The Renegade Party: Kristol Goes Rogue

Poor Bill Kristol. The Weekly Standard editor is having a such a hard time dealing with Donald Trump’s success that he’s trying to form his own political party — the “Renegade Party.”

Kristol has been in meltdown mode ever since it became apparent Trump would likely secure the GOP nomination.

A vocal supporter of the #NeverTrump movement, Kristol has been in meltdown mode ever since it became apparent that Trump would likely secure the GOP nomination.

Considered by many to be the “godfather” of neoconservatism, Kristol, along with his pals from the Project for a New American Century and The Weekly Standard, spent the 1990s transforming the American conservative movement — and the GOP — into a hollow shell of its former self.

Now that so many Americans are rejecting the modern GOP he helped create — a GOP obsessed with misguided foreign adventures in nation-building and Wall Street — little Billy is, like the proverbial 10-year-old sore loser, taking his ball and going home.

Kristol decided to call his new party “Renegade” after an article written by David Horowitz and published in Breitbart, which described him as a “renegade Jew” for his decision not to back the presumptive GOP nominee and advocate instead for an independent candidate.

Why Kristol thought a word which means “traitorous” would be a good name for a political party is a question only his sage mind can answer, though it’s certainly the perfect word to describe the toxic brand of globalist quasi-conservatism he and his cronies foisted on the Republican Party during the Bush years.

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Regardless, Kristol seems genuinely convinced that his “Renegade” movement actually has a chance at succeeding. “I’ve bought http://RenegadeParty.com. Redirects (for now) to http://NeitherTrumpNorHillary.com. Ducks all in a row. All that’s needed now: a candidate,” he tweeted on Tuesday.

On Wednesday he took to Twitter to proclaim that “there is a viable path to victory for a credible independent candidate.” But Kristol was also convinced that the Iraq War would last a few months and that Donald Trump would never make it this far.

Kristol’s new party has been met with ridicule across social media.

“You know what #RenegadeParty[‘s] REAL problem is?” asked one Twitter user. “Chamber of Commerce doesn’t want the wall.”

“At least the Neocons aren’t pretending anymore,” wrote another. Indeed, almost as soon as the Renegade Party Twitter account was created, one enterprising fellow created a Twitter account called RenegadePartyAnimal — with the apparent sole purpose of trolling Kristol and his fellow neoconservative self-exiles.

In a direct dig at Kristol, the account’s operator describes himself as a “self-loathing American white male who caves in to Democrats on behalf of lofty conservative principles. And#NeverTrump because he scares me.”

Kristol’s efforts at building a viable third-party movement are in his mind efforts to save the country from Trump or Hillary Clinton, but to many Americans they seem to simply be a sad, last-ditch effort to protect his precious neoconservative project — a project which has been rejected resoundingly by large swathes of GOP voters and the American people.