National Review was once the nation’s premier conservative journal of opinion. The brainchild of William F. Buckley, Jr, the magazine featured the writing of modern conservatism’s first team: James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Whittaker Chambers, Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, William Rusher, Henry Hazlitt, Will Herberg, Brian Crozier, Michael Novak, Joseph Sobran, James J. Kilpatrick, John O’Sullivan, and, of course, Buckley himself. After Trump announced in 2022 that he was running again for the GOP nomination for president in 2024, NR told voters to say “no.” The magazine championed the Goldwater candidacy in 1964, losing the election by a landslide but taking control of the Republican Party from the Rockefeller-wing of the party, and later consolidating conservative control of the GOP with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. With the political rise of Donald Trump and the populist conservative movement, however, National Review fell prey to Trump Derangement Syndrome and began its journey to political irrelevance. In 2015, NR’s editors published an editorial titled “Against Trump,” and featured its opposition to Trump on the magazine’s cover. By then, NR had been effectively taken over by neoconservatives led by Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg, champions of George W. Bush’s endless wars and the Global War on Terror. Interestingly, Buckley in the last years of his life cast doubt on the wisdom of Bush’s Iraq war and on neoconservatives’ place in the conservative movement. The Yale-educated Buckley had a soft-spot for populist governance. Remember, it was Buckley who once remarked that he would rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston phonebook than by the faculty of Harvard University. Not so for the University of Virginia-educated Lowry and the Groucher College-educated Goldberg. Lowry in 2016 told Bill Kristol that Trump was a threat to conservatism because of his embrace of populism. To Goldberg, Trump was in 2016 and is now “unacceptable.” In 2021, Lowry opined that Trump was beatable in 2024 in the GOP primaries, and suggested that throughout the country there is a “massive wall of resistance to Trump.” In 2022, Lowry wrote that it was time for the GOP to “move on from Trump,” and urged Republican congressional candidates to reject Trump’s endorsement. After Trump announced in 2022 that he was running again for the GOP nomination for president in 2024, NR told voters to say “no.”  In 2024, the editors of NR urged Republican primary voters to vote for Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley instead of Trump, whose behavior they said was “injurious to our republic.” Trump’s remarkable victory on November 5th has brought a change of tune to NR’s articles. Lowry himself recently wrote that Trump as president-elect is off to a “strong start.” “Like it or not,” Lowry writes, “Trump is mainstream.” Another featured article urges Trump to undo the Biden administration’s weaponization of the government. Another article praises  Trump’s pick of Elon Musk to be “the disrupter conservatives needed.” And most notably, NR’s January 2025 print issue shows a smiling Trump riding back to the White House with a caption titled: “After the Sweep.” What a far cry from 2016’s “Against Trump.” It won’t work. Trump’s MAGA movement understands that National Review has for a decade opposed Trump and the populist-nationalist movement he leads. NR in its heyday launched a movement that helped put Ronald Reagan in the White House. In the age of Trump, NR is irrelevant. READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: The National Endowment for Democracy Should be Defunded on Principle The Last Lion Born 150 Years Ago The post <i>National Review</i>Tries To Jump on the Trump Bandwagon appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.