[C. Edmund Wright]

Trump isn’t a conservative, and he’s not even a Republican. While I applaud him for bringing certain issues to the forefront, I have no belief that he’d actually do anything about them, even on the 1 in 1,000,000 chance he could actually get elected. Normally, I’d be all in favor of letting Trump rant, because he’s tapping into the seething anger out there and giving frustrated people a voice. But the cost is high: he’s sucking the oxygen out of the room for more viable candidates (e.g., Ted Cruz), who need to get the media exposure, which is hard when some 40% of the nightly news broadcast is about Trump. The only silver lining I can think of is that following the inevitable Trump implosion, it’s going to be hard to portray any remaining member of the field as the “scary, crazy one” in comparison.

Well stated, bears repeating, so I repeated it!

[kevkrom]

Now, that said, I can echo some of the National Review bashing as well. Putting aside the discussion of where it sits on the scale of "true conservatism", the editors and writers at NR - even the ones I like - seem to get the vapors at the merest hint of populism. And Trump is nothing but (faux) populism.