National Review [NR] is a formerly influential political newsmagazine … edited by Rich Lowry. … Neither NR nor the (now-defunct Weekly Standard have been particularly conservative on social issues, and in Nov. 2022, NR absurdly came all-out against Donald Trump. … NR joined with liberals in criticizing a high school boy who peacefully stood his ground against political hostility [later] having to pull its article that falsely claimed [the boys] “might as well have just spit on the Cross.” … NR has promoted numerous left-wing policies. In 2008 former NR contributor Wick Allison publicly endorsed … Barack Obama over … John McCain … NR was home to many anti-Trump commentators during and after 2016 presidential election.
Conservapedia
Some conservatives [make] … excuses for Trump … Count us out. Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would … trample it … on behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as himself.
National Review, Jan. 22, 2016
There has been no shortage of writers playing armchair psychologist over the years to analyze the pathologies of Donald Trump. From “daddy issues” to accusations of “clinical narcissism” [and] his management style, what makes Trump tick has been [discussed] well before he ran for president.
David Bahnsen, National Review, July 10, 2023
I left NR… after 20 years … [T]here were certain issues [like] the Covington kids. I sensed before we knew anything [that NR] would … condemn them … [because] … people in the Republican … establishment felt it’s their duty to … virtue signal to the Left. … [and] their duty … to tell the world they didn’t approve of Trump’s tweets or crudity. … [I replied:] But, it’s good for the middle class. … I thought they would be champions of the middle class, but I don’t think they … wanted to be.
Stanford University History Professor Victor Davis Hanson, Oct. 6, 2021
Julie Kelly, Sept. 20, 2024
NR has played the role of the useful idiot to the Left in promoting every anti-Trump operation from Russiagate to Trump-Zelensky phone call quid-pro-quo to January 6 with some calling for [Trump’s] impeachment for the latter two. NR’s top 2 legal analysts defended DOJ’s use of 1512(c)(2) against J6ers overturned by SCOTUS in July 2024. NR had an opportunity to oppose the life-destroying lawfare and media crusade against Trump supporters. They did not. … NR support [for] every media and Democrat-operation against Trump, his associates, and his supporters is too long to post. But NR ‘s fueling of the [absurd] J6 narrative is particularly egregious.
Since Trump is the only Republican to have won the presidency for the past 16-years, NR has opposed him since 2015. It is certainly fair to criticize Trump. But the vehemence of NR’s criticisms and the knee-jerk tendency to pile on the Democrat/media’s often inaccurate caricatures of him makes me think there is something visceral, rather than rational, in NR’s over-the-top criticisms. One feels one has gone through the looking-glass.
NR’s David Bahnsen, who claims to be neither a “Never Trumper” nor a “fan”, but who refers cavalierly to Trump’s “pathologies” from “daddy issues” to accusations of “clinical narcissism,” claims to provide a fair evaluation of Trump. (Note: Although clinical narcissism may be a pathology being accused of it is not. Comprehende David?)
Bahnsen critiques Trump’s handling of Covid, his daily “ego-brawl with the media, when the country was clamouring for leadership and empathy. … [reflecting] a president disconnected from the American people.“
However, former CDC Director Robert Redfield just endorsed Trump for 2024, praising his approach to health policy and administration, and admitted to Trump ally RFK, Jr, who had strongly critiqued both Redfield and the CDC over their handling of Covid, that he (Kennedy) “got everything right”. That is, Trump, in entirely new pandemic territory, focussed, like a businessman, on getting the job done, not on tweets or making nice-nice, and not caving, as “Republicans” typically do, to a completely biased media. Some of us believe that the massive one-sided media bias is destroying our country and that we must fight back. Is that belief still permitted now or is that too now verboten?
Bahnsen goes on to call out Trump for his “unacceptable” personal attacks on Ted Cruz’s father or his remarks about the physical appearance of Carly Fiorina and Heidi Cruz (and similar behaviour). I too find such behaviour unacceptable. But what I find more unacceptable is the record number of dead people, including many children, at the southern border, 853, in 2022, the 650,000 criminal illegals, including, for starters, 13,099 criminally convicted MURDERS and 15,000 convicted of sexual assault, that the Biden-Harris administration deliberately released into the country, the TRANSPARENT lying for 3.6 years that the border is secure, the Stalinist lawfare the Biden-Harris administration have unleashed on Trump, the wars and dead people all over the globe that exploded under Biden-Harris incompetence, and dictators, including Putin and Xi, talking about a nuclear WWIII, thetransparently undemocratic behaviour, replacing the Democrat primary winner Joe Biden by someone, Kamala Harris, who never got a single primary vote, etc.
We don’t get to choose between the Angel Gabriel and Satan. We have a binary choice in November between a crude but tough businessman and a dishonest incompetent member of the Biden-Harris administration that has unleashed destruction all over the world and is backed up by a dishonest media that refuses to hold her to account. I can survive a bizarre tweet now and then but I cannot tolerate all the crime, wars and dead people.
Julie Kelly is right that NR smeared Trump with colourful emotive language. The Capitol was not, as NR wrote, “wreathed in smoke” on Jan. 6th. She is right that NR repeated the lie that Brian Sicknick was bludgeoned to death by a rioter with a fire extinguisher before correcting this months later. And though we may not know the whole story about Jan. 6th, mostly because of government obstruction, it is now entirely clear, years of digging later, that there were numerous shenanigans afoot that day. See the tape of Nancy Pelosi on that day taking responsibility for the unpreparedness, the government shenanigans about the pipe bomb near DNC headquarters, IG Horowitz’s admission there were FBI confidential sources in the crowd that day, etc. Sorry, but after the Whitmer kidnapping fiasco that means we cannot know it was Trump supporters that led the attack on the Capitol. Comrade Wray, reminiscent of comrades Comey and Mueller, does not, when questioned under oath about that day, seem to know much about anything.
I suspect that much of NR’s anti-Trumpism has to do with class. Trump may not care which one is the dessert fork, and he may not win the essay writing contest on Aristotle’s Politics, but that is because he is a knock-some-heads-together-to-get-the-job-done-guy, not another effete pedant.
One popular establishment argument against Trump is that he blew it in 2020. My view is that he lost because of all the bags of Biden votes that miraculously showed up at 3 AM. But how well would he have done if he had not been sabotaged by establishment Republican weaklings? What NR refuses to understand is that Trump’s enduring popularity from 2016 to the present is the rejection of the failures of establishment Republicans like NR that have not prevented the destruction of the country.
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