Bill Kristol

This is Bill Kristol now, breathlessly moralizing about Trump’s rhetoric like an aging professor desperate for tenure in a gender studies department. The guy who once championed preemptive war, shrugging off civilian casualties as the necessary price of American dominance, defending black sites, indefinite detention, and the carnage of Iraq and Afghanistan, now clutches his pearls over the supposed threat to trans people. The same Bill Kristol who dismissed Abu Ghraib as exaggerated liberal outrage, who brushed aside torture and drone strikes as necessary for maintaining global order, now shudders at the president’s rhetoric.

The Kristol of 2003 would have mocked the Kristol of today. He would have called him weak, unserious, a squishy liberal begging for elite approval. It’s important to emphasize that he didn’t just support the Iraq War – he designed it. His think tank, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), wasn’t just a cheerleader for interventionism; it was the blueprint for the Bush administration’s foreign policy, the intellectual engine behind America’s march into endless war. Kristol wasn’t some backroom strategist – he was everywhere, the go-to guy for cable news whenever a network needed a “serious” conservative to justify another invasion, another bombing campaign, another flex of American empire. The only thing Bill Kristol took more seriously than American hegemony was his own importance in shaping it.

Then it all fell apart. The Iraq War became a catastrophe. The Republican base, tired of endless war, turned against the neocon agenda. The rise of Trump in 2016 was the final nail in Kristol’s conservative coffin. His entire worldview – his wars, his think tanks, his endless faith in elite decision-making – was rejected. Unable to accept that he was no longer the kingmaker, Kristol made a choice. A rather poor choice, I might add. If he couldn’t control the Republican Party, he would burn it down – or do everything in his power to. It wasn’t courage, nor was it principle. As anyone with a functioning brain can see, it was pure spite masquerading as moral righteousness. A reinvention this transparently brazen hasn’t been attempted since Madonna tried to go country.

The conscious rebrand really gained momentum in 2018, when The Weekly Standard, once Kristol’s vehicle for influence, was declared dead. Not because of Trump, but because it had become unreadable – a bitter, joyless screed where Kristol and his fellow neocon rejects gathered to shake their fists at a party that had left them behind. The Weekly Standard was, in many ways, suffocated by its own irrelevance.

But Kristol wasn’t going to go down quietly. He still needed a paycheck; he still needed an audience.  So, he launched The Bulwark. At first, under Charlie Sykes, it had a sharpness to it – a conservative-leaning, anti-Trump publication that, while irritating, at least had a voice. But Kristol infected it like a virus. Under his influence, it devolved into a second-rate Huffington Post, a place where former neocons pretend to care about woke causes to maintain their relevance.

Kristol became a mascot for the anti-Trump resistance, parroting every progressive talking point his new patrons demanded. It wasn’t enough to despise Trump – he had to prove his loyalty to the new regime. He started praising liberal economic policies, embraced gun control, and, most laughably, became a champion of identity politics.

Kristol is the most shameless of the Never Trump sellouts, but he’s hardly alone. Another Bush-era war hawk, David Frum, followed the same well-worn path. The architect of the infamous “Axis of Evil” slogan now churns out cringeworthy think pieces about “saving democracy” in The Atlantic. Then, there’s Jennifer Rubin, once a reliable Romney-style conservative, who has reinvented herself as a shrill Democratic operative, indistinguishable from the very people she spent years attacking.

Of course, these figures didn’t shift out of principle; they pivoted out of necessity. The Republican Party cast them out, and rather than face irrelevance, they latched onto the only audience willing to take them in: the liberal establishment. But here’s the rather brutal irony: Kristol’s new allies don’t respect him. To them, he’s not a thinker or a leader; he’s a prop, a convenient defector trotted out to confirm their preconceptions. He exists in a kind of ideological purgatory, too compromised to return to the right, too transactional to ever be truly embraced by the left. The moment he steps out of line, the moment he becomes inconvenient, they’ll cast him aside like a discarded campaign leaflet. And when that day comes – and it will come – when the left finds a shinier, more useful ex-conservative to parade around, Kristol will find himself in the one place he’s spent his life trying to avoid – total irrelevance.