dropping $1 million on anti-Trump ads in Iowa with more to come. And Trump’s campaign is spending good breath on it: his lawyers have publicly threatened to sue the group over its ads asserting that the Donald is a fan of high taxes.

“Everyone’s been waiting for the sheriff to come in and take care of it” — it being Trump — “but everyone is afraid,” says Ben Berger, a political scientist at Swarthmore College. “No one else has done anything like this.” It all began six months ago, when Trump (whose campaign didn’t reply to our multiple requests for comment) announced his candidacy. McIntosh jumped into the rhetorical bashing, and fast, hounding the campaign in press releases as “not serious” and soon publishing a white paper on the Club for Growth site calling the current GOP front-runner (who’s polling at around 30 percent of the Republican electorate, according to a Washington Post poll) “the worst of Washington politicians.” But in person, McIntosh is calm (dare we say Carsonesque?) and an unlikely man to go head-to-head with the famously hotheaded debater. White-haired, with a soft smile, McIntosh tells me, “Candidly, I was more comfortable being behind the scenes.”

Read the article “The Old-Guard Conservative Facing Off Against Trump” on ozy.com.