The Weekly Standard was killed last month, an act that had both a clear culprit and a muddy forensic trail. For twenty-three years, it was the most influential, and often the most interesting, publication of the American right, championing a less dreary and more adventurous conservatism, one that insisted that Washington was the center of human events. But, during the past five years, the magazine had lost about a third of its print subscribers and some three million dollars per year. In the second week of December, the C.E.O. of the Standard’s parent company, Clarity Media Group, told the staff that it would close the magazine and transfer subscribers to a new conservative publication that was already in the works, a weekly supplement to the Washington Examiner. That Friday, the staff threw an Irish wake at the home of Andrew Ferguson, perhaps the magazine’s most eloquent writer. Bill Kristol, the Standard’s founder, reminded them that his father, the pioneering neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol, had titled a book “Two Cheers for Capitalism.” Maybe, Kristol said, it should be edited down to one cheer.

In the press, the magazine’s demise was a media story, confined to the inside pages and told in a tone of half-sympathetic reminiscence. But the death of the major intellectual journal of conservatism, at a time of profound transition for the right, is about more than the strategic calculations of a media holding company in Denver. The decisive turn in conservatism during the half decade when the Standard shed subscribers and, eventually, its owners’ faith, was toward Trumpism, an evolution that the Standard opposed so vociferously that for a long time it has been hard to separate Bill Kristol’s public persona from the anti-Trump cause. (As the 2016 Republican Convention neared, Kristol had frantically tried to recruit a challenger to Trump, a somewhat quixotic effort in which he was turned down by James Mattis, Mitt Romney, and eventually a National Review columnist named David French.) The division over the President among conservative élites has been especially sharp of late, as Mattis and Nikki Haley, favorites among Washington conservatives, left the administration, and Romney published an op-ed attacking the President two days before assuming his Senate seat. The Standard’s sources, friends, and sensibility were on one side of this divide. Many of its subscribers, fatally, were on the other.

Many journalists spend their careers at the mercy of one billionaire or another. The Standard’s first owner was Rupert Murdoch, whose media portfolio was broad enough that the magazine’s editors trusted him to have reasonable expectations. (At the original pitch meeting, Murdoch turned to one of his executives and said, “Let’s make sure we don’t lose too much money,” John Podhoretz, one of the magazine’s founders, said on his podcast.) In 2009, Murdoch sold the Standard to Philip Anschutz, a Republican billionaire who made his fortune in oil and railroads. Anschutz and the neoconservative Standard were not a perfect ideological fit, but to its editors he exuded a “cowboy graciousness,” and when the Standard staged events with Republican grandees he would come. “He liked that we were influential—that was the word he would use,” one of the Standard’s senior editors told me.

More of The Political Scene A weekly column on the characters and issues shaping U.S. politics.

A magazine like the Standard depends upon social currency of at least two kinds. One is inside Washington, a prestige that guarantees both its influence in Republican administrations and congressional offices and its access to important sources. The Standard never really lost this currency, despite its rift with the President. The final issue’s cover story was a friendly interview with Haley, who seems as likely as anyone to lead the Republican Party after Trump. But, for the magazine to thrive, it required a broader brand, too. For years, to name-check the Standard was to project a certain image: that you were conservative without being brutish or anti-modern, that you had some ecumenicism and intellectual style. That kind of currency filtered back to Colorado, where some of Anschutz’s executives at Clarity Media moved in Republican donor circles. “Whenever Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan or Cory Gardner would go through Colorado and have an event, they would say, ‘Oh, you guys own the Standard! It’s great,’ and they liked being part of that,” the senior Standard editor told me. The aura it cast was not unlike the one supplied by The Economist—name-drop it in a mundane setting and it suggested that you had access to a broader and more imaginative world.

In the Trump years, the Standard’s reputation in Washington held. The broader brand did not. There were intermittent tensions with the owners. Ryan McKibben, a Clarity Media executive, “tried to get The Standard to hire highly partisan shock-jock screamers,” David Brooks, a Standard alumnus, wrote in the Times last month. “He tried to tilt it more in the direction of a Republican direct mail fund-raising letter.” By Memorial Day, 2016, when Kristol’s efforts to find a challenger to Trump became public, the conflict with Denver had deepened. McKibben spoke with Kristol. “He was surprisingly upset,” a source familiar with the conversation said. “He said this wasn’t what Phil Anschutz wanted from the magazine.”

Soon after the election, Kristol gave the job of editor-in-chief to Stephen Hayes, one of the Standard’s most prominent writers, in part to try to ease the tensions, but his own partisan apostasy had come to define the Standard. Kristol told me last year that on the magazine’s cruise in 2017 he’d been accosted by some of his own subscribers, who told him that the magazine’s anti-Trump stance was too rigid and that the Standard had lost its way. “People don’t like being at odds with the group they’ve been part of, one way or the other—the crowd at the dinner party, or at the country club. It’s psychologically more difficult to sustain than one would have thought,” Kristol said last week. “You believe what your peer group believes.” The Washington crowd, the George Conways, are on his side, but the country club is on Trump’s. Last spring, Hayes, with Anschutz’s permission, started searching for a buyer for the magazine; in the summer, Clarity Media executives asked him to stop. When they pulled the plug, in December, they required all the staffers to sign “non-disclosure and non-disparagement” agreements or else risk their severance pay.

“If you know very little you think it’s about Trump,” one Standard staffer told me. “And if you know almost everything then you think it has almost nothing to do with Trump. But if you know absolutely everything there is to know you realize it really is about Trump after all.”

What has been lost in all of this is the magazine. It could be appealingly various. As singular as Kristol’s neoconservatism was, the Standard did not so much have a house style as a bunch of writers under one roof, and so it could veer from the punkish (Matt Labash) to the stylish (Andrew Ferguson) to the ruminative (David Brooks) to the staccato and didactic. The most-read article in the magazine’s history is a 2002 feature by Jonathan Last, which argues that “the deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire was good.” My own reading of the Standard over the years leaned heavily on Labash, a Gen X cynic who tended to see corruption everywhere, less for his Mencken affect than for his sharp sense of how human weakness and vanity could direct the course of public events. Watching Roger Stone champion Donald Trump’s candidacy for the Reform Party’s Presidential nomination, in 2000, Labash noticed Stone mounting the campaign bus, which was named A Touch of Class, and announcing, “I’m here. Who needs to be spun?” The essential quality of the Trump apparatus, its un-embarrassability, was laid bare, two decades ahead of schedule.