Bill Kristol speaking at the Art Museum at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona on March 3, 2017 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
Declaring he is “pro-freedom, pro-law and order, pro-limited government, and pro-the Declaration and the Constitution,” columnist Bill Kristol, the 73-year-old former Republican chief of staff to a vice president, announced last week he is now a Democrat.
“The Republican party is unquestionably and unambiguously Trump’s party,” Kristol wrote Monday at The Bulwark. “And the GOP will be dragged down by him, burdened by his dead weight, as it sinks this fall beneath the political waves.”
Kristol shared the results of YouGov’s polling of President Donald Trump this year. They show consistent one-point downward movement in approval each month, and consistent one-point upward movement in disapproval each month.
Trump, he notes, now stands at 37 percent approval and 63 percent disapproval.
Acknowledging that “the movement of American public opinion away from Trump has been frustratingly slow,” he says that even one-point movement each month adds up.
He then shared a two-pronged strategy to defeat his former party at the midterms.
“The pro-democracy movement has to try to continue to drive down Trump’s approval, to the degree possible,” he writes. “At the very least, it has to get out of the way as Trump’s own actions lead to public disapproval.”
He adds that the “short-term task of the Democratic party is also pretty simple. Tie Republican incumbents and candidates as tightly as possible to their president.”
That includes forcing Republicans to vote “over and over for Trump’s unpopular policies and for his unpopular vanity projects.”
“The best way to make sure Trump’s enablers pay a price is to make them continue, visibly and embarrassingly, enabling their leader.”
And if some break away, “grow sick of doing so, or decide it’s in their political interest to allow a little space between themselves and the president, all the better,” he writes.
“Trump and his party will be able to do a lot of damage over the next six months,” Kristol warns. “They’ll be able to do a lot of damage for the subsequent two years even if Democrats do win Congress. But perhaps the tide has turned.”