“Is Trump a liberal?” conservative columnist Mona Charen asks. “Who knows? He played one for decades — donating to liberal causes and politicians (including Al Sharpton) and inviting Hillary Clinton to his (third) wedding. Maybe it was all a game, but voters who care about conservative ideas and principles must ask whether his recent impersonation of a conservative is just another role he’s playing.”

Charen isn’t alone. In the wake of Sarah Palin’s recent endorsement of Donald Trump, the conservative National Review has gathered a group of conservative pundits — everyone from Cal Thomas and Thomas Sowell to Michael Medved and Glenn Beck  — with the goal of persuading conservative America that Trump represents something dangerously different from the foundational principles that made America great. A sampling:

The Tea Party

Glenn Beck: “When conservatives desperately needed allies in the fight against big government, Donald Trump didn’t stand on the sidelines. He consistently advocated that your money be spent, that your government grow, and that your Constitution be ignored…. If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination, there will once again be no opposition to an ever-expanding government.”

Erick Erickson: “In October 2011, when many of the other Republican candidates were fighting Barack Obama, Donald Trump told Sean Hannity, “I was [Obama’s] biggest cheerleader.” Trump donated to both the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign, as well to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, and other Democrats. In 2011, according to the website OpenSecrets.org, “the largest recipient [of Donald Trump’s political spending] has been the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee with $116,000.”

Neoconservatives

Michael Medved: “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 … Trump is the living, breathing, bellowing personification of all the nasty characteristics Democrats routinely ascribe to Republicans.”

Mona Charen: “When a con man swindles you, you can sue — as many embittered former Trump associates who thought themselves ill used have done. When you elect a con man, there’s no recourse.”

Movement Conservatives

L. Brent Bozell III: “The GOP base is clearly disgusted and looking for new leadership. Enter Donald Trump, not just with policy prescriptions that challenge the cynical GOP leadership but with an attitude of disdain for that leadership — precisely in line with the sentiment of the base. Many conservatives are relishing this, but ah, the rub. Trump might be the greatest charlatan of them all.”

Ben Domenech: “Trump assures voters that he will use authoritarian power for good, to help those who feel — with good reason — ignored by both parties. But the American experiment in self-government was the work of a generation that risked all to defeat a tyrannical monarch and establish a government of laws, not men. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people is precisely what the Constitution offers, and what is most threatened by ‘great men’ impatient to impose their will on the nation.”

Yuval Levin: “The appeal of Trump’s diagnoses should be instructive to conservatives. But the shallow narcissism of his prescriptions is a warning. American conservatism is an inherently skeptical political outlook. It assumes that no one can be fully trusted with public power and that self-government in a free society demands that we reject the siren song of politics-as-management. A shortage of such skepticism is how we ended up with the problems Trump so bluntly laments.”

Libertarians

David Boaz: “Trump’s greatest offenses against American tradition and our founding principles are his nativism and his promise of one-man rule. Not since George Wallace has there been a presidential candidate who made racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign … America is an exceptional nation in large part because we’ve aspired to rise above such prejudices and guarantee life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to everyone.”

Thomas Sowell: “In a country with more than 300 million people, it is remarkable how obsessed the media have become with just one — Donald Trump. What is even more remarkable is that, after seven years of repeated disasters, both domestically and internationally, under a glib egomaniac in the White House, so many potential voters are turning to another glib egomaniac to be his successor. No doubt much of the stampede of Republican voters toward Mr. Trump is based on their disgust with the Republican establishment. It is easy to understand why there would be pent-up resentments among Republican voters. But are elections held for the purpose of venting emotions?”

Religious Conservatives

Cal Thomas: “I once compared Trump to Lonesome Rhodes, the character played by Andy Griffith in the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd. Trump might also be compared to Elmer Gantry, the fictional evangelist who used religion to mask his dark side … Anger is not policy. Trump channels a lot of the righteous (and some of the unrighteous) anger of voters and sees the solution as himself. Isn’t a narcissist what we currently have in the White House?”

Russell Moore: “Trump’s supposed pro-life conversion is rooted in Nietzschean, social-Darwinist terms. He knew a child who was to be aborted who grew up to be a “superstar.” Beyond that, Trump’s vitriolic — and often racist and sexist — language about immigrants, women, the disabled and others ought to concern anyone who believes that all persons, not just the “winners” of the moment, are created in God’s image.”

To read the whole symposium, visit National Review.