Early this September, The Weekly Standard embarked on its annual cruise, for which its subscribers pay several thousand dollars to secure a berth and a chance to spend time with the eminences of the conservative opinion journal, including its founder and animating spirit, Bill Kristol. The cruise set off this year from Dublin, where Kristol admired a Vermeer exhibition, and then proceeded south to Cherbourg, France. Most of the cruise passengers travelled to the D Day beaches of Normandy, but Kristol had visited them before, and so he went instead to see the Bayeux Tapestry, a two-hundred-and-thirty-foot-long, eleventh-century embroidery depicting the events leading to the Battle of Hastings, in 1066. “Really amazing!” Kristol reported.

It was somewhere between Dublin and Lisbon when Kristol noticed that a subtle shift had occurred in his relationship to the rest of the passengers. Readers of The Weekly Standard incline toward loyalty: they have remained by Kristol’s side when he pushed for the invasion of Iraq, when he urged John McCain’s campaign to select Sarah Palin as the Vice-Presidential nominee, and when he grew appalled by the nativism of the Donald Trump campaign. When the primaries were all but over, he conducted a high-profile and increasingly quixotic search for a right-leaning alternative to run as an Independent candidate. Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and James Mattis all took meetings with the editor but rejected his entreaties, until finally Kristol settled on a national-security blogger named David French, whom he had met a few times; eventually, French declined, too. Weekly Standard readers were in Kristol’s corner during the decade he was an eminence at Fox News, and they stood by him during the Presidential campaign when he called the network “ridiculous” and pronounced Tucker Carlson’s show “close now to racism”; “Donald Trump Is Crazy, and So Is the GOP for Embracing Him,” the headline of a Standard dispatch from the Republican National Convention, in Cleveland, read. But Kristol’s sardonic sense of the gallows had lingered into the Trump Administration, and among his readers this had begun to chafe. Throughout the cruise, passengers kept coming up to the editor to say that he was being “too tough on Trump,” and that the continued drumbeat of criticism might have grown pointless, Kristol recalled at lunch in Washington the other day. He was still a little perplexed at the memory. “And these are Weekly Standard subscribers!”

Among those Republicans who think that the President is an abomination, the progress of the Trump phenomenon has unmasked the nature of their own coalition. Within the libertarian movement, a nativist strain had festered; the family-values faction turned out to be quite tactical in withholding criticism in exchange for access to power. Certain revelations did not surprise Kristol. “One always knew, if one was intelligent, that there was this strain of xenophobia,” he said. “The idea that democracies could be vulnerable to demagogues is not a new notion.”

The real surprise for him, unfurling in stages, and fully apparent only this fall, was the ways in which Republican élites had accommodated themselves to Trump: elected officials, conservative pundits, donors—in a very real sense, Kristol’s people. That more or less the full House Republican caucus has taken up the President’s war against the F.B.I. was especially distressing (“They’ve gone full conspiracy”), but the general pattern he saw went further than that. “People are defending things that I think a year and a half ago would have horrified them,” Kristol said, and ticked them off: the demonization of the F.B.I., the racial attacks on Barack Obama, the personalization of politics, “the kind of business deals Jared”—Kushner, the President’s son-in-law, who serves as a senior White House adviser—“is doing.” Kristol has been an operator in Washington for a generation; he is, he stressed, not a naïf. “But to see it in real time and to see so many people on your side, so to speak, fall for it, or rationalize it . . .” The word concentrated his attention. “It’s the rationalization,” Kristol said.

When Trump offered only equivocations after the white-supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, last August, Kristol had assumed that the same Republican leaders who had spent months telling him in private that they could not stand Trump would finally break with the President. When they did not, Kristol and his wife, Susan Scheinberg, a classics scholar, were so infuriated that they sent a two-hundred-dollar donation to the campaign of the Democrat Ralph Northam, who was running for governor of Virginia against the Republican Ed Gillespie, whom Kristol considered something of a friend. “What happened with Charlottesville?” he wondered, at lunch. “Wasn’t that supposed to be a big moment when all the businessmen were like, ‘You know, I can’t be on the board.’ And three months later, ‘Hey, great work on the tax bill!’ What happened there?” Kristol paused. “So, yeah, I’m a little freaked out.”

He has been conducting something of an internal experiment on how much his partisan loyalties might bend before they break. The results have been interesting to him. When Northam won the Virginia governor’s race, in November, and enough Democratic legislative candidates won to turn the suburbs from red to blue, “I found myself pleased,” Kristol said. He has been wondering how he would feel if Democrats won the House in 2018. “I’m a little surprised by my own reactions over the last two or three months along those lines,” he said. “One really is conflicted. I really could make a case that the country would be better off with the Democrats running the House, because, if the Republicans aren’t willing to check Trump, someone has to.”

Kristol, who is sixty-five, has been an indispensable conservative operator since the end of the Cold War, when he served as Vice-President Dan Quayle’s chief of staff and, later, circulated an enormously influential policy memo that marshalled Republican opposition to the Clinton Administration’s health-reform plans. In 1995, he co-founded The Weekly Standard, which became an institutional home for his strain of neoconservatism, the system of beliefs that his father, the famed intellectual Irving Kristol, had originally helped to assemble and which had its greatest influence in the prelude to the Iraq War. For a generation, whenever conservatism and power coincided, he has been nearby: as a key intellectual architect of the Iraq War, as an influential adviser to the McCain and Romney campaigns. In Trump’s Washington, however, his place has been on the periphery, as one of the less likely members of the resistance. His contract with Fox News was cancelled a few years ago; when he appears on television now, it is usually on CNN or MSNBC. He knows maybe “a couple of people” in the Administration, but that’s it.

Part of the emotional condition of semi-exile in Washington is to be a little less sure of why any given decision is made, and a little more sure that each of these decisions will turn out badly. “The tide is towards Trump,” Kristol said, a little gloomily. Even as popular opinion has turned against the President, the élites of his party have consolidated around Trump. “It’s gradual. So you start off saying, ‘This is terrible, but we’ll get a few things out of it.’ Two months later, ‘It’s not that terrible.’ Four months later, ‘The media’s unfair, and, furthermore, if he didn’t blow things up, he wouldn’t be achieving his goals.’ And, six months later, they’re kind of on board.” Kristol said, “Rationalization turns out to be a stronger psychological force than I realized.”

In the spring of 2017, Kristol handed the day-to-day operations of his magazine to a longtime colleague, Stephen Hayes. Kristol still has a column, and still commutes to work each day from the Virginia suburbs, but the new arrangement means that he has more time to himself. This fall, the Kristols travelled to Japan, where Bill gave two public talks—something between an excuse for the trip and a reason for it. He met Japanese officials, journalists, political operators; they were “so polite, diplomatic, indirect,” he reported, that it usually took a few minutes to breach the deeper wells of anxiety. First, Kristol would hear some proud noises about how well Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had managed the President, and then there would be some comforted cooing that involved the syllables “H. R. McMaster.” After that, though, it was a beeline to trauma. Kristol recalled the questions he was asked: “ ‘Do they know what they’re doing?’ ‘Is there a strategy?’ ‘Do they understand’ ”—this part vis-à-vis North Korea—“ ‘that we’re right here?’ ” Kristol held up his hands, mimicking his own defensive replies: “Maybe, I don’t know, I hope so!”

Trump’s Ambassador to Japan, a Tennessee businessman and “pretty good guy” named William Hagerty, asked him if he could say something “reassuring.” Kristol took it under advisement. At his first talk, he opened by saying that, though he had been asked to be reassuring, he could not, because he himself was not reassured. “And it was, like, laughter, nervous laughter. And I could see the woman from the Embassy who had come from the talk. And she was, like, ‘Aaaah!’ She has to report to the Ambassador that Kristol is not entirely on message.”