After National Review published an entire edition devoted to bashing Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate tore into the conservative publication Friday, criticizing the magazine for not knowing “how to lead.”
National Review is a failing publication that has lost it’s way. It’s circulation is way down w its influence being at an all time low. Sad!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2016
Very few people read the National Review because it only knows how to criticize, but not how to lead.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2016
The late, great, William F. Buckley would be ashamed of what had happened to his prize, the dying National Review!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2016
The anti-Trump issue included an editorial and a collection of essays from conservatives like Glenn Beck, Erick Erickson, Bill Kristol, and Dana Loesch making the case against Trump.
In the editorial titled “Against Trump,” the National Review editors wrote that Trump “is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries,” arguing that he has flip-flopped on important issues:
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.
The National Review editors said that when it comes to immigration, Trump “makes no sense and can’t be relied upon,” and that he knows “almost nothing” about national security.
The editorial declares that Trump is not a true conservative:
His obsession is with “winning,” regardless of the means — a spirit that is anathema to the ordered liberty that conservatives hold dear and that depends for its preservation on limits on government power. The Tea Party represented a revival of an understanding of American greatness in these terms, an understanding to which Trump is tone-deaf at best and implicitly hostile at worst. He appears to believe that the administrative state merely needs a new master, rather than a new dispensation that cuts it down to size and curtails its power.
The Republican National Committee on Thursday removed the National Review as a moderator of a February Republican presidential debate following the publication of the anti-Trump edition, stating that moderators “can’t have a predisposition.”
