Never Trump Goes French

Bill Kristol is ready to take down the Republican Party, and he doesn’t care if that puts Hillary Clinton in the White House.

Most politicians and commentators who don’t live in a delusional fantasy land know that the only real chance Kristol’s candidate has is the chance to hand Clinton the general election.

Weeks after Kristol announced the formation of the “Renegade Party” and his desire to field a neoconservative candidate to run against both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Kristol has found his man. “Two Republicans intimately familiar with Bill Kristol’s efforts to recruit an independent presidential candidate to challenge Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have told Bloomberg Politics that the person Kristol has in mind is David French,” Bloomberg News reported late Tuesday.

French is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, a constitutional lawyer, and a recipient of the Bronze Star.

Kristol said over the holiday weekend that “here will be an independent candidate — an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.” But most politicians and commentators who don’t live in a delusional fantasy land know that Kristol’s candidate could well hand Clinton the general election.

“A quarter of a century ago, another Clinton was running for the White House, and it was the entrance of a third-party candidate, Ross Perot, that made it possible for him to win,” Ben Carson observed on Fox News on Monday. “Wouldn’t it be ironic if the same thing happened this time?”

“I can’t really figure out what Bill’s doing,” LifeZette Editor-in-Chief Laura Ingraham said on “Fox & Friends” Tuesday morning. “At this point, Kristol is only helping Hillary.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, widely acknowledged as one of the GOP Establishment’s leading voices — who himself has little positive to say about Trump — is also deeply disconcerted by Kristol’s apparent desire to see the GOP lose just because its presumptive nominee isn’t a Weekly Standard-reading neoconservative who wishes to gallivant across the globe building democracies.

[lz_third_party includes=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqkHsUxZKrw”]

Kristol’s scheme “can only help elect Hillary Clinton,” McConnell told Fox News on Tuesday. “Donald Trump won this thing in a good, old-fashioned way and I think we ought to respect the wishes of the Republican voters,” he continued.

“Anything that divides this sort of right-of-center world is not helpful, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to do anything that helps us elect Hillary Clinton,” he said.

But there is more at stake than merely a Clinton presidency, as Trump pointed out during a press conference Tuesday. “You lose the election for the Republicans, therefore you lose the Supreme Court,” he said.

“You will have a group of people put on the Supreme Court where this country will never, ever recover — it will never, ever be the same,” Trump warned.

Even Marco Rubio, one of Trump’s most vocal critics, recognizes this reality. “Despite all my differences with Donald Trump, I have a better chance to get a conservative-nominated Supreme Court with him than I ever will with Hillary Clinton,” Rubio said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

[lz_related_box id=”135866″]

Kristol and his neoconservative cohorts spent the 1980s and 1990s working to change this, and by George W. Bush’s second term, the GOP had been transformed into a big-government war party which put the interests of international bankers and Israeli foreign policy ahead of American jobs and security. Kristol himself was explicitly honest about this during a 2012 debate on American-Israeli relations held at B’nai Jeshurun Synagogue in New York City.

“The big story in the Republican Party over the last 30 years, and I’m personally very happy about this as a Republican, is first the eclipsing of I’d say the … [traditional] lack of closeness and warmth for Israel,” Kristol said.

“The other thing that for 20 years now has been a worry for many of us … was the rise of — the return of the Pat Buchanan/Ron Paul type of hostility to Israel. The good news is that doesn’t have much support in the Republican Party or the presidential field,” he noted.

Trump, however, has changed that. He has vowed repeatedly to put “America first,” which in Kristol’s mind apparently equates to “hostility to Israel.” Now that the big-government, interventionist GOP which Kristol helped create is on the verge of being no more, he would rather see the party lost — handing Hillary Clinton the White House — than see it win on a platform with which he doesn’t entirely agree.