President Trump ridiculed the now-defunct Weekly Standard Saturday as “pathetic and dishonest.”
“The pathetic and dishonest Weekly Standard, run by failed prognosticator Bill Kristol (who, like many others, never had a clue), is flat broke and out of business,” the president tweeted, adding, “Too bad. May it rest in peace!”
Trump’s ripping Kristol as a “failed prognosticator” probably has to do with Kristol’s inability to come to terms with Trump’s 2016 victory, both in the Republican primary and the general election, and Kristol’s cheerleading of the Iraq War.
Overall, though, Trump can undoubtedly sense that outside of the dead-enders in the elitist Never Trump movement, the Weekly Standard is no longer respected in Republican circles.
According to numerous reports, the anti-Trump publication founded in 1995 by Fred Barnes and Bill Kristol was dealing with a noticeable decline in subscriptions and readers. After reportedly giving editor-in-chief Stephen Hayes the opportunity to find a buyer, the magazine’s owner, billionaire Philip Anschutz, decided he had waited long enough and put the increasingly left-leaning outlet out of his misery Friday.
To those who once considered the Weekly Standard an important voice in the conservative movement, that opinion was flipped on its head during the Trump era when the magazine morphed into something unrecognizable: a hysterical voice of pompous bitterness directed towards those who dared not share its desire to hold on to its failed ideas about Middle East wars, immigration, trade, and rolling over for the establishment media.
While Trump brought fresh ideas to the Republican Party, the Weekly Standard held on to its old ones and got left behind by an electorate tired of war, the ravages of illegal immigration, trade deals that decimate the working class, and playing nice with a media that want everything we hold dear destroyed.
But rather than trying to convince Trump supporters to return to the fold, rather than trying to woo them with ideas and reason, the magazine became intolerant of others–reactionary, angry, and insufferably smug as it lashed out at those who had moved on.
Near the end, the Weekly Standard had so lost its way, it was trashing Trump while defending leftist billionaire George Soros.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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