Posted on 06/01/2025 2:55:27 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
In a memorable exchange during a Republican primary debate in January 2016, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas needled the upstart candidate Donald Trump, saying he was not a true conservative and adding, “Not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan.”
Mr. Trump was ready with a retort. “Conservatives actually do come out of Manhattan,” he replied, “including William F. Buckley.”
It was obvious why Mr. Trump would invoke William F. Buckley Jr. — the author, columnist, magazine editor, TV debater and political candidate who died at 82 in 2008 (and who did work for decades in Manhattan). Mr. Buckley was the leading intellectual architect of the modern conservative movement — indeed, he personified it for more than 50 years.
But by what reasoning could Mr. Trump rightfully claim a connection with him? Outwardly, Mr. Buckley, with his patrician manner, salon wit and gold-plated vocabulary, his passion for Bach and connoisseur’s taste for fine writing, could not have been less like Mr. Trump. And in policy terms, Mr. Trump’s love of tariffs, defense of entitlement programs and isolationist tendencies were at odds with Mr. Buckley’s fondness for the free market, skepticism of big government and support for a muscular foreign policy.
In fact, in the winter of 2016, the editors of National Review, the venerable political journal Mr. Buckley founded in 1955, devoted an entire issue to making the case against Mr. Trump. They invited conservatives “across the spectrum” to argue that he was a “philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the G.O.P. in favor of a free-floating populism with strongman overtones.”
Since then, the ranks of anti- or “never” Trump conservatives have thinned almost to extinction, in the pages of National Review and elsewhere. Mr. Trump controls the Republican Party top to...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The 2016 version of National Review was not the same as the WFB run version.
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Ted Cruz a Trump supporter?
He said not a lot of conservatives come out ofanhattan?
My people go back 3 generations in Manhattan and I’m more conservative than Ted Cruz and his Goldman Sachs wife
Cruz lost me when he promoted h1b visas during his stupid campaign
And he severed ties with Trump
My county, Suffolk, manhattan commuters, is redder than any city in Texas
Blechh! this creep.
Trump acquired the political theories of Pat Buchanan. Buchanan brought back the America first movement. It was clearly a populist movement. Trump is a populist. Buckley excommunicated Buchanan from the conservative movement as an anti Semite.
Almost everyone listed on that cover are now big Trump supporters.
So much for their opinions.
Sounds like the Slimes is trying to stir things up for Trump.
Sow CHAOS.
Quite.
“Patrician”
Will that be on every MSM talking head lips tomorrow?
Will Bernie drop “Oligarch” and start using “Patrician”?
All cities are blue. Either because of minorities or libtards, regardless of the state. The suburbs and rural areas are where red folks live.
Thank you. And thank you Ted Cruz. Very informative
I’ve lived in blue areas my whole life and I’m more conservative than Ted Cruz will ever dream of being. The messed up political condition that Texas government is in right now is something Ted Cruz is doing nothing about. Saying nothing about
Here in Texas they escorted Ken Paxton out of the state house last week
Cruz has nothing to say about it. He let that creepy Louis gohmert try to run Paxton out of the AG spot for what?
Cruz. Blech
That would suck.
Yep. They are so desperate.
Gold-plated suggests cheap veneer, razzle dazzle, none of which is Buckley who mastered the art of the mot juste by the time he was a sophomore at Yale.
And then there is this mess: Mr. Trump’s love of tariffs, defense of entitlement programs and isolationist tendencies were at odds with Mr. Buckley’s fondness for the free market, skepticism of big government and support for a muscular foreign policy.
Trump doesn't love tariffs, AH. He is using it as a nuclear weapon to blow up unfair arrangements around the world to get a better deal for America- you know flexing American muscle to conduct a muscular foreign policy. Meanwhile the hater of big government and financial waste and largesse in subsidies for cheese and illegitimacy, would have been impressed by the work DOGE did to identify the biggest scam on the taxpayer of all time-the NGOs.
And Buckley, being an overwhelmingly culturally sophisticated devotee of western culture - like that white privileged dead man this Bach this AH author discusses - would have had a problem with DEI. And the world's greatest anti-marxist [throwing himself athwart the tracks of history yelling stop] had no truck with the pseudo intellectual marxists at the NY times.
Buckley grew up in the Buckley house in Sharon CT and as an adult he had his own house in Connecticut on Long Island Sound which is where IIRC he died.
William F. Buckley was born in Houston.
There are only about five senators that are worth more than a warm bucket of spit. Cruz is in the second tier. But they are all dug in like ticks on a hound. Paxton will take Cornhole’s seat. You can’t get them out without term limits.
The goal of the article is to sell Tanenhaus’s Buckley biography.
Whatever. I think Cruz saying that conservatives don’t come from manhattan is bigoted
Maybe he meant Kansas?
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