'They will bend the knee': Lincoln project cofounder cautions against dismissing Trump
By: smithinamerica (the Guardian)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Rick Wilson, a veteran Republican strategist, suggests the ex-president still holds sway despite multiple crises
Troubling times ahead for Trump? Not really, says Rick Wilson. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP Troubling times ahead for Trump? Not really, says Rick Wilson. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP
Donald Trump, the former US president, is all washed up. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is poised to dethrone him. This is the view currently in vogue among many in Washington.
Not so fast, argues Rick Wilson, a veteran Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group that shot to prominence with go-for-the-jugular advertisements before becoming mired in scandals of its own.
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"The greatest danger in American politics is not recognising that there are great dangers," Wilson, who lives in Florida, says in a phone interview. "The same people in 2015 and 2016 were confidently asserting Donald Trump could never, ever under any circumstances win the Republican nomination, and there were never any circumstances where Donald Trump could beat Hillary Clinton, and then he could never have almost a million people die because of his mishandling of Covid and on and on and on and on.
"I know that the Republicans who right now are acting very bold and the donors who are acting very frisky - as Trump starts winning primaries, they will bend the knee, they will break, they will fall, they will all come back into line."
When Trump scheduled his announcement of a third run for the White House this month, he had hoped to ride a "red wave" of midterm election successes and sweep aside potential rivals within the Republican party. But the red wave ebbed and his anticlimactic campaign launch had the opposite effect.
With Trump at arguably his weakest point since last year's January 6 insurrection, senior Republicans are criticising his losing habit, Rupert Murdoch's media empire is ridiculing him and big money donors such as Ken Griffin and Stephen Schwarzman are deserting what they perceive as a sinking ship.
The new conventional wisdom - or wishful thinking - among numerous pundits is that, after surviving crisis after crisis, Trump has finally met his Waterloo. A slew of federal, state and congressional investigations and opinion polls showing DeSantis ahead or level lend credence to this view.
Some have noted, however, that Trump maintains an iron grip on his base and, just as in 2016, that might be enough to win a Republican primary race in which the anti-Trump vote is split among several candidates.
Wilson, 59, author of the books Everything Trump Touches Dies and Running Against The Devil: A Plot To Save America from Trump and Democrats From Themselves, says: "He controls a quarter, at the minimum, of the Republican base. Even if it's 15% and he goes into Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and he wins primaries because he has 15% going in, that's the ballgame. It's over. It's done. Everybody else, it's all over bar the crying."
Supporters watch as Donald Trump arrives to announce he is running for president on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP
He adds: "Right now they're all talking so much shit: 'I'm not going to get with Trump. I'm going to be with the hot new number, DeSantis.' When DeSantis gets his ass handed to him, when he gets his clock cleaned in a debate or forum or just by Trump grinding away at him, eating him alive mentally for weeks on end, and suddenly Donald Trump's numbers start posting up again, all the conservative thinkers who are right now like, 'We will never vote for Trump again, we have integrity!' will find themselves some excuse. 'Well, you know, we don't like Trump's tweets, but otherwise it's pure communism!'
"It's all bullshit, it's all a fucking game, and that game is going to play out in a way that does not result in the outcome that the donor class thinks they're going to get."
Wilson, who began his career on the 1988 presidential campaign of George HW Bush, worked as a consultant and political ad maker for numerous candidates and state parties. In December 2019 he and other Republican operatives founded the Lincoln Project, a political action committee that assailed Trump with a punch-in-the-mouth brio eschewed by "when they go low, we go high" Democrats.
Some of the co-founders have acknowledged their part in the Republican party's descent into bloodsport, hypocrisy and extremism. Wilson told an audience at the group's launch event: "We have, as the great political philosopher Liam Neeson once said, a particular set of skills. Skills that make us a nightmare for people like Donald Trump."
He produced slick advertisements that got under the president's skin and helped make the Lincoln Project the best known of the so-called Never Trump groups, raising tens of millions of dollars.
