National Review's response - of sorts - to Palin's endorsement of Trump

1. "Trump’s potential primary victory would provide Hillary Clinton with the easiest imaginable path to the White House" (Glenn Beck, 1/21/16)
2. "Not since George Wallace has there been a presidential candidate who made racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign" (David Boaz, 1/21/16)
3. "For the simple reason that he cannot win without conservatives’ support, virtually every Republican presenting himself to voters swears so-help-me-God that he is a conservative....We so often 'win' — only for nothing to come of it....Trump might be the greatest charlatan of them all" (L. Brent Bozell III, 1/21/16) 
4. "In December, Public Policy Polling found that 36 percent of Republican voters for whom choosing the candidate 'most conservative on the issues' was the top priority said they supported Donald Trump....one thing about which there can be no debate is that Trump is no conservative—he’s simply playing one in the primaries....Put aside for a moment Trump’s countless past departures from conservative principle on...abortion....voters who care about conservative ideas and principles must ask whether his recent impersonation of a conservative is just another role he’s playing. When a con man swindles you, you can sue—as many embittered former Trump associates who thought themselves ill used have done. When you elect a con man, there’s no recourse" (Mona Charen, 1/21/16).
5. "In order to build a governing majority, conservatives do not need Trump’s message or agenda, but they urgently need his supporters" (Ben Domenech, 1/21/16).
6. "I take my conservatism seriously, and I also take Saint Paul seriously. In setting out the qualifications for overseers, or bishops, Saint Paul admonished Timothy, 'If anyone aspires to the office of overseer . . . he must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil' (1 Timothy 3:1,6). I think this is also true of political leaders, including those within the conservative movement" (Erick Erickson, 1/21/16).
7. "his inclination to understand our problems as being managerial rather than political suggests he might well set back the conservative cause if he is elected" (Steven F. Hayward, 1/21/16).
8. "I recall that 30 or more years ago he said he could master the politics of the Cold War, nuclear strategy, and arms control in two weeks, the proof being that he had fixed the Wollman ice-skating rink" (Mark Helprin, 1/21/16).
   
9. "Isn’t Trumpism a two-bit Caesarism of a kind that American conservatives have always disdained?" (William Kristol, 1/21/16)
   
10. "Donald Trump is no conservative....He poses a direct challenge to conservatism, because he embodies the empty promise of managerial leadership outside of politics....American conservatism is an inherently skeptical political outlook. It assumes that no one can be fully trusted with public power and that self-government in a free society demands that we reject the siren song of politics-as-management" (Yuval Levin, 1/21/16)
    
11. "As recently as a couple of years ago, Trump favored the liberal use of eminent-domain laws. He said that the ability of the government to wrest private property from citizens served 'the greater good.' Is that suddenly a conservative principle?....Why are other politicians excoriated when they change their minds...but when Trump suddenly says he’s pro-life, the claim is accepted uncritically?" (Dana Loesch, 1/25/16)
12. "I’m trying to understand how the consummate pro-Democrat insider gets to be electable — as a Republican, and in an election that’s supposed to be all about the outsiders (Andrew McCarthy, 1/25/16).
13. "Trump is no better than what we already have. He’ll say anything to get a vote but give us more of the same if he gets into office. Trump beguiles us, defies the politically correct media, and bullies anyone who points out that the emperor has no clothes. None of that makes him a conservative who cherishes liberty" (David McIntosh, 1/21/16).
    
