![]() These days, even allies and close friends of the 63-year-old Kristol worry that he is turning out to be a problematic standard-bearer for his own movement. Kristol’s defiant insurgency has revealed him to be very much out of touch with the party he claims to be saving. To Trump, Kristol is the rigged system he’s fighting against, the personification of an elite establishment overdue for a rude awakening.Īnd, of course, Trump’s not entirely wrong about that. But no one-not Mitt Romney, Senator Ben Sasse or retired Marine General Jim Mattis-wanted to be his kamikaze pilot.Īll of which has made Kristol less a daunting foe than a handy foil for Trump, an insider who was already famous for his many wrong political predictions, long before he incorrectly judged the Trump presidential candidacy dead on arrival. With his hope fading that Republican leaders would reject Trump-and unwilling, he says, to vote for Hillary Clinton (“semi-corrupt,” “nanny-state liberalism”)-Kristol eventually tried to recruit a new candidate to join the race. Kristol battled Trump in his magazine, on television and on his quirky Twitter account, emerging as generalissimo of the #NeverTrump movement as he called the mogul “loathsome,” “a con man” and “a charlatan and a demagogue” who is “soiling the robe of conservatism.” He then watched in horror as one GOP ally after another surrendered. The two men have emerged as rivals of almost cartoonish contrasts: Kristol, the courteous intellectual who loves opera and Greek philosophy Trump, the confrontational populist who hosted The Apprentice. troops home from Asia he dubbed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Kristol defends to this day, a “disaster.” And he gleefully blamed elites like Kristol for running the country into the ground. In particular, Trump called for an American foreign-policy retreat from the outside world, threatening to scrap NATO and bring U.S. Trump didn’t just steamroll the rest of the Republican field he made a mockery of the cherished conservative ideals Kristol has spent some 30 years promoting. Kristol, of course, was dead wrong about that, and the next year turned out to be a slow-motion nightmare for him. “He’s dead to me,” Kristol declared on ABC News a day later.īut not to worry, Kristol predicted: “I don’t think he’ll stay up in the polls.” McCain famously spent five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, and Kristol, who counts McCain as a friend, not to mention perhaps the politician most closely associated with Kristol’s hawkish views about American military power, was horrified by Trump. “I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said. The very next day, during an appearance in Iowa, Trump declared that Republican Senator John McCain was “not a war hero” because he had been captured when his fighter-bomber was shot down in the Vietnam War. “They told me you couldn’t vote for me,” Trump said cheerfully. Kristol found this amusing, given his doubts that Trump is a regular reader, or a reader at all. “Hey, Bill! I love the magazine!” Trump boomed. offices of the Weekly Standard, the political opinion magazine he edits. It was July 2015, Trump was beginning his improbable rise in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and Kristol-a hybrid pundit and activist who is one of Washington’s most influential conservatives-was in the D.C. Ībout a year before Donald Trump publicly denounced Bill Kristol as “a loser,” “a dummy” and a purveyor of mass death, the billionaire called Kristol, seeking his support. Michael Crowley is senior foreign policy writer at Politico. ![]()
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