Flames are all they’ve got. They can’t defend Trump’s conservatism because there’s precious little to defend.
Insults and messenger-shooting are all they can manage.
National Review is performing a service to conservatism, which is what this site is supposed to stand for. Supporting Donald Trump over Ted Cruz with this many activists and key conservatives weighing in is pure spite.
So when lurkers and readers come here to gage what real conservatives are thinking, they will instead see what tyrannical control-freak Republicans are thinking while claiming to be conservative.
In 2012, masses of people here warned folks that if Romney got the R nomination, they would spurn him in the general because only a fool votes for a functional leftist Democrat regardless of party. FR hated hearing it so much that it censored such conservatives, they left, FR then was comfortable "knowing" that most would vote for Romney ... and instead, the balance did exactly what they tried to warn folks on FR they would do: spurn him. And Romney lost.
So all that was accomplished, was people who might otherwise have been able to see Romney's loss coming via FR, instead were blindsided by it because they thought FR represented a full spectrum of conservatives, when FR had instead been whittled down to a small spectrum of conservatives who believed in voting "against."