Look at what you've done ...

“Trump has gotten far in the GOP race on a brash manner, buffed over decades in New York tabloid culture. His refusal to back down from any gaffe, no matter how grotesque, suggests a healthy impertinence in the face of postmodern PC (although the insults he hurls at anyone who crosses him also speak to a pettiness and lack of basic civility).”

Jeanne Cleveland, a retired teacher, pursed her lips sourly at the mention of his name and tried to summarize her distaste in diplomatic terms.

“I think he’s arrogant,” she said. “I think he’s rude. I think——”

She paused, reaching for the right words. “Let’s just say, I don’t like the way he represents us as a country.”

To avoid any confusion, Mrs. Cleveland put it plainly: “I don’t like Trump.”

In this, the retired teacher, 70, from Hollis, N.H., has ample, baffled and agonized company in New Hampshire as the presidential primary enters its final, frenzied weeks, with Donald J. Trump remaining atop poll after poll of the state’s Republican electorate.

Or is he? So deep is the dislike for him in some quarters that people like Mrs. Cleveland’s husband, Doug, question the accuracy of polls that so consistently identify Mr. Trump as leading the field with around 32 percent. “I’ve never met a single one of them,” Mr. Cleveland said about those said to be backing Mr. Trump. “Where are all these Trump supporters? Everyone we know is supporting somebody else.”

Joan and Ray Weaving, checking out a Bush campaign event in Hampton, N.H., on Thursday. They have real doubts about Jeb Bush’s rival, Donald J. Trump, despite Mr. Trump’s standing in the polls.

These are the lamentations of the 68 Percent — the significant majority of Republican voters here who are immune to Mr. Trump’s charms and entreaties, according to a battery of voter interviews on Thursday at campaign events for his rivals.

For months, great quantities of ink, political-science brain power and polling resources have been expended trying to dissect, if not exactly diagnose, the Trump phenomenon — precisely who supports him and why. Far less energy has been devoted to sounding out a much larger segment of the electorate: those who reject him.

From Brookline to Laconia, these voters call Mr. Trump “unhinged.” They object to his “temperament.” They doubt his motives.

Their disapproval runs strikingly deep. Several spoke of changing the channel whenever his face (or, more frequently, his New York-accented voice, via telephone) turned up on television.

“I really try not to watch him,” one resident, Paul Brennan, said as he walked out of an appearance by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida in a factory in Brookline, along New Hampshire’s southern border. “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.”
[...]
But for the 68 Percent, no single attribute rankles as much as Mr. Trump’s instinctive proclivity to insult — everyone, over everything, no matter how big or small the issue, from Mexicans to the Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly.

“His behavior — I can’t do it,” complained Joan Weaving, 72, from Hampton, N.H., as she sat on a folding chair next to her husband at a Jeb Bush campaign event on Thursday night. “Belittling people. Just seeing the bad parts of things.”

They may share his impatience with ordinary political speak, with the hypersensitivity that has crept into American public life. And they admire his attempts to crack and peel away that veneer of politesse.

But they have limits.

Barbara Henry, 63, wants a president with a filter. Any filter. “He has no filter,” she said, leaning forward to make her point.

“I understand people say, ‘I’m sick of this political correctness.’ I get that,” she said. “But there’s also an argument for some measure of civility. I mean, he’s just not somebody who you can say, ‘I’m proud he’s our president.’”

Too much time is spent trying to prove that Trump is not a real conservative, while ignoring the fact that the racist nationalism he is espousing has its origins on the right. Trump, the editors argue, is “a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.” There’s much that can be questioned here: After all, National Review didn’t have a problem with “free-floating populism” in 2008 when it celebrated Sarah Palin (now an enthusiastic Trump cheerleader), and historically the magazine has loved strongmen dictators like Mussolini and Franco.

The symposium gets off to a rocky start by beginning, admittedly for alphabetical reasons, with a contribution from Glenn Beck. With his long history of racism and conspiracy-mongering, Beck has all the flaws of Trump many times over. To get Glenn Beck to denounce Donald Trump as an unsound thinker makes about as much sense as hiring Larry Flynt to write about how Hugh Hefner demeans women. Nor is Beck the only extremist in the symposium, which also includes contributions from Erick Erickson (known for his boorish sexism) and Thomas Sowell, who in 2007 wrote in National Review: “When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.”

In the “Against Trump” symposium, Sowell makes this outlandish comparison: “The actual track record of crowd pleasers, whether Juan Perón in Argentina, Obama in America, or Hitler in Germany, is very sobering, if not painfully depressing.” Is there any rhetorical overkill Trump has been guilty of that is worse than this?

Sowell’s belief that a coup could be good for America and that Obama can be fairly compared to Hitler gives lie to the argument, made repeatedly by writers in the National Review symposium, that Trump is not a true conservative. For there is very little that Trump has said or done that can’t find prior sanction in National Review, be it racism, anti-immigrant nativism, or sexism. In the last debate, in response to an attack on his “New York values,” Trump noted that conservatives do come from New York and cited William F. Buckley. It is fair to see Trump’s version of white identity politics as firmly in the tradition of Buckley and his magazine.

Decades from now, when historians try to figure out the genealogy of Trumpism, they will have to pay careful attention to the pages of National Review in the 1980s and 1990s, when a crucial debate was being played out between neo-conservatives and paleo-conservatives. Although National Review ultimately sided with the neo-conservatives, it gave ample room to such paleo-conservative voices as Joseph Sobran, Peter Brimelow, John O’Sullivan, and Samuel T. Francis. Even after these writers were purged from the magazine, the white identity politics they argued for was taken up by other National Review writers, albeit in more muted and coded form. This paleo-con tradition created the idea of a politics centered around immigration restriction and a more robustly nationalist foreign policy (including trade policy). Many of these writers seeded the ideas that helped form the alt-right, which is the faction on the right that is most enthusiastic for Trump.