But its meteoric rise was followed by an equally spectacular fall. The group's co-founder John Weaver was revealed to have sent sexually charged messages to multiple men, sometimes with offers of employment or advancement. There were allegations of opaque accounting and financial impropriety that Wilson and others adamantly deny. A glut of high-profile figures resigned.
But the Lincoln Project has survived in slimmed down form and continued to wage war on Trump and Trumpism in the midterms. Paradoxically, its continued relevance partly depends on Trump's own; without him, it loses the principal reason for its creation. It has already launched attacks on DeSantis as a "new ultra-Maga megastar" who poses his own threat to American democracy.
Living in the Florida state capital, Tallahassee, Wilson is ideally placed to take stock of the governor, a former US navy lawyer and congressman whose own brand of conservative populism and "anti-wokeness" helped him win re-election by nearly 20 percentage points over the Democrat Charlie Crist.
He says: "Ron DeSantis won an election in Florida against a three-time loser, a campaign that was run by the best Republican party in the country, and I mean that because I'm a guy who helped over many years elect many people in the great state of Florida. The quality of our operation here made it look easy.
"Has Ron DeSantis been to the rodeo? Has he been out there in the fight? Has he actually faced up against a full campaign of the brutality and the cruelty that Donald Trump will level against him? He has not. It's like he's walked on to the field on to third base and thought he hit a grand slam home run. It's easy for Republicans to win in Florida. It's how it's supposed to be: we built it that way. In a Republican primary against Trump, even Trump in a weakened state still has an innate feral sense of cruelty and cunning that Ron DeSantis does not have. How does Trump know that? He watched the debate."
Wilson is referring to a gubernatorial debate in which Crist asked his opponent to commit to another full four-year term in the governor's mansion; like a rabbit caught in headlights, DeSantis, 44, struggled to answer directly.
Ron DeSantis in Las Vegas last week. Photograph: Caroline Brehman/EPA
"It was nine seconds of the gears moving in his head and you could see the agony on his face, like 'I don't know what to say.' Trump never has a doubt. He may be an asshole but he never has a doubt. Ron is over-intellectualising it and I'm telling you: this guy has a glass jaw."
This, Wilson predicts, will become apparent on the debate stage, a setting where Florida Republicans such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio struggled against Trump in 2016. "All of a sudden, all that donor money is going to go, 'Oh, fuck,' and then they're going to call Ron's people and go, 'Hey, listen, we love Ron but we're worried. We're gonna have to sit this one out for a little while. Let's see what it looks like in a month.'
"And then a month will pass and all of a sudden Donald Trump is the nominee. That's how it's going to go and I don't say this out of any joy; I say this because I've just been to this fucking party too many times now."
Wilson also suggests that DeSantis may lack the personal touch and knack for retail politics that is crucial in a Republican primary. A recent New Yorker magazine profile noted several people describing "his lack of curiosity about others, his indifferent table manners, his aversion to the political rituals of dispensing handshakes and questions about the kids".
Wilson opines: "You're telling me you're going to send Ron DeSantis to New Hampshire where he has to go and sit in a diner with the Merrimack county GOP chairman and that 79-year-old codger is going to want to talk to Ron DeSantis about the gold standard or whatever and Ron DeSantis is going to sit there and get bored and restless and leave or be angry? I'm sorry. Sell me another fantasy of Ron DeSantis the perfect candidate."
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Many have already stated that they do not want Trump as the nominee but would vote for him in the general if nominated.
Anecdotally, I was talking with a Trump supporter (in person) Friday and he was telling me that Trump is past his prime and that he is supporting DeSantis. But, of course, he eventually added that he would vote for Trump rather than any D. I have to wonder what percentage of the GoP base thinks similarly.
Partisans will vote straight Party ticket regardless of who the candidates are. Less than 10% of voters split their ballot between the Parties. I think that in 2020, it was less than 5%.
So people will vote for a traitor just because he has a (R) behind his name on the ballot?
Interesting.
If you have to ask, you haven't been paying attention.
I am not so sure we can count on that if Trump somehow got the nomination.
Was LBJ a traitor for successfully stealing an election? Was Rutherford B Hayes?
The sloppiness with words is something else. Last time I looked Trump did not wage war against the US.
Oh please.
