In January 2016, just ahead of the Iowa Republican presidential caucuses, the longtime house journal of American conservatism published a special issue devoted in large part to denunciations of Donald Trump. Featuring contributions from conservative luminaries like Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz, and L. Brent Bozell III (nephew of its founder, William F. Buckley Jr), the National Review’s “Against Trump” effort signaled the opposition of right-wing public intellectuals to his surging candidacy.

But the issue was also meant as an edict: a motion of formal censure that would arrest Trump’s momentum by making clear to Republican voters he did not have the blessing of movement conservatism’s clerisy. In an unsigned editorial, the magazine declared that Trump was “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.”

When Ted Cruz narrowly won Iowa a few weeks later, National Review editor in chief Rich Lowry duly treated himself to a victory lap, tweeting out an image of the “Against Trump” issue’s cover with the caption “You’re welcome.” Such triumphalism, needless to say, was short-lived. Within days, Trump secured a blowout victory in New Hampshire and, by the end of February, had consolidated his stranglehold on the GOP presidential nomination with wins in seven of the eleven contests held on Super Tuesday.