“There are understandable reasons for his eminence, and he has shown impressive gut-level skill as a campaigner,” the magazine, a prominent voice in American conservatism for more than half a century, editorialized about Trump. “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.”

The position paper cost National Review its debate partnership with the Republican National Committee.

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“We expected this was coming,” the magazine’s publisher Jack Fowler wrote in a blog post late Thursday night, as The Washington Post’s David Weigel reported. “Small price to pay for speaking the truth about The Donald.”

The magazine wrote that there were “great gaping holes” in Trump’s conservatism. It criticized him for his previous positions on abortion, taxes and guns, saying Trump “and Bernie Sanders have shared more than funky outer-borough accents.” It said his proposed immigration policy “wouldn’t survive its first contact with reality.” It criticized his business record, mottled view of foreign affairs and lack of political experience. It said that Trump’s popularity with the working class is important for the GOP to grapple with, but that “doesn’t make the mogul any less flawed a vessel.”

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It was a very public thumping of a man National Review deemed a “menace to American conservatism.”

“Some conservatives have made it their business to make excuses for Trump and duly get pats on the head from him,” the editorial read. “Count us out.”

Prominent conservatives — among them Weekly Standard founder William Kristol (author of another anti-Trump op-ed in that magazine), economist Thomas Sowell, and Glenn Beck — joined the anti-Trump chorus in National Review’s pages.

“Sure, Trump’s potential primary victory would provide Hillary Clinton with the easiest imaginable path to the White House,” Beck wrote. “But it’s far worse than that. If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination, there will once again be no opposition to an ever-expanding government. This is a crisis for conservatism.”

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Trump, accused of being a strong man, struck back forcefully.

“National Review is a failing publication that has lost it’s [sic] way,” Trump tweeted. “It’s circulation is way down w its influence being at an all time low. Sad!” He added: “Very few people read the National Review because it only knows how to criticize, but not how to lead.” (It should be noted that Trump says this or something like this about every news organization that criticizes him.)

Trump even invoked the name of the magazine’s founder: the once-lionized conscience of conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., who died in 2008. “The late, great, William F. Buckley would be ashamed of what had happened to his prize, the dying National Review!” Trump, who cited Buckley in a recent debate on “New York values” with one of his rivals, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), wrote.

Trump may have been wrong on that point — and indeed, Buckley may not have liked Trump the candidate. No less a conservative than George Will said so last year.

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“Because the actual Donald Trump is wealthy, he can turn himself into an unprecedentedly and incorrigibly vulgar presidential candidate,” Will wrote in “Donald Trump Is an Affront to Anyone Devoted to William F. Buckley’s Legacy,” published in the National Review in August. “It is his right to use his riches as he pleases. His squalid performance and its coarsening of civic life are costs of freedom that an open society must be prepared to pay.”

But questions about Buckley’s legacy may have struck home at the magazine. Educated at Yale and host of the cerebral PBS show “Firing Line” for three decades, Buckley was not a firebrand, a maverick, or a P.T. Barnum. He was the well-spoken voice of establishment conservatism, not above advocating the legalization of marijuana or slamming the Iraq war. Even President George W. Bush wasn’t quite the right kind of conservative for the discerning Buckley.

“I think Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology — with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress,” Buckley said in 2006. “And in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge.”

Alas, slamming W. during the aughts meant isolating oneself from the ascendant Republican Party. Not only did the National Review, which recently became a nonprofit, lose money, but it seemed — it seems — increasingly distant from the conservatives it purports to speak for.

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“National Review once devoted itself to raising the tone of conservative intellectual discourse,” Damon Linker wrote in the Week in 2014. “As part of this civilizing mission, its founding editor summarily excommunicated the paranoid cranks of the John Birch Society from the conservative movement. He also spent 33 years hosting an erudite talk show in which leading intellectuals and public figures from all points on the political spectrum debated important issues of the day. The ideological descendants of the Birchers have since taken their revenge. Today they are the conservative movement’s most passionate supporters and foot soldiers.”

And, it might be ventured, they are Trump supporters.

Should the Donald triumph in Iowa and beyond, the National Review’s buttoned-up conservatism may be less relevant than ever. Indeed, such an outcome was hinted at by Buckley’s famous mission statement, written when he founded the magazine in 1955.

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“The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace,” he wrote. “It is not that, of course; if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”