Tucker Carlson

You look at Donald Trump, what do you see?

And so his purpose really for the last 10 years, maybe his most important purpose, has been to show the rest of us what the debate is really about and what the stakes really are and what the people involved in those debates actually think.

Because something about Donald Trump evokes a kind of involuntary honesty in people and they just blurt out what they think.

And that happened to Bill Kristol in 2017.

Now, Kristol was a kind of half-hearted Trump supporter.

Up until the moment

In early 2016, when Trump traveled to Greenville, South Carolina, and engaged in a Republican candidates debate, a primary debate with Jeb Bush and the other 27 people running that year, whatever the number was.

And during that debate, he famously said to Jeb Bush, your brother got us into the dumbest war in history.

The Iraq war was a huge mistake.

Only the weapons manufacturers got anything out of that.

It hurt this country, killed a lot of people, and it drained our treasury.

That was a mistake.

And it was at that specific moment that Trump lost the support of Bill Kristol and everyone like Bill Kristol in Washington, the neoconservative foreign policy establishment.

The people who really sincerely believed the signers of the Project for the New American Century mission statement, which would include Dick Cheney and Bob Kagan, John Bolton, all of them.

All of those people decided that Trump was not simply a candidate they couldn't support.

He was their enemy.

And they became famously never Trump.

And that's why.

That was the issue.

His criticism of the Iraq war was the issue that drove them not simply away from Trump, but to the polar opposite position.