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,...