Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
NRO Standing Athwart Trumpism
National Review, the venerable conservative institution founded by William F. Buckley, has just released an unprecedented special issue titled “Against Trump.”
Editor Rich Lowry reached out to a wide variety of conservative writers to register their disagreement with the GOP frontrunner. Authors include Thomas Sowell, William Kristol, Glenn Beck, Erick Erickson, and of course NR’s editors who prefaced the issue with a blistering editorial:
Donald Trump leads the polls nationally and in most states in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. There are understandable reasons for his eminence, and he has shown impressive gut-level skill as a campaigner. But he is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries. Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.
Trump’s political opinions have wobbled all over the lot. The real-estate mogul and reality-TV star has supported abortion, gun control, single-payer health care à la Canada, and punitive taxes on the wealthy. (He and Bernie Sanders have shared more than funky outer-borough accents.) Since declaring his candidacy he has taken a more conservative line, yet there are great gaping holes in it…
Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism. Trump nevertheless offers a valuable warning for the Republican party. If responsible men irresponsibly ignore an issue as important as immigration, it will be taken up by the reckless. If they cannot explain their Beltway maneuvers — worse, if their maneuvering is indefensible — they will be rejected by their own voters. If they cannot advance a compelling working-class agenda, the legitimate anxieties and discontents of blue-collar voters will be exploited by demagogues. We sympathize with many of the complaints of Trump supporters about the GOP, but that doesn’t make the mogul any less flawed a vessel for them.
What do you think, Ricochetti? Will this issue make self-described conservatives think twice about supporting Trump, or will it only fuel their contempt for inside-the-Beltway thinking?
Published in General
Except for Nordlinger. He’s been a supporter of Cruz since before he was a Senator.
In Thursday’s Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty wrote:
I suppose this is part of a last crack at this one. I also think I know how this one turns out.
I just took a look at his timeline and saw this laugher:
” @NRO is conservative journal, not GOP Huckster Monthly.”
I believe both I and Drew answered that question if you read our comments above. Or you could read the entire National Review issue.
But they’re the Establishment, so everything they say is wrong.
Thomas Sowell.
A disaster of biblical proportions. Old Testament, Sam, real wrath of God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
You mentioned this:
…and then this:
I’m curious about the “more intensely” part.
Ha, a man can dream…
It is indeed a time of choosing. Apparently the good people I know who support Mr Trump ‘are like dogs’.
If I need help or need someone to watch my back, I would trust them. They are savvy and tired of being spit on.
I can live with any one of three candidates, but the level of bile here is getting my cussedness up.
If you keep trashing the voters, they will get your message.
Like dogs, huh?
So, tell me…what do you think the effect will be on the economy if Trump is successful in pushing through single-payer health care as he promised to do? Or is this just typical Trump BS and we’re not to take him at his word?
He’s just teaching us how to win friends and influence people.
Honestly, when I read his post, and he wrote “dogs”, in my head I heard it in SuperVillain voice. That kind of low, Dr. Doom-speak telling Mr. Fantastic what a weak fool and inferior intellect he was compared to Doom!
Dogs! Dogs, I tell you!
NR has been predictable and steadfast in opposition to any faction that upsets the beltway gravy train. They want to remain comfortable as the opposition party, with no responsibility, just extremely remunerative sinecures.
Where, oh where did John Derbyshire and Ann Coulter go? Why did NR dis Steyn? Follow the money, as always.
Funny and ironic fact is that they will end up helping Trump. Good.
I’m not being snarky with you so cool down a bit.
I think single-payer is bad news for both cost and quality of medical services. Has this campaign made this promise? That would be left up to congress to pass; however, I suppose I wouldn’t put it past them for the right amount of pork.
I certainly hope not! We don’t want the country to ever again be the same as it is now.
Lotta bad words.
Where’s the CoC when I read stuff like this. Woof, woof.
Who’s hot?
Trump proposed it in September and hasn’t backed off the remarks.
Well, then given that Congress can’t be trusted (and who knows what the Congress will look like post election and two and four years hence after a Trump administration) you should be concerned maybe even very concerned that there is a chance it could be passed.
