Former President Donald Trump took aim Friday at the National Review after the conservative magazine's editorial board announced its opposition to his 2024 presidential run.
"Why does anyone read the National Review? They are so negative to Conservatives and me, and are seen as being led by lightweights that couldn't shine the shoes of Bill Buckley," the former president declared in a statement via his presidential campaign.
"They have absolutely nothing going, it is failing fast, and my only question is, who is paying for the losses — when it loses plenty of money and serves no purpose at all. People are tired of haters — let the National Review die peacefully!"
It isn't the first time National Review has butted heads with Trump. The outlet has featured a litany of Never Trump authors including David French, Jonah Goldberg and Jay Nordlinger.
Famously, National Review published "Against Trump" in 2016, claiming that Trump was "a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism ... ."
The magazine's recent "No." piece mirrored many of the same concerns voiced in its 2016 attack, while also carefully not yet taking sides on what candidate it would officially support.
During Trump's presidency, the magazine itself took a decidedly pro-administration stance in both its online pages and marketing efforts to get new subscribers.
In 2019, National Review's longtime editor Rich Lowry penned a book, "The Case for Nationalism," embracing much of Trump's populist American agenda.
The CATO Institute described Lowry's book as part of "the newest intellectual trend on the American right" in "building a coherent ideology around the policies and rhetoric of President Donald J. Trump."
Today, National Review seems intent on rejecting Trumpism.
"It's too early to know what the rest of the field will look like, except it will offer much better alternatives than Trump," the National Review board wrote. "The answer to Trump's invitation to remain personally and politically beholden to him and his cracked obsessions ... with all the chaos that entails and the very real possibility of another highly consequential defeat, should be a firm, unmistakable, No."
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