“Conservatives” Blast Trump

National Review spins even further into irrelevance.

National Review has published a collection of short blasts against Donald Trump by 22 “conservatives.” They worry about some of his policies, but mainly they call him names. In an introductory essay called “Against Trump,” the editors set the tone: The Republican front-runner is “heedless and crude,” “a huckster,” “a menace to American conservatism,” and “a philosophically unmoored political opportunist.”

Their writers then get to work. Mr. Trump is a “con man” (Mona Charen), a “know-nothing demagogue” who suffers from “raging egomania” (Mark Helprin), “the politicized American id” (John Podhoretz), a “glib egomaniac” and “bombastic showoff” (Thomas Sowell), a “political conman” (Katie Pavlich), a “narcissist” (Cal Thomas), a harbinger of “two-bit Caesarism” (William Kristol), a peddler of “know-nothing protectionism,” “nativism,” and “one-man rule” (David Boaz), etc.

You know you’ve won the argument when your opponents are reduced to name-calling.

But there are a few substantive complaints amidst the roaring. One is that Mr. Trump is too ignorant to run the country. According to Mark Helprin, Mr. Trump “doesn’t know the Constitution, history, law, political philosophy, nuclear strategy, diplomacy, defense, economics beyond real estate,” and so on. This is true of almost the entire political class. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were genial ignoramuses, but Reagan is a hero toNational Review.

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