A group of hardcore ideological neoconservatives and disaffected Never Trumpers is planning a troll ‘counter-convention’ during the August Republican Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, hoping to somehow derail President Trump’s reelection prospects with the puerile, reactionary stunt.

Failed 2016 independent spoiler candidate Evan McMullin is headlining the stunt event. The event is being billed as a “Convention on Founding Principles,’ and it appears that it’s being conducted in a primarily virtual format, undermining any claim that it’s more than a livestream. The faux convention is being billed under the wing of a Never Trumper group called “Republicans for a New President,” which primarily exists to enrich fat cat political consultants who detest grassroots Republican voters with donations from billionaire anti-Trump oligarchs.

McMullin, who suffered an embarrassing defeat in his single-state Utah presidential campaign, is advertising the convention as a celebration of his vision of the Republican Party. The former CIA operative and staunch neoconservative is claiming the event will help to return the GOP to its “pre-Trump” principles, invoking the failed presidential campaign Mitt Romney and disastrous presidency of George W. Bush.

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It’s quite pathetic that a group claiming to be invoking the nation’s founding principles is organizing their minuscule event merely on the basis of imitating the real Republican convention. One would think they’d be able to promote their ideas on their own merits without lazy copying of a real national party convention, which will include real in-person events and political content, as opposed to an irrelevant virtual stream of McMullin, Rick Wilson, and Tom Nichols talking about why they don’t like Trump.

The circus organizers also claim they’re going to somehow campaign against incumbent congressional Republicans, raising questions as to how they plan to reach local Republican voters with their irrelevant Never Trump commercial.

A Trump campaign spokeswoman, Erin Perrine, merely dismissed the event’s fringe organizers as “irrelevant losers” when asked to comment by the Washington Examiner.