14. "Trump’s defenders insist that his flashy, shameless, non-conservative style will help win support for his views, which are, they say, substantively conservative. But where, exactly, do we find the conservative substance?....Trump’s brawling, blustery, mean-spirited public persona serves to associate conservatives with all the negative stereotypes that liberals have for decades attached to their opponents on the right....If Trump becomes the nominee, the GOP is sure to lose the 2016 election. But the problem is much larger: Will the Republican party and the conservative movement survive?" (Michael Medved, 1/24/16).
15. "the political atmosphere is polluted by the vicious personal attacks that the Republican contenders have unleashed against one another. Heading the attackers, in both vigor and vitriol, has been Donald Trump" (Edwin Meese III, 1/21/16).
16. "In 2009, the Manhattan Declaration, led by Chuck Colson and Robert P. George, reaffirmed the three primary goals of religious conservatives: to protect all human life, including that of the unborn; to reinforce the sanctity of marriage and the family; and to conserve the religious freedom of all persons. All three goals would be in jeopardy under a Trump presidency....Trump’s supposed pro-life conversion is rooted in Nietzschean, social-Darwinist terms. He knew a child who was to be aborted who grew up to be a 'superstar.' Beyond that, Trump’s vitriolic—and often racist and sexist—language...ought to concern anyone who believes that all persons, not just the 'winners' of the moment, are created in God’s image. One also cannot help but look at the personal life of the billionaire. It is not just that he has abandoned one wife after another for a younger woman, or that he has boasted about having sex with some of the 'top women of the world.' It’s that he says, after all that, that he has no need to seek forgiveness. At the same time, Trump has made millions off a casino industry that, as social conservatives have rightly argued, not only exploits personal vice but destroys families....conservatives have argued for generations that virtue matters, in the citizenry and in the nation’s leaders. Can conservatives really believe that, if elected, Trump would care about protecting the family’s place in society when his own life is—unapologetically—what conservatives used to recognize as decadent?" (Russell Moore, 1/21/16)
17. "Trump says he would order the military to kill the families of terrorists. That would be a direct violation of the most basic laws of armed conflict, which require that deadly force be used only when required by military necessity, under circumstances that allow distinction between military and civilian targets, and when incidental damage to non-military targets is proportional to the military advantage gained. A military that adhered to the laws of armed conflict would necessarily disobey such an order; if it followed the order, both the person who gave it and those who followed it would be subject to prosecution for war crimes" (Michael B. Mukasey, 1/21/16).
18. "Trump is 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.  Trump’s political opinions have wobbled all over the lot. The real-estate mogul and reality-TV star has supported abortion....Since declaring his candidacy he has taken a more conservative line, yet there are great gaping holes in it....If Trump were to become the president, the Republican nominee, or even a failed candidate with strong conservative support, what would that say about conservatives? The movement that ground down the Soviet Union and took the shine, at least temporarily, off socialism would have fallen in behind a huckster. The movement concerned with such 'permanent things' as constitutional government, marriage, and the right to life would have become a claque for a Twitter feed" (Editors of National Review, 1/21/16).
19. "Conservatives have a serious decision. Do we truly believe in our long-held principles and insist that politicians have records demonstrating fealty to them? Or are we willing to throw these principles away because an entertainer who has been a liberal Democrat for decades simply says some of the right things? In short, do our principles still matter? A vote for Trump indicates the answer is 'No'” (Katie Pavlich, 1/21/16)
    
20. "Donald Trump is the apotheosis of a tendency that began to manifest itself in American culture in the 1980s, most notably in the persons of the comic Andrew Dice Clay and the shock jock Howard Stern....Should his election results match his polls, he would be, unquestionably, the worst thing to happen to the American common culture in my lifetime" (John Podhoretz, 1/21/16)
    
21. "Understanding and exploiting the baser emotions is what con artists do, and Donald Trump is a con artist par excellence" (Kevin Williamson, 1/25/16) 
22. "He presents himself as a Strong Man who promises to knock heads and make things right again....Our nation’s solidarity is being tested. It will only make things worse if we go Trumpster diving" (R. R. Reno, 1/21/16). 
23. "No national leader ever aroused more fervent emotions than Adolf Hitler did in the 1930s. Watch some old newsreels of German crowds delirious with joy at the sight of him. The only things at all comparable in more recent times were the ecstatic crowds that greeted Barack Obama when he burst upon the political scene in 2008. Elections, however, have far more lasting and far more serious—or even grim—consequences than emotional venting. The actual track record of crowd pleasers, whether Juan Perón in Argentina, Obama in America, or Hitler in Germany, is very sobering, if not painfully depressing....A shoot-from-the-hip, bombastic showoff is the last thing we need or can afford" (Thomas Sowell, 1/21/16). 
24. "Trump channels a lot of the righteous (and some of the unrighteous) anger of voters and sees the solution as himself. Isn’t a narcissist what we currently have in the White House?" (Cal Thomas, 1/21/16)