But the magazine’s gambit didn’t work; in fact, it backfired in a spectacular way, unleashing a tide of pent-up resentment between rank-and-file Republicans and party masters. Frustrated by the GOP’s failure to derail the far-left agenda of President Barack Obama despite winning control of the House of Representatives in 2010 and the Senate in 2014, Republican voters were out of patience and in no mood to take marching orders from conservative commanders who lacked a plan to defeat Hillary Clinton in November 2016.
National Review’s plea not only fell on deaf ears, it likely contributed to Trump’s ascendancy. “Many now believe the reason Trump won both the primary and national election is precisely because publications like National Review and the Weekly Standard coddled and encouraged a Republican Party that not only betrayed conservatism but turned on what was once its own base by becoming the party of Washington insiders courting favorable press from pundits,” Breitbart News noted after the election.12
Mark Steyn, a onetime contributor to NR, mocked the publication for its outdated fealty to the Morning-in-America era and droning wistfully about how the Gipper would not approve of The Donald. But Ronald Reagan, Steyn noted, could never be elected governor of California today. “The past is another country, and the Chamber of Commerce Republicans gave it away,” Steyn wrote. “Reagan’s California no longer exists.”13
After the release of “Against Trump,” the leading GOP contender wasted no time trolling National Review. “The late, great, William F. Buckley would be ashamed of what had happened to his prize, the dying National Review!” Trump tweeted on January 21, 2016.14 The battle lines had been drawn between the Republican elite and the GOP’s most flamboyant party crasher. And the rank-and-file’s rebuke against the former would be swift.
One week after the release of the “Against Trump” issue, the tycoon barely lost the Iowa caucus to Texas senator Ted Cruz. (Trump would go on to win nearly every other contest.) The Republican National Committee rescinded an invitation for National Review to help moderate one of the debates.15 The “Against Trump” issue, rather than scare off Republicans from voting for Trump, had the opposite effect.
(A few years after his publication, Lowry and others expressed regret about the issue as it spurred what would become known as the NeverTrump movement. “I wish they’d never come up with that phrase,” Lowry told the New York Times in October 2019, referring to NeverTrump.16 Brent Bozell III, a contributor to the “Against Trump” missive who later became a Trump ally, told the Times, “Had I known this was going to be perceived as the bible of the anti-Trump movement, I never would have written it.”17)
Trump was unfazed by National Review’s condemnation. If anything, the thrashing by buttoned-up, tight-assed, tone-deaf “conservative” scolds motivated Trump to push back even harder. And he went right for the jugular, saying the quiet parts out loud, as they say, related to the Republican Party’s biggest failures in a generation.
THE RECKONING OF THE IRAQ WAR
On a debate stage in February 2016, Trump spoke what was—up until that point—considered blasphemy in the Republican Party. Standing just feet away from former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Trump declared that the Iraq War had been a mistake and that America’s 13-year-long military involvement had destabilized, not liberated, the Middle East. Then, in typical Trump style, he went a step further. “They lied,” he roared from Peace Center in Greenville, South Carolina. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none and they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”18 The crowd mostly booed.
The next morning on Fox News, Trump continued his tirade. “The Iraq War was a disaster,” he told the morning news hosts, including Tucker Carlson, who had opposed the war. “We spent two trillion dollars, thousands of lives, wounded warriors who we love … what do we have, nothing? We have absolutely nothing.”19
Trump’s roast of the Iraq War would be the most significant challenge to conservative orthodoxy in years; it resulted in a group therapy session for large chunks of the Republican Party who would reassess their attachment to widely accepted slogans that had, by and large, been empty vessels for failed policies. According to polling in 2015, most Republicans still believed the Iraq War was the right thing to do.20 By 2018, less than half of Republicans believed the US succeeded in achieving its goals in Iraq.21 (More recriminations about the war would continue into Trump’s first term.)
Trump’s tongue-lashing for the perpetrators of the Iraq War would be a harbinger of things to come from his candidacy and presidency. No issue was off-limits, no accepted truth too sacred to challenge. It is an approach that to this day appeals to rank-and-file Republicans and some Democrats while rankling urbane, effete backers of the Democratic Party and NeverTrump fussbudgets.
THE PARTY’S OVER
By May 2016, Trump locked up the nomination, to much widespread pearl-clutching by the party’s top tier. Trump crushed his opponents, winning a record number of Republican votes while besting the previous record held by George W. Bush in 2000, in another ironic slap at the Bush dynasty.
The Republican establishment was rocked to its neoconservative core.
But it was the post-primary conduct of NeverTrump that deepened the fault lines between the conservative establishment opposed to Trump and conservative voters who overwhelmingly supported him. Trump gave voice to long-simmering anger about Republicans’ complicity in unfettered illegal immigration, unfair trade agreements, and endless foreign war, matters that had been ignored by Washington’s political class for more than a decade. Conservatives were especially alarmed at the Left’s takeover of academia, the news media, Hollywood, and the corporate world while conservatives were unable to halt the incursion.
The once-patriotic heartbeat of the Republican Party had been put on a bypass machine by party leaders, who seemed more concerned about the plight of illegal immigrants than of American citizens who had been gradually displaced—occupationally, culturally, academically, and socially—in their own homeland.
Trump, with his gaudy but genuine slogan to “Make America Great Again,” made an unapologetic commitment to put America’s interests first. It was a scolding as much as a promise. To the neoconservatives who ruled the Republican Party, Trump’s MAGA mantra disemboweled the internationalist Bush Doctrine, a post-9/11 foreign policy approach that had resulted in protracted war in several countries, with dubious, deadly outcomes.22 To Democrats, MAGA posed a direct hit to the undercurrent of anti-Americanism that had animated the party for years.
Trump openly antagonized the power base of both political parties—that, of course, was the real threat to establishment conservatives.
So, rather than coalesce around the Republican nominee in preparation for a brutal general election against a well-funded Democrat hostile to conservative views and values, GOP stalwarts fortified their ranks in a galling rebuke of party acolytes. The very same people who had long profited from their affiliation with Republicans—who sold them books and headlined fancy fundraisers and consulted on campaigns and led them into treacherous wars—turned on their patrons in an ugly way.
“Make sure he loses,” bow-tied George Will advised beleaguered conservative voters in a June 2016 interview. “Grit [your] teeth for four years and win the White House.”23
Will, channeling Reagan in another slap at Republican voters, changed his voter registration from Republican to unaffiliated because, as he told Fox News’s Chris Wallace, “the party left me.”24 He later would join other alleged “conservatives” who either endorsed Hillary Clinton or