Mark Elias of the Democracy Docket recently interviewed Rick Wilson, the Never Trumper who established the Lincoln Project. The transcript of that interview (linked) is lengthy, but it really is worth your time to read in its entirety. If you haven’t that time, or the inclination, I’ll focus on some highlights.
Wilson defected from the GOP when he realized the party had gaslighted him.
All of us jaded, cynical consultants were actually the guys who really believed everything we said, like the Constitution, the rule of law, personal responsibility, and integrity. The rest of the party was like, whatever comes next that gets us to the next job, we’re going to be with it. And then Trump was that. I just decided I wasn’t going to be a part of it.
He also understands something that far too many progressives do not–that you can’t have a policy debate with a man who is totally uninterested in issues–and you can’t argue policy in a GOP that lives in its own preferred ‘reality.”
I think two things happened to the Republican Party. The first was the emergence of a separate populist conservative subculture. It came out of talk radio, and it came out of right-wing media on Fox and elsewhere. It came out of the rise of social media where people were suddenly able to pick and choose the news they got, pick and choose the world they wanted to have represented to them. Politicians suddenly realized in the Republican party that the incentive structure was to go further out, to be crazier. To raise money, you needed to be the guy who was on Fox. To be on Fox, you had to be the guy who was the crazy guy. And they’re on a hamster wheel of that. So the perverse incentive structure inside the party was the opening act of it.
Wilson notes that most Democrats don’t understand how to debate someone who is not motivated by ideas or policy preferences, and he criticises Democrats who tend to enter the political debate by saying something like “Check out page 74 of my climate change plan, and then you’ll be convinced.”
In what may be his most significant observation, Wilson attributes the solidity of the Republican base to the fact that “it’s not a political party anymore. It’s a cultural movement, and it wraps up nationalism, populism, fascist adjacency, white nationalism. It’s a culture, and it’s hard to convince somebody in a culture to change that culture over a policy.
Even though the things that the Republican party has done to working-class voters in the last 12 years has been horrific, and as an ex-Republican, I can tell you that it’s horrific, they still believe that the cultural thing — and that’s God, that’s guns, that’s gay rights stuff — that an awful lot of this country that are not in coastal cities, that are not college graduates, that are not folks who are politically tuned into MSNBC or CNN or Fox every day, they feel like the culture around them is changing in a way they don’t like.
Trump offered them an easy solution: “I’ll be the enemy of your enemy. I’ll hurt the people you want to hurt. I’ll hurt the people you think are hurting you.” And that offer, that deal that he made, was a culture deal. You’re seeing them play it out right now with the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk killing. You’re seeing them play it out in the censorship regime they’re trying to impose because a lot of the things in that culture, they are connected only to the branding of America, not to the reality. They don’t believe in a pluralistic republic based on democratic principles. They believe in a Christian nation. They believe in a nation where authority figures like Trump have power because that will make it easier to hurt the people they don’t like.
The interview also contained some hopeful observations.
Donald Trump is so much weaker than you think. He is right now 26 points underwater on inflation and prices…. right now, the economy is unspinnably bad for a lot of his voters. When you go into the grocery store or Target or Walmart or the gas station, prices are not down, and you can’t spin that away….
His polling numbers right now are so far below where they were in the first term, and they’re so far below where Biden’s numbers were at this time in the beginning of his term, where we had roaring inflation. We’re going to go into 2026, unless there’s some unforeseen economic miracle, with an economy that’s dragging on Donald Trump pretty badly. An economy that is saying, “Okay, we tried your tariff game, it didn’t work.” And all these Republicans who backed Trump on this do not have the immunity that Trump has from reality with his voters…
The laws of political gravity still apply down the ballot. So we’re going to go in with an environment where a change election is in the wind. And a change election means that it’s not going to be, as the DCCC thinks, we’re going to fight it out over six or seven seats… We’re going to fight it out over 25 or 30 seats if Trump’s numbers continue to remain so low… He is an unpopular president, and the Republicans have defined themselves by only one thing: being Trump’s guys. They don’t represent people in a district anymore. They’re just Donald Trump’s representative from the fourth congressional district of Missouri or whatever…
He’s a boat anchor right now in terms of ratings and politics. The big bad bill is having very nasty impacts out there on rural hospitals. People are getting how bad it is. We’re in the middle of a real estate collapse in about seven or eight Sunbelt states right now, which we’re pretending it’s not happening … across the deep south in the Sunbelt, we’re about to have a real estate collapse. That is a very bad political outcome for Trump. A lot of these Republicans