National Review, a Thurston Howell impression on print and with staples in it, published a special edition yesterday titled Against Trump. Not Stop Trump, or Dump Trump or even Chump Trump. “Against Trump.” Toward a Normative Understanding of Trump Negation. Whatever.



I’m sure it will be very effective with all 5,000 subscribers who are not conservative thinktanks. There is definitely no way that the snob mouthpiece of the Republican party rolling out a coordinated attack on Donald Trump will backfire. And nobody will make fun of the cover, and the august list of contributors definitely does not read like a grocery list beginning with “Lunatic”, stopping off twice at “Nepotist” and hitting all the other lowlights of fraudsters and homophobes, etc.



What makes this especially fun is that everything that makes Donald Trump a runaway success is a creation of conservatism. He is their Be Careful What You Wish For candidate. (This guy put it about as succinctly and hilariously as anyone can.) National Review can stand athwart history and yell stop, but they’re standing in front of a snowball they’ve been pushing down a hill for the last half-century. Even the hand-wringing that Donald Trump is such an ugly and hateful candidate is hilarious from a rag that started out defending liberty and segregation.



Take Glenn Beck. I really don’t know what genius at National Review thought he would be a good representative for impeaching an opportunistic huckster prone to wild populist confabulation. Sending Beck to stop Trump is like trying to get a gravy stain out of a carpet by steamrolling a prime rib into it. This guy so regularly leaks torrents of crocodile tears that if you’d sent him back to Bronze Age Egypt, the denizens along the Nile would have invented the calendar to chart how often Glenn Beck flooded their banks.

He couldn’t even get out of his first paragraph without hysteria: “As the election of 2008 approached, America was in crisis. And as we would soon learn, that crisis would not go to waste. Years after Bill Clinton disingenuously claimed that the era of big government was over, Obama won his party’s nomination by promising its furious revenge.”

That furiously vengeful Obama guy. Remember the Shepard Fairey Vengeance poster? Remember how conservatives have attacked him for being too measured and dispassionate, just as lefties castigated him for believing too long in bipartisan comity that would never be forthcoming? No matter. Big government vengeance. Molto vengeance.

Beck’s thesis is another installment of the “Republicans Lose Elections Because All Our Candidates Are Rinos” theory. “Conservatives were forced to either stay home or hold their noses and vote for a progressive Republican.” Yep, progressive John McCain.

Other contributors, like L Brent Bozell III, are hardly better. Bozell currently works for the Media Research Center and is formerly of the Parents Television Council, whose sole purpose was furnishing TV executives’ mailing addresses for every sexless tightass who wanted to write an angry letter whenever they saw lesbians kissing on TV.

Bozell opens his column with: “Longtime conservative leader Richard Viguerie has a simple test for credentialing a conservative: Does he walk with us?” It’s an interesting question, and Bozell answers it through the noblest lens: self-interest. (Viguerie is the architect of conservatism’s decades-long direct-mail scam unit, which has lined the pockets of deep-thinking gold salesmen like Glenn Beck.)



His overall point is about what you’d expect: Donald Trump isn’t actually a conservative. He donated money to Democrats! Now, leave aside that the most reliable conservatives in America are the people who’ve been funding the Republican party for decades and who are rich enough and smart enough to grease Democrats too, just like The Donald. What’s interesting is who Bozell thinks gets hurt by this.

Buying a seat at the table is bad when someone like Trump only wants to build buildings, get his permits fast-tracked and cut through zoning problems. In the immortal words of Dandy Don Fanucci, Brent just wants to get his beak wet.



Consider this reasoning:

A real conservative walks with us. Ronald Reagan read National Review and Human Events for intellectual sustenance; spoke annually to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Young Americans for Freedom, and other organizations to rally the troops; supported Barry Goldwater when the GOP mainstream turned its back on him; raised money for countless conservative groups; wrote hundreds of op-eds; and delivered even more speeches, everywhere championing our cause.

Let’s put this in human language: Donald Trump doesn’t prop up two publications that have always been reliant on wealthy donors to create the illusion of not being a complete failure in the marketplace. He doesn’t lend his name to the marquee of annual merch-and-huckster conventions that charge true believers stupid sums to get the opportunity to buy a copy of Marco Rubio’s book before asking for his autograph. He doesn’t pay ghostwriters like my dad for hundreds of op-eds!



Even attempts to chide Trump for insulting others come across as hollow. Mona Charen wrote “Who, except a pitifully insecure person, needs constantly to insult and belittle others …?” Has Charen ever looked at a single candidate’s Twitter page? It would take a thousand words to document every atrocity from the last three months.

Rand Paul’s teems with cowardly snide barbs, like the kid at the back of the classroom who desperately wants to needle someone at the front into a fight but still disguises his voice so the jocks can’t be sure it’s him. Mike Huckabee’s offers an anthology of loathing and gay panic. The only reason Jeb Bush’s Twitter isn’t a litany of cyber-bullying is that he’s even now only halfway through figuring out how to end his “The Jerk Store called …” burn.



The number-one rule of conservative mass politics and virality is always punch down. If that’s not possible, weigh the value of punching sideways. You don’t even have to get into some abstract discussion of the Southern Strategy to know that constantly pwning noobs, enemies and the teeming Other in the Republican field gets you clickthrough. If the National Review is going to be mad at Trump for this, they should at least be honest and admit they’re mad because he’s so much better at it.

It’s hard to imagine what could have been accomplished from a planned encirclement of an angry no-laws/no-masters populist by a magazine for elites and founded by the sorts of people who get a paper cut and see Yale-blue club ties come unfurling out of the wound.



Endorsing Trump might have been more damning, assuming Trump fans have ever see a copy of National Review. The proper response to this attack is: “Why are you hitting yourself?” The only commodity the National Review has ever been able to sell – or at least give away to donors – is the illusion of always being right. And, if that were the case, why are they punching up?