Donald Trump calls the National Review a 'dying paper' after it publishes anti-Trump issue

The cover of a special edition of the National Review says it all: "Against Trump."

The magazine is out on Friday, but the National Review posted the 22 essays by conservative thinkers on its website Thursday night, with each author trying his best to put as much distance between Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and the conservative movement as possible. Yuval Levin, a contributing editor of the National Review, put it succinctly: "Donald Trump is no conservative. That's not a crime, it's just a reason to vote against him."

Glenn Beck decided to take the fear mongering route, saying if Trump becomes the Republican nominee, "there will once again be no opposition to an ever-expanding government. This is a crisis for conservatism." Talk show host Michael Medved also played on the fears of some conservatives that Trump is becoming the poster boy for the movement. "Trump's brawling, blustery, mean-spirited public persona serves to associate conservatives with all the negative stereotypes that liberals have for decades attached to their opponents on the right," he wrote.

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Novelist Mark Helprin painted Trump as someone ill-prepared for the presidency, writing: "He doesn't know the Constitution, history, law, political philosophy, nuclear strategy, diplomacy, defense, economics beyond real estate, or even, despite his low-level mafioso comportment, how ordinary people live." Others decided to get personal, with David Boaz of the Cato Institute saying Trump puts his "crazy" out "front and center," and is "effectively vowing to be an American Mussolini," while Mona Charen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center called him "pitifully insecure."

Trump responded by calling the National Review a "dying paper" that "people don't even think about."