Doesn’t surprise me.
People are just that lazy and getting lazier. I once asked a guy who worked for me if he was planned on voting. He said yes, for whoever the union told him to vote for.
Amazing!
Look for the union label... ♪
Is Wilson the Lincoln project founder who raped boys or the one who covered it up? Hard to remember which is which. Regardless, we know he’s bilked progressives of millions he funneled to himself in exchange for a producing a handful of ads.
Your comments are increasingly irrelevant.
He’s the one who attempted to gaslight his buddies perverted antics away.
The guy is a POS.
Is Mr. Kellyanne Conway still part of the group?
Don’t know. All I do know is that Abe is still rolling around in his grave after these douchebags used his name.
Abe is rolling around a hell of a lot more over Trump being the leader of the Republican Party than he is about Rick Wilson, believe me.
Man, your fixation on Trump really is incredible.
Fascinating to observe.
Your fixation on being wrong and unprepared fascinates me.
Thanks John, for more affirmation that I’m on the right track.
You are the best!
That was Jim Jordon. He just covered it up...
Jim Jordan worked for Lincoln Project?
I did not know that.
nomoremister.blogspot.com /2022/11/that-right-wing-consent-wont.html
THAT PRO-DeSANTIS RIGHT-WING CONSENT WON'T MANUFACTURE ITSELF
4-4 minutes
Last week I wrote :
But I think I was wrong. Many Trump voters seem to be resisting the party's efforts to make Ron DeSantis the nominee. Here's a new Emerson College poll :
This follows post-midterm polls from Politco/Morning Consult (Trump 47%, DeSantis 33%) and Harvard CAPS/Harris (Mark Penn's firm; Trump 46%, DeSantis 28%). The Hill hilariously used the headline "DeSantis Closes Gap with Trump in New Poll" for a story about the latter survey, which showed Trump up by 18.
So after an endless round of stories about elite Republicans' disgust with Trump -- GOP senators don't want him! Paul Ryan doesn't want him! Billionaire donors don't want him! -- Republican non-elitists are telling us that they still want him.
And I do mean "non-elitists." As I told you last week, the Morning Consult poll showed that Trump's support is disproportionately among the non-college-educated; Emerson finds the same thing :
There's also a generation gap:
Why would DeSantis be doing best among the elderly? It's simple: They have more time to watch Fox News. Fox loves DeSantis and is completely over Trump.
But even among the oldest and best-educated Republicans, Trump leads DeSantis, though it's close. I suspect that the efforts by GOP elites to manufacture consent for a dump-Trump movement might be backfiring. No one in the GOP base wants to be told whom to vote for by Paul Ryan, of all people. (He's an unperson to the GOP base, a worthless RINO.)
Fox News personalities are clearly doing a better job of persuasion than other elites, because boomers have grown old thinking that their favorite TV personalities are their friends. If the party wants to persuade the rest of the base to switch to DeSantis, it will have to use the media younger and poorer Republicans prefer and win over the personalities they trust. Who would that be? Ben Shapiro? Joe Rogan? Buck Sexton (whose name sounds like the pseudonym of a cowboy-themed male stripper)?
Maybe all this will change next year, once DeSantis announces. But for now, what the party elites are doing isn't working.
If the gop nominates Trump Biden wins 2nd term!
Quite possibly true. A Biden vs. Trump rematch would be yet another indication of the piss poor state of our political system in terms of the quality of candidates that emerge.
Completely agree, old, unfit candidates.
So many intelligent people in this country and so few want to represent our country. It seems like the candidate pool is far from our best.
I fully agree. It is a very sorry state.
The Lincoln Project, Walk Away, these organizations that find disgruntled former party members are an embarrassing aspect of our politics as they are directly funded by the benefiting party. We really need to reform our campaign laws.
Yep, I used to be against publicly funded elections. Now I am 100% for them. It’s the only chance we have of pulling our election system out of the deep, dark crevasse of slimy special interest money.
And time limits, starting the 24 election now is insane. 6 months before the election is the earliest you can campaign. And no donations from outside your district or state if running for a statewide office.
Yep, sounds good.