No, will make the country too far gone to save.
Yes, it’s unfortunate that I and others have to use them. We use them because they accurately define the man in question.
So the RNC has now dis-invited NR from hosting the debate….it seems they want a more unbiased host, like the MSM. I guess Reince P. thinks the MSM would be less biased. huh
?
I can’t say I gauge the state of civil society through the comments sections of websites (I fully understand the irony as I type this, heh) and I’ve never used facebook.
I used to think that because we live in a democracy, politics is something that should be taken seriously; that the electoral cycle, especially the presidential cycle, is an opportunity for the country to have a serious conversation about the direction and future of the nation, stuff like that. So an earlier me may have shared in your desire of the diplomat/statesman/gentleman persona candidate (though in reality no politician is actually these things). After 2012 it occurred to me that I don’t live in the country I thought I did; that my fellow countrymen don’t think the same way I do; that I really can’t consider a large portion of people living in this country as my fellow countrymen even.
I like that Trump fights and “punches back twice as hard” as your “only metaphorically speaking” Obama is allowed to say. I’m glad both George Soros and NRO share the same opinion about the guy. I enjoy seeing journalists apoplectic. But liking Trump as a candidate isn’t about spite towards these groups of people, it’s merely a feature. And polite conservative candidates have done nothing to advance conservative policies as far as I can tell. Sure we’re not living in a communist hell, but that is hardly something for the GOP to brag about (not to mention we do live in a nearly cronyist hell).
I’ll end up voting for whomever the GOP nominates which is more than GOPe types can say for themselves
As a paying member I fully understand Ricochet is in many ways forum.nro.com, so I am in no way surprised Trump is so reviled here; however, I do find the enmity toward fellow right leaning people surprising.
It already has – just read some of the vile comments on Breitbart.com or from some on Facebook that are sometimes openly anti-Semitic or racist. On this site I was told that Trump’s remark that a Black Lives Matter heckler “probably should have been roughed up” wasn’t that big of a deal or an encouragement to violence and it would only be significant if a body was found floating face down in a river…so, the logic is essentially that anything short of that wouldn’t be a big deal. Keep in mind that no other presidential candidate – ever – has encouraged his or her supporters to rough someone up. Obama has come close with his bring a gun to a knife fight comment…which can be explained away as a metaphor. Trump wasn’t speaking metaphorically.
When Trump alluded to Megyn Kelly’s hygiene (which he denied) many Trump supporters were more graphic and obscene about Kelly on Breitbart and other sites.
I’ve been following presidential politics since 1968 and have never seen a candidate as vulgar and insulting as Donald Trump is to anyone who disagrees with him or catches him making a gaffe or unknowledgeable about an issue he clearly should know something about. Even imitating a physically handicapped reporter. Show me any politician who has done that speaking before a crowd.
So, yes, I would say that that is unprecedented.
I think he writes for them occasionally.
It sounds like a good move. They were against Trump anyway, although I actually skipped or turned off the last Mad Dogs podcast after NR decided to side with New York values against Ted Cruz.
Trump might make a good president, but he could be a complete disaster or a complete … something else.
Celebrity status is now the prerequisite to become president? That’s not a good sign for the future. Count the number of Hollywood conservative celebrities versus non-conservative celebrities. Yikes.
None of this crap would have happened, if the Republican Party hadn’t been siding with the Democrats regarding the issue of importing more Democrat voters for the past 50+ years since President Eisenhower. They have no one to blame except themselves.
It’s about bloody time. Trump is not a conservative and I peg him for a False Flag Operation- a life-long Democrat who has never even voted in a Republican primary and a pro-death abortion defender whose egomaniac grab for the GOP’s nomination represents nothing but crass opportunism. One could hardly design a more Herbblockian caricature of a Republican than what Trump actually is and the folk at NR should have handed this collective condemnation out months ago. Thanks and cheers to all who finally did.
We should start referring to him as the insufficiently reviled Donald Trump.
Indeed.