In January 2016, just ahead of the Iowa Republican presidential caucuses, the longtime house journal of American conservatism published a special issue devoted in large part to denunciations of Donald Trump. Featuring contributions from conservative luminaries like Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz, and L. Brent Bozell III (nephew of its founder, William F. Buckley Jr), the National Review’s “Against Trump” effort signaled the opposition of right-wing public intellectuals to his surging candidacy.

But the issue was also meant as an edict: a motion of formal censure that would arrest Trump’s momentum by making clear to Republican voters he did not have the blessing of movement conservatism’s clerisy. In an unsigned editorial, the magazine declared that Trump was “a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.”

When Ted Cruz narrowly won Iowa a few weeks later, National Review editor in chief Rich Lowry duly treated himself to a victory lap, tweeting out an image of the “Against Trump” issue’s cover with the caption “You’re welcome.” Such triumphalism, needless to say, was short-lived. Within days, Trump secured a blowout victory in New Hampshire and, by the end of February, had consolidated his stranglehold on the GOP presidential nomination with wins in seven of the eleven contests held on Super Tuesday.

For the magazine’s reputation as a conservative kingmaker, the 2016 Republican primaries and their aftermath were not just an embarrassment but a crisis of existential magnitude. Since its founding by Buckley in 1955, National Review had seen itself not only as a gathering place for right-wing intellectuals but as a movement leader charged with establishing and articulating conservative orthodoxy and delineating its limits.

Developed by longtime National Review editor Frank S. Meyer, its foundation (often referred to as “fusionism”) was the synthesis of militant anti-communism, social conservatism, and libertarian economics that came to define the Republican project in the post–Barry Goldwater years. In political terms, this emergent consensus required the forging of a new nexus linking right-wing elites with the conservative grassroots, for which public intellectuals were the main binding agent — providing, as Robert Saldin and Steven Teles put it in their 2020 book Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites, “a critical coalition maintenance function for a party whose constituent parts could easily find themselves at odds.”

As the designated spokespeople for conservatism writ large, such intellectuals also had the outward-facing task of making their cause, in the words of former National Review editor George Will, “intellectually respectable and politically palatable” to a more mainstream and liberally inclined audience. It’s for this reason that the magazine’s own house mythology has long emphasized its supposed role in smoothing conservatism’s rougher edges and excommunicating unsavory elements.

In lamenting the party’s 2016 turn to MAGA, for example, Jonah Goldberg argued that the “older, swampier, shittier group of paleocons and racists” that made up the newly Trumpified right “really hated National Review, because [we have] always sort of seen ourselves as the Texas Rangers patrolling the frontier. We’re the ones who say, ‘This is the border and those are the Badlands.’”

By capturing both the nomination and the presidency in explicit defiance of the movement’s would-be ideological guardians, Trump therefore seemed to strike at the magazine’s entire raison d’être and, with it, a constitutive piece of institutional conservatism’s modern identity. For decades, a cadre of erudite intellectuals had successfully kept the yobs and yokels in line. Now the braying hordes had stormed the castle ramparts and overrun the keep with a glorified court jester leading the charge. The upright and serious conservatism of William F. Buckley, many believed, had died a horrible death, and something more feral, uncouth, and sinister had taken its place.

The problem with this self-aggrandizing fable is that the boundary separating conservatism’s wannabe urbane intellectuals from its outwardly coarser ideological fringe has always been more porous than the official line insists. Buckley was himself raised in a household where open fascist sympathies and antisemitism were the norm, by his own account weeping “tears of frustration” at age eleven when four of his siblings deemed him too young to accompany them in the burning of a cross outside a Jewish resort. In 1954, he famously penned a lengthy apologia for McCarthyism and, in a 1957 editorial entitled “Why the South Must Prevail,” defended Jim Crow on the grounds that “for the time being, [the white community] is the advanced race.”

Seeking to expand its legitimacy and audience in the 1960s, National Review gradually created rhetorical distance between its editorial line and the more belligerently racist parts of the Right while still incessantly winking at them. In 1962, during the magazine’s internal debate over its orientation toward the John Birch Society and its founder, Robert Welch, Meyer made the strategic observation that “criticism of a demagogic leader (or of an opportunistic politician) should be conducted in such a way that their followers will still listen to us” — elsewhere cautioning that an excessively heavy-handed approach would be “disastrous … in terms of our remaining ability to speak over Welch’s head to the vital hard-right forces.”

The masthead’s careful maneuvering vis-à-vis the Birchers, as Jeet Heer writes, ultimately tells us a wider story about the nature of its relationship to the very fringes the magazine has supposedly existed to guard against:

National Review, then and now, walks a difficult tight rope: It needs rabid writers who engage in borderline bigotry in order to attract grassroots right-wing readers. But in order to maintain its position as a respectable publication, it has to occasionally purge those very writers if their hate speech becomes too overt or loses a patina of plausible deniability.

Much like the Republican Party itself, the magazine’s model throughout the decades that preceded the Trump era thus involved an ongoing dalliance with the kinds of hard-right forces to which Meyer had once alluded.

Viewed this way, the National Review’s failed showdown with Donald Trump is less the story of a nobler, more sophisticated conservatism being supplanted by a meaner and more primitive kind than an indication that the whole enterprise of making reaction appear respectable is no longer politically useful for the Right. By winning the nomination and embedding his own style as the lingua franca of the Republican mainstream, Trump demonstrated it is today more expedient to cultivate a direct relationship with the assorted vanguard of extremists who comprise the GOP grassroots than to maintain a facade of intellectualism by depending on the likes of George Will or David Brooks.

Given how quickly and easily Trump has seduced some erstwhile critics at National Review — as of October 2019, roughly half of the cohort that had contributed to the “Against Trump” issue had changed their minds about him — he also demonstrated the extent to which their original opposition had been about style and affect rather than ideology. For decades, institutional conservatism had depended on a core of intellectual militants whose function was to render the concerns and prejudices of the reactionary fringe in a manner legible to liberals and acceptable to the cultural mainstream. With Trump’s successful conquest of the GOP, there was no longer any need to keep up the act.