About 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. 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. offices of the Weekly Standard, the political opinion magazine he edits. “Hey, Bill! I love the magazine!” Trump boomed. Kristol found this amusing, given his doubts that Trump is a regular reader, or a reader at all. “They told me you couldn’t vote for me,” Trump said cheerfully. “But we’re going to bring you around!”
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. “I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said. 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. “He’s dead to me,” Kristol declared on ABC News a day later.
But not to worry, Kristol predicted: “I don’t think he’ll stay up in the polls.”
Kristol, of course, was dead wrong about that, and the next year turned out to be a slow-motion nightmare for him. 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. In particular, Trump called for an American foreign-policy retreat from the outside world, threatening to scrap NATO and bring U.S. 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.
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. 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. 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. But no one—not Mitt Romney, Senator Ben Sasse or retired Marine General Jim Mattis—wanted to be his kamikaze pilot.
All 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. To Trump, Kristol is the rigged system he’s fighting against, the personification of an elite establishment overdue for a rude awakening.
And, of course, Trump’s not entirely wrong about that.
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. Sure, he’s fighting what he sees as a valiant battle of principle, a last-ditch stand for the soul of a GOP that is built around the very Kristol doctrine of low taxes, traditional values and, above all, hawkish foreign policy.
But Kristol’s defiant insurgency has revealed him to be out of touch with the party he claims to be saving. How much good can he do, his friends wonder, by confronting a populist wave with a font of knowing tweets issued from various rarified enclaves up and down the Northeast corridor? When a fellow passenger in the café car of the all-business Amtrak express to New York asked him not long ago why he doesn’t run himself, Kristol joked that he would “only run in states covered by Acela.”
If anything, the war between the two has ended up reminding even his admirers about the numerous times in his long public life that Kristol has been wrong. As in: consistently, publicly, multiple-online-compilations-of-his-worst predictions wrong. Because Kristol wasn’t just wrong about Donald Trump’s rise: He was wrong about what invading Iraq would entail, and about Barack Obama’s prospects in 2008, and whether Joe Biden would run for president in 2016. Some even argue his wrongness has helped to unleash the very forces inside the Republican Party that have enabled the rise of the candidate he so publicly loathes: Kristol helped quash a 2013 GOP immigration-re-form effort that might have brought Latinos into the GOP fold; he suggested Sarah Palin for the Republican ticket in 2008—not only dooming McCain’s presidential bid, but creating an anti-intellectual conservative celeb-rity who now supports his nemesis Trump.
He may yet be right that Trump will ruin his party. But in a campaign season filled with ironies and unintended outcomes, this might be one of the most loaded of all: What if it turns out that Bill Kristol himself is partly to blame for Donald Trump?
***
“The idea of all these people I admire and like mumbling through the next five months … I think that will do damage to them,” Kristol said when we met early this summer. He was downing an omelet at a hotel near the Standard’s Washington offices and lamenting the sight of Republicans squirming over Trump’s racially based criticism of a Mexican-American judge presiding in a lawsuit against him. Many of those squirming people—members of Congress, donors, activists—are Kristol’s personal friends. McCain, for example: Trump’s insult of the Arizona Republican may have made Kristol a permanent enemy, but the senator has turned out to be considerably more flexible, endorsing Trump in May with the half-hearted conclusion that it would be “foolish to ignore” the will of the voters. Asked whether he is disappointed in McCain, who previously had described Trump’s national security views as “uninformed and indeed dangerous,” Kristol replied with a weary, “Yeah,” adding, “He’s up for reelection.” But in the pages of the Standard, he’s been tougher, describing the flip-flopping likes of Trump endorsers including House Speaker Paul Ryan and McCain as “gullible marks” of Trump’s con. “The Republican establishment turns out to be really as weak and as lame as Donald Trump said,” Kristol said on CNN. “They are basically capitulating to Donald Trump.”
It was early June, the end of a rough spring for Kristol. His efforts to recruit a post-primary challenger to Trump—a candidate who might give someone for conservatives to stand for in a “non-embarrassed way,” as he put it over breakfast—had been an all-too-public flop. Kristol had met privately with Romney, Sasse and Mattis, the latter for three hours. “In each case it was pretty close. … They all took it seriously,” Kristol says. None took the plunge.
Finally, on May 29, Kristol sparked a minor frenzy in political-media circles when he tweeted portentously, “There will be an independent candidate—an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.” A few days later, the identity of his would-be white knight leaked. It was one David French, a National Review writer little known outside conservative intellectual circles. Indeed, French, an attorney and Iraq War veteran who lives in Tennessee, didn’t even know Kristol until the men dined together, along with the Republican donor and former Romney bundler John Kingston, in mid-May to strategize about the stop-Trump effort. (Kingston had bankrolled polling, ballot access and other research into the feasibility of the effort.) The initial plan was to discuss ways of coaxing Romney to join the race. But after he left, Kristol asked Kingston about French, who had written about his opposition to Trump. “Well, what about David?” Kristol said. He followed up with a phone call to French, who said he had “intended to go through a deliberate decision-making process in relative obscurity.”
Instead, he had reporters emailing him within minutes of a Bloomberg story revealing his name. Few people took French seriously as a savior, not even himself. After some consideration, French called Kristol to say he would not run. “It was a hard conversation,” he told me. “We were both out on a limb at that point.” French added that Kristol’s tweet didn’t help: “It took me by surprise. When you tweet something like that, and everyone knows you’ve been talking to Romney and Sasse, and then it comes out that it’s David French, it’s hard—how shall I put this?—to avoid the sense of letdown.”
“I thought I would keep hope alive,” Kristol says of the French trial balloon. Instead, he mainly seemed to underscore his cause’s futility. “Bill Kristol is making himself look ridiculous,” Pat Buchanan declared on The McLaughlin Group. “He’s diminished himself,” said a prominent conservative pundit who favors Trump.
As that episode illustrates, Kristol is far more than a pundit. In 2009, for instance, he founded the Foreign Policy Initiative, a small neoconservative think tank that has advocated military action against Syria and Iran, and cultivates young neoconservative thinkers like Jamie Fly, an early staffer who went on to become Marco Rubio’s top foreign policy aide. Kristol also co-founded the Emergency Committee for Israel, a nonprofit advocacy group that mounted a fierce—Democrats say slimy—campaign against President Obama’s 2013 nomination of Chuck Hagel to be defense secretary, including a full-page New York Times ad calling Hagel “anti-Israel.” The group also spent nearly $1 million in 2014 to help elect Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, a former Army Ranger and a friend of Kristol’s. (Cotton consulted with Kristol last year while drafting the controversial letter he sent to the Supreme Leader of Iran opposing the nuclear deal.) Kristol is famously chummy with a slew of conservative benefactors, like the New York investment titans Paul Singer, Ira Rennert and Dan Loeb, the publisher-scion Steve Forbes and the Florida shopping-mall magnate Mel Sembler. One well-connected conservative chuckled at the memory of Kristol holding court for gaggles of starry-eyed donors in the hallways of the conservative American Enterprise Institute’s annual retreat in Sea Island, Georgia, this past March. But even the Obama White House has sought his ear: In 2009, Kristol had breakfast in the White House mess with Obama national security aides Denis McDonough and Ben Rhodes, who saw him as an ally in Obama’s plan to send more troops to Afghanistan.
He does it all while maintaining a relentlessly public schedule, with appearances on the Sunday shows, Morning Joe, CNN and various platforms in between.
All of which has made him one of Washington’s most recognizable faces. And sure enough, during our breakfast, the Republican campaign operative Chip Saltzman stopped by the table to say hello, eager to tout to Kristol his work for a rising-star congressional candidate in Tennessee. “Tell him to come by and see me sometime,” Kristol said.
“Bill is an activist and an operator first and foremost,” says one conservative who has known him for years. “Whatever he does in punditry is more in service of his activism.”
But lately, the activism is proving as controversial as the punditry—and drawing unprecedented scrutiny, thanks to the sudden interest of one Donald J. Trump.
On May 25, Trump addressed a crowd of about 3,000 supporters in Anaheim, California, as police dragged off a handful of protesters outside. Amid vows to build a border wall and a warning that Hillary Clinton would “abolish the Second Amendment,” Trump lit into Kristol by name: “Bill Kristol—he’s got some magazine, I don’t even know what the hell it is. And he’s saying”—here Trump adopted a faux-sanctimonious tone, never mentioning, of course, his call to Kristol the previous spring and claims to be a “fan” of the magazine—“‘We’re looking for another candidate. We’re looking. We’re looking.’ He’s sweating. … He’s been doing this for like nine months. He can’t find anybody. What a loser!”
Trump has also—repeatedly—tweeted his disdain for Kristol, who has 61,000 followers to Trump’s 9.3 million. Kristol is just “an embarrassed loser,” Trump blasted. By May 29, a few days after the Anaheim rally, Trump had given Kristol a new nickname and tweeted a more specific complaint: “If dummy Bill Kristol actually does get a spoiler to run as an independent, say goodbye to the Supreme Court.”
Behind the public scorn, Kristol was sure he was getting to Trump. Kristol told me he suspects that the vaguely menacing calls from various well-connected Republicans he started receiving around this time were no coincidence. They were “calling out of alleged concern” for his reputation and well-being, he explains. “It took me a couple of calls to say, ‘Why is this call coming through?’ Was it, ‘I’m worried about Bill’? Or did someone call them?” David French told me that, after his name emerged in news reports, a member of his wife’s family received an unnerving call from a person who said he was affiliated with the Trump campaign. The caller asked whether French understood “how hard this will be on his family.” “I’m not thinking they’re really all that concerned about my family,” French says. (The Trump campaign denies any responsibility for the call.)
“The Clinton people play hardball too,” Kristol adds. “Trump—sort of on a different level.”
It wasn’t just the Trump people who felt that Kristol had overreached. Some other Republicans also accuse Kristol of aiding and abetting the opposition. “Any good conservative out there trying to be part of some effort like this is only seeking to put Hillary Clinton in the White House,” Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer told NBC News. Even some friends of Kristol publicly questioned his judgment, like former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, a fellow Iraq War hawk who told one radio host that the anti-Trump crusade was “a mistake” bound to help Clinton.
Kristol admits taking grief from his friends. “It’s embarrassing, it’s bad for your reputation,” he says, mimicking them in a dismissive, yadda-yadda voice. Yes, he admits, some of his friendships have frayed. “There are some people I suppose I haven’t talked to as much,” he says. He doesn’t name them, though in April he did tweet his disappointment with Rupert Murdoch, the Standard’s original owner, calling “the normalization of Trump” in Murdoch media holdings like Fox News and the New York Post “a disservice to the country he loves.”
Still, Kristol certainly doesn’t look rattled. He has a preternaturally chipper demeanor and defaults to a slight grin—one that his fans read as pleasant and enemies find unbearably smug. Friends say he is unflappable. “There’s a kind of cheerfulness to Bill,” says Pete Wehner, a former George W. Bush White House aide. “He is impressively unafraid of criticism. The laughing at and mocking of David French, and the third party, and all that—he’s completely untroubled by it. He thinks he’s doing what’s right.”
Even when nearly everyone else thinks he’s wrong.
***
“What rules the world is ideas, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.” Those words were written in September 1975 by Kristol’s father, Irving, a Trotskyite in his youth who moved right in reaction to the student movement of the 1960s and a growing conviction that America had to stand firm against Stalinist communism. Ex-liberals like Irving Kristol—liberals who’d been “mugged by reality,” he famously said—came to be known as “neoconservatives,” and in 1979, Esquire put Kristol on its cover as “the godfather of neoconservatism.” In his obituary, the Daily Telegraph pronounced Kristol “perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the 20th century.” His wife, and Bill Kristol’s mother, Gertrude Himmelfarb, is an eminent historian of Victorian England and a leading neoconservative thinker in her own right. When Bill Kristol was a boy, the couple hosted a formidable cast of intellectuals at their apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. They included the future U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose city council campaign Kristol leafleted for when he was 12 years old. After the couple moved to Washington in the 1980s, Irving Kristol played a regular poker game with Supreme Court justices William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia.
Bill Kristol shares his father’s belief in the power of ideas. He attended Harvard as an undergraduate and then got a Ph.D. in government and political science. His mentor there was the conservative political philosopher Harvey Mansfield, who taught Kristol the political theory of Leo Strauss. (Mansfield told me that, from Strauss, Kristol would have learned the primacy of politics over culture; Trump, in a bitter irony, has arguably reversed that equation.) Kristol spent two years teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and five years at the University of Pennsylvania before concluding, as he later told C-SPAN, “I wasn’t really cut out to be a scholar.”
Kristol decided to put ideas into practice, heading to Washington to work for Ronald Reagan’s education secretary, William Bennett, a friend of his father’s and a leading warrior in the culture battles of the 1980s and ’90s. Next, he became chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, prompting many a joke about the gap between his intellect and that of his boss. (“Quayle’s brain,” the New Republic dubbed him.)
But it was a battle with Bill and Hillary Clinton that made Kristol famous. After Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, Kristol had founded a small policy shop, the Project for a Republican Future, which he used as a platform to rally GOP opposition to the health-care reform proposal championed by first lady Hillary Clinton. In a now-famous 1993 memo to GOP leaders, Kristol argued for total war, framing the complex policy debate in heavily political terms and promising that health care’s defeat would be “a monumental setback” for the president and a blow against “Democratic welfare-state liberalism.” Kristol followed up with daily memos faxed to Republican congressional offices. Not a single Republican ended up siding with Clinton, who later singled out Kristol for blame: “Mr. Kristol—you’ve probably never heard of him, but he’s the fellow that tells them what to think up in Washington. He told them, for example, to stop cooperating with us on health care,” Clinton told an Iowa audience in 1994.
In 1995, Kristol founded the Weekly Standard as a forum for conservative ideas and politics. Bankrolled by Murdoch, who sold it to fellow billionaire Philip Anschutz in 2009, and money-losing to this day, the Standard earned influence beyond its modest readership. No party organ, the magazine often needled the GOP—especially on foreign policy, in which Kristol took a growing interest. He started out by chiding Republicans for opposing Clinton’s interventions in the Balkans and Kosovo. Alarmed by signs of GOP isolationism, he co-founded the Project for a New American Century, a think tank devoted to promoting a robust vision of American power. (Years later, Iraq War critics cited a 1998 PNAC open letter to Clinton calling for regime change in Iraq as evidence of a nefarious neocon conspiracy.) As Kristol rattled his saber at Iraq, Iran, Syria and China—while promoting a tough pro-Israel line—the Standard became a house organ of neoconservatism.
That caused initial tension with the Bush White House, especially after Kristol co-authored a Weekly Standard editorial, blasting Bush’s fumbling response to an April 2001 collision between a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet as “a profound national humiliation.” Vice President Dick Cheney attacked the piece as “one of the most disreputable commentaries I’ve seen in a long time.”
The attacks of September 11, 2001, quickly closed the gap between them. For a moment, Kristol even had bipartisan cachet, as Republicans and Democrats alike turned to him for ideas about the best use of American power in remaking the toxic Middle East. At a 2002 hearing on the Iraq threat, then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden fawned over Kristol, calling him “a serious intellect” and adding, “take your time. … We’re anxious to hear what you have to say.” In that hearing, on television, in the Standard and in a slim volume he quickly published, Kristol became perhaps the Iraq War’s most visible backer outside government. He predicted the war would be quick (two months, he said in one appearance), discover weapons of mass destruction and be welcomed by liberated Iraqis.
When none of that happened, Kristol became a public boogeyman for the first time in his largely backstage Washington career. He got an unlisted telephone number after fielding abusive phone calls, and during one 2005 speech at a Quaker college, he took a pie to the face. Rather than slink away, he doubled down, arguing that the invasion had been poorly managed and that more troops were needed, not fewer. Working with the conservative military expert Fred Kagan and the retired Army General Jack Keane, Kristol promoted a troop “surge” plan in the pages of the Standard, and took the case to television, from the Daily Show to Fox News. (“General Kristol,” Fox host Chris Wallace teasingly dubbed him.) But Kristol was taken seriously at the Bush White House, where he joined Kagan for private meetings with national security adviser Steven Hadley and chief of staff Josh Bolten. Finally, in January 2007, Bush announced he was sending an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq. Experts still debate the impact of “the surge,” as it came to be known, but many say it rescued the country from collapse, at least temporarily. “The surge really is Bill’s greatest achievement,” says Michael Goldfarb, a conservative writer and Kristol protégé. “He was instrumental in organizing the players privately and promoting the effort publicly.”
If he worked to redeem one fiasco for his party, however, Kristol soon helped to create a new one. In mid-2007, after a Weekly Standard cruise docked in Alaska, Kristol had lunch with the state’s little-known, newly elected hockey-mom governor, Sarah Palin. He was smitten, and returned to Washington singing Palin’s praises. Soon enough, he urged McCain to choose her as his running mate against Barack Obama in the 2008 election. “She could be both an effective vice-presidential candidate and an effective president,” he declared on Fox. Palin soon proved the first half of that statement untrue. Most Americans, including Kristol, are glad the second half was never tested.
In retrospect, Iraq and Palin look like two of the highest-profile judgment errors in recent Republican history, one immensely costly to the nation, the other to the party. But Kristol has never apologized for backing the Iraq War, which he still insists was flawed in execution, not conception. “We were right to invade Iraq in 2003,” he wrote as recently as last year. “We were able to bring the war to a reasonably successful conclusion in 2008.”
As for Palin, he is slightly more contrite. “It was a gamble,” he tells me. “I assumed [the McCain campaign] would vet her—not that I would say, ‘Hey, look at Sarah Palin,’ and they would pick her.” He adds: “She turned out to be much more susceptible to fame and money and all that than I thought.”
***
“Why do you keep putting a guy on television that’s been proven to be wrong for so many years?”
That was Donald Trump, in his May 25 tirade against Kristol in Anaheim. Like so many Trump insults, this one was rooted in an uncomfortable truth: Kristol’s bad political predictions have spawned a mini-genre of journalism. There’s “Bill Kristol: A Timeline of Faulty Predictions” (the Atlantic Wire, June 2011); “Bill Kristol’s History of Terrible Predictions and Bad Advice” (Mediaite, June 2013); “Bill Kristol Has a History of Inaccurate Predictions” (Breitbart, May 2016). His name has appeared on numerous “worst predictions of the year” lists, from Foreign Policy in 2008 (“Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary”), to the Huffington Post in 2012 (“I’m told by two reliable sources that Rudy Giuliani intends to run for the GOP nomination for president in 2012”), to Politico in 2015 (“I continue to think Biden will run—and that he can beat Hillary”). Many are admittedly harmless, no more than failed and sometimes mischievous prognostications about campaigns. Some are more damaging, including his 2003 dismissal of the “pop sociology” notion about Iraq that “somehow the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni.”
As for Trump, Kristol seemed almost in denial over his rise. Between July 2015 and late January 2016, Kristol declared at least 11 times by a New York magazine count, that Trump had peaked. “You’ve been wrong, the Republican establishment has been wrong!” an exasperated MSNBC host Joe Scarborough barked at him in October after one such prediction. But Kristol was unmoved. “Sticking with my prediction,” he tweeted less than two months later. “Trump will win no caucuses or primaries, and will run behind Ron Paul 2012 in IA and NH.” Two months after that, Trump won the New Hampshire primary and began his steamroll over his 16 GOP rivals.
Kristol today shrugs off the criticism of his pundit misfires as a function of “excessive earnestness,” suggesting that many of his calls are only half-serious. “I’m probably too tempted to be contrarian,” he says with a smile. “I suppose I could have stayed as a political philosophy professor. … If you get into this business, you want to influence people’s thinking. You do have to take some gambles.” Even so, he can’t resist defending himself, and ticks off examples of things he’s gotten right, from warnings about the state of the U.S. economy in the mid-2000s to the Iraq surge. “People said, literally, ‘You cannot do that.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I can,’” he says.
Lots of pundits make bad predictions, of course. And the fact that Kristol remains a TV staple reflects his provocative and perhaps even love-to-hate-him appeal. (From 2015 through early July of this year, Kristol appeared 23 times on ABC’s This Week alone.)
More important, however, is the legacy of his influence over the Republican Party. And on that score, even some Republicans say Kristol bears blame for the creature now stalking their once placid village, by anchoring the GOP to positions arguably more appealing to wealthy donors and activists than to actual GOP voters. “He’s really out of touch with what’s going on in the country,” says a veteran GOP operative who opposes Trump and partly blames Kristol for his rise. “The ideology that undergirds the intellectual institutions of the party has been utterly repudiated by the voters.”
One adherent of this theory is a former employee of Kristol’s father. Michael Lind, an author and policy thinker who was executive editor at the National Interest, the policy journal the elder Kristol co-founded in 1965, says that the younger Kristol pushed his father’s neoconservatism too far to the right—fixating on aggressive foreign policy while allowing big business and evangelical Christians to set the party’s agenda on other issues. That shift, Lind says, lost sight of the blue-collar white voters who have rejected the GOP establishment for Trump. “They essentially specialized in being foreign policy hawks. As a result, there was no one in national politics, and certainly not in intellectual politics, to represent the white working class,” Lind says. “That’s part of the explanation for Trumpism.”
And as that bold interventionism championed by Kristol and company has shifted over the past 15 years from political asset to liability, it became ideal fodder for the Trump shredder. In the primaries, Trump hammered his primary foes as supporters of stupid wars, offering a middle ground by promising (however fuzzily) ruthlessness against America’s enemies while making clear he has little appetite for toppling foreign dictators. Says Christopher Preble, a foreign policy expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, “Trump has capitalized on the folks who look at the unhappy record of the past 15-20 years” and say they want something different. Those are the people Trump was addressing when he bellowed in Anaheim. “He want[ed] the war in Iraq,” Trump said. “All the guy wants to do is kill people and to go to war and kill people!”
Some Republicans also blame Kristol for more tactical mistakes. Palin, the vice presidential nominee he helped elevate, set a template for the know-nothing, reality-show candidacy of Trump. Kristol also publicly opposed the GOP’s 2013 effort to pass an immigration reform bill that might have helped to rehabilitate the party’s image with Latinos. He urged Florida Senator Marco Rubio to walk away from the measure—a political volte-face that badly damaged Rubio, Kristol’s preferred candidate, in the primaries.
Still, Kristol rejects the critique: “Basically, this argument is, anyone active in conservative debates over the last 15 years is responsible for Trump.” He notes that one could just as easily argue that “political correctness, Obama and failure to enforce the law on immigration made Trump possible. In this respect, Trump is kind of over-determined.”
He also argues that Trump won for less complicated reasons, including a fractured GOP field and his skill as a “demagogue.” But Kristol concedes missing something more basic about the GOP electorate: Trump’s raw appeal as an entertainer and the fame generated by his long stint as host of The Apprentice. “The celebrity thing is what I really missed. And I think that is key. I think anyone else running the same campaign would not have done nearly as well. You know, I never watched those shows.” This is, after all, a man who recently taught a Harvard class with Mansfield on the subject of tyranny, complete with reading list from Machiavelli and Xenophon.
Kristol may yet find vindication. On days when Trump’s poll numbers dip and talk grows about a disastrous November blowout defeat for the GOP, Kristol’s crusade appears as pragmatic as it is principled. “If Trump loses in a landslide, everything’s going to look a lot differently. The anti-Trump dead-enders will look less desperate and more prescient,” insists National Review editor Rich Lowry, another #NeverTrumper.
Kristol has already been proved right about Trump in one way. Back in mid-2015, when Trump first began running, Kristol showed some grudging respect, saying Republicans could learn from his populist appeal. “It’s very, very foolish if the Republican establishment or the Republican candidates treat him with disdain,” Kristol told Newsmax back then. To ABC News, he said that Trump was “not hurting the GOP, and is probably helping by broadening the tent.” He even proclaimed Trump a better alternative to Clinton.
“I wasn’t pro-Trump. I was anti-dismissing Trump,” Kristol says now. “I still thought he couldn’t get the nomination.”
Then he pauses.
“So I was totally wrong about that.”