National Review’s Goldberg, Weekly Standard’s Hayes to launch conservative media company

Former Weekly Standard Editor-in-Chief Stephen Hayes and National Review senior editor Jonah Goldberg will be joining forces to launch a new conservative media company, according to a Thursday report.  

The Axios report comes just three months after The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine that was critical of President Trump and had been printing since 1995, ceased publication.

The report says Goldberg and Hayes, who are currently seeking investors, plan “a reporting-driven, Trump-skeptical company that will begin with newsletters as soon as this summer, then add a website in September, and perhaps ultimately a print magazine.”

{mosads}It adds that Hayes likely will serve as CEO, with Goldberg serving as editor-in-chief. Both are Fox News contributors.

“We believe there’s a great appetite on the center-right for an independent conservative media company that resists partisan boosterism and combines a focus on old-school reporting with interesting and provocative commentary and analysis,” Hayes told Axios.

Goldberg previously wrote that “Trumpism” isn’t based in ideology as much as it is a “psychological phenomenon.”

“I don’t think I should change my positions about all sorts of things just because [Trump’s] a Republican,” Goldberg told CNN’s David Axelrod on “The Axe Files” podcast in October.

“What bothers me and what I think is so corrupting of conservatism and of the Republican Party is that we are hardwired evolutionarily to resist the idea that our leaders are bad people,” he continued.

“Trumpism isn’t an ideological or intellectual program,” he said. “It’s a psychological phenomenon, both in terms of understanding the president and understanding his biggest supporters.”

A launch date for Goldberg and Hayes’s new project has not been set.

Updated at 12:10 p.m. to reflect that Goldberg has not said he is a part of the Never Trump movement.