RNC Disinvites ‘The National Review’ From Debate

National Review publisher Jack Fowler wrote late Thursday that after the “Against Trump” editorial was published, a top RNC official called to disinvite the magazine from the February debate.

The idea of bringing conservative media into the debates had actually come from RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, who has repeatedly blamed a loose, easily-exploited approach to the media for a “circus” that hurt eventual 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

I don’t really see how it is going to be that effective, because most of the people out there supporting Donald Trump so jubilantly right now, are not reading the National Review or the Wall Street Journal editorial page, or any of these other publications that are held in such high regard around here. A number of National Review’s writers have repeatedly expressed very negative feelings about Trump, and correspondent Kevin D. Williamson released a book two months ago called The Case Against Trump. Much of his support is as understandable as the origins of the tea party in 2009. “We wanted to push back against this notion that it was just the establishment that was opposed to Trump, so we assembled this group of people who nobody can accuse of being the establishment”.

National Review’s complaints against Trump ranged from his liberal positions in the past on abortion, gun control, health care and taxes to what they deemed to be his lack of knowledge of the details of his own immigration plan.

If the Republican nominee, “He would be, unquestionably, the worst thing to happen to the American common culture in my lifetime”, wrote John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine. In 2012, after Romney’s defeat, the former RNC research director David Welch bemoaned the lack of strong conservative voices who could police the movement. Trump represents not only an existential threat to the Republican Party and conservatism, but to the Constitution and our Republic.

The National Review says its 2015 audited circulation is 150,000, and that it is the largest-circulation conservative magazine in the nation. Buckley was born in New York City.

The magazine’s argument is one that has been made by several of Trump’s rivals for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, most notably by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

The magazine’s dramatic move comes as Trump has regained the lead in polling in Iowa, which carries enormous influence as the first state to vote in the primary process.