Republican candidate Donald Trump is firing back after neoconservative operative Bill Kristol announced that he expects an independent candidate to enter the race to split the Republican vote.
Kristol’s effort to get a candidate to run on his anti-Trump “Latter-Day Republicans” ticket – already condemned by the Republican National Committee – has apparently come to fruition.
Trump did not take the announcement lying down. The presumptive Republican nominee slammed Kristol and implored Republicans to keep the “Weekly Standard” editor in line.
Kristol recently met with #NeverTrump champion Mitt Romney to discuss a third-party campaign, but Kristol has hinted that Romney will not be the independent “White Knight.” Kristol tweeted Saturday, “If Mitt decides he can’t, someone will step forward to run” then quoted William Gladstone to declare, “The resources of civilization are not yet exhausted.”
This is not the first time Trump and Kristol have sparred on Twitter. When Trump asked last week why networks continue to employ Kristol’s punditry services, Kristol admitted that he had been wrong to have underestimated Trump’s political appeal:
Kristol’s neoconservative inner circle has reason to fear the threat posed by a populist outsider, especially one who could gain anti-Establishment traction by attacking the legacy of the Kristol-supported Iraq War. Kristol’s “Weekly Standard” magazine and his son-in-law Matt Continetti’s blog “Free Beacon” hammered Trump throughout the Republican primaries to little avail. The “Beacon” blog’s writers and editors flogged the “small hands” insult that infamously made it into Marco Rubio’s campaign stump speech in Rubio’s desperate final days.
Trump’s steadfast support from paleoconservative icon and Kristol arch-nemesis Pat Buchanan clearly terrified the neoconservative wing of the party, which still remembers how Buchanan drummed up three million votes against George Bush in the 1992 Republican primary by blasting globalist trade policy.
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