he once called out NRA-funded Republicans and boosted a ban on so-called “assault rifles.”8
But the “Against Trump” issue came across as a vanity project that smacked of both desperation and arrogance. Commentary veered from sober analysis to self-serving moralizing. Some contributors regurgitated the Democrats’ most inflammatory charges against Trump, including accusations he was a racist, a sexist, and an Islamophobe—pure irony from thought leaders of a political party accused of the same wickedness by the Left for decades.
“Trump has made a career out of egotism, while conservatism implies a certain modesty about government. The two cannot mix,” warned longtime conservative commentator Mona Charen, unwittingly making the pro-Trump case for conservatives who think the two are not only compatible but essential.
“Should his election results match his polls, he would be, unquestionably, the worst thing to happen to the American common culture in my lifetime,” complained John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, the publication run for more than 30 years by his father Norman Podhoretz, the distinguished (and pro-Trump) public intellectual.
They—accurately—interpreted Trump’s support as a bootheel kick to the collective groin of the weak, eager-to-please, and largely incompetent conservative ruling class. “If Trump were to become the president, the Republican nominee, or even a failed candidate with strong conservative support, what would that say about conservatives?” asked National Review editor Rich Lowry and his colleagues.9
In the succeeding 10 months, Lowry would get his answer. And it would require not more condemnation of Trump and his conservative backers but a long look in the mirror.
Concern over Trump’s shaky conservative street cred wasn’t their only beef: Trump’s demeanor, mannerisms, and thrice-married status offended the Brahmin sensibilities of the National Review class. “Can conservatives really believe that, if elected, Trump would care about protecting the family’s place in society when his own life is—unapologetically—what conservatives used to recognize as decadent?” asked Russell Moore. “It is not just that he has abandoned one wife after another for a younger woman, or that he has boasted about having sex with some of the ‘top women of the world.’ It’s that he says, after all that, that he has no need to seek forgiveness.”10 (There is no record of similar concerns about John McCain’s admitted infidelity or extramarital affair with and subsequent marriage to a much younger woman. In a 2008 interview with CNN’s John King about McCain’s history of cheating on his first wife, who had been badly injured in a car accident while he was in captivity in Vietnam, McCain told King that “the responsibility is mine” as to why the marriage failed.)11
But the magazine’s gambit didn’t work; in fact, it backfired in a spectacular way, unleashing a tide of pent-up resentment between rank-and-file Republicans and party masters. Frustrated by the GOP’s failure to derail the far-left agenda of President Barack Obama despite winning control of the House of Representatives in 2010 and the Senate in 2014, Republican voters were out of patience and in no mood to take marching orders from conservative commanders who lacked a plan to defeat Hillary Clinton in November 2016.
National Review’s plea not only fell on deaf ears, it likely contributed to Trump’s ascendancy. “Many now believe the reason Trump won both the primary and national election is precisely because publications like National Review and the Weekly Standard coddled and encouraged a Republican Party that not only betrayed conservatism but turned on what was once its own base by becoming the party of Washington insiders courting favorable press from pundits,” Breitbart News noted after the election.12
Mark Steyn, a onetime contributor to NR, mocked the publication for its outdated fealty to the Morning-in-America era and droning wistfully about how the Gipper would not approve of The Donald. But Ronald Reagan, Steyn noted, could never be elected governor of California today. “The past is another country, and the Chamber of Commerce Republicans gave it away,” Steyn wrote. “Reagan’s California no longer exists.”13
After the release of “Against Trump,” the leading GOP contender wasted no time trolling National Review. “The late, great, William F. Buckley would be ashamed of what had happened to his prize, the dying National Review!” Trump tweeted on January 21, 2016.14 The battle lines had been drawn between the Republican elite and the GOP’s most flamboyant party crasher. And the rank-and-file’s rebuke against the former would be swift.
One week after the release of the “Against Trump” issue, the tycoon barely lost the Iowa caucus to Texas senator Ted Cruz. (Trump would go on to win nearly every other contest.) The Republican National Committee rescinded an invitation for National Review to help moderate one of the debates.15 The “Against Trump” issue, rather than scare off Republicans from voting for Trump, had the opposite effect.
(A few years after his publication, Lowry and others expressed regret about the issue as it spurred what would become known as the NeverTrump movement. “I wish they’d never come up with that phrase,” Lowry told the New York Times in October 2019, referring to NeverTrump.16 Brent Bozell III, a contributor to the “Against Trump” missive who later became a Trump ally, told the Times, “Had I known this was going to be perceived as the bible of the anti-Trump movement, I never would have written it.”17)
Trump was unfazed by National Review’s condemnation. If anything, the thrashing by buttoned-up, tight-assed, tone-deaf “conservative” scolds motivated Trump to push back even harder. And he went right for the jugular, saying the quiet parts out loud, as they say, related to the Republican Party’s biggest failures in a generation.
THE RECKONING OF THE IRAQ WAR
On a debate stage in February 2016, Trump spoke what was—up until that point—considered blasphemy in the Republican Party. Standing just feet away from former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Trump declared that the Iraq War had been a mistake and that America’s 13-year-long military involvement had destabilized, not liberated, the Middle East. Then, in typical Trump style, he went a step further. “They lied,” he roared from Peace Center in Greenville, South Carolina. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none and they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”18 The crowd mostly booed.
The next morning on Fox News, Trump continued his tirade. “The Iraq War was a disaster,” he told the morning news hosts, including Tucker Carlson, who had opposed the war. “We spent two trillion dollars, thousands of lives, wounded warriors who we love … what do we have, nothing? We have absolutely nothing.”19
Trump’s roast of the Iraq War would be the most significant challenge to conservative orthodoxy in years; it resulted in a group therapy session for large chunks of the Republican Party who would reassess their attachment to widely accepted slogans that had, by and large, been empty vessels for failed policies. According to polling in 2015, most Republicans still believed the Iraq War was the right thing to do.20 By 2018, less than half of Republicans believed the US succeeded in achieving its goals in Iraq.21 (More recriminations about the war would continue into Trump’s first term.)
Trump’s tongue-lashing for the perpetrators of the Iraq War would be a harbinger of things to come from his candidacy and presidency. No issue was off-limits, no accepted truth too sacred to challenge. It is an approach that to this day appeals to rank-and-file Republicans and some Democrats while rankling urbane, effete backers of the Democratic Party and NeverTrump fussbudgets.
THE PARTY’S OVER
By May 2016, Trump locked up the nomination, to much widespread pearl-clutching by the party’s top tier. Trump
