The inside story of National Review’s big anti-Donald Trump issue
By Callum Borchers January 22 at 1:25 PM
washingtonpost.com
It’s one thing to publish an editorial denouncing Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump; any news outlet can do that, and plenty have. It’s another to get almost two dozen leading conservative thinkers to write essays arguing against the Manhattan billionaire’s nomination and agree to print them under a single banner: “Against Trump.” [ A YUGE number of conservatives just shredded Donald Trump in the National Review]
That’s what the National Review and its editor, Rich Lowry, just pulled off. Lowry spoke with The Fix about how the special issue came together, what he hopes it will accomplish and the price that the conservative magazine was willing to pay in its relationship with the Republican National Committee, which has removed the magazine as co-sponsor of a debate in response to this issue.
FIX: How long ago did you start this project? It must have been quite the undertaking.
LOWRY: It was a month in the making. We started around the holidays, which turned out to be a bad idea. It’s hard to get people. We were aiming for the first issue in January, and that just became impossible, so it got bumped in issue. But it really turned out to be fortuitous because we’re in that period now of intense, hour-by-hour focus on the race.
FIX: At what point did you arrive at the conclusion that this was the right approach? “We as a conservative collective need to stand up and say, ‘This isn’t the guy for us.’”
LOWRY: Again, about a month or so. Endorsements are done collectively by our top editors. We’re a little all-over-the-map on the other guys, but we’re convinced that Trump is a mistake. So we were ready to make this mistake. That’s one. Two, it’s been irritating over the last eight months hearing that it’s the “establishment” that opposes Trump. All along, there have been principled conservatives opposing him. So we wanted to gather together a group to make that point quite dramatically. And there are people in this group who’ve criticized each other, who I’m sure don’t like each other very much, who’ve criticized National Review over the years — but they all thought making a statement about Trump was more important than those past rivalries.
</snip> Rest here: washingtonpost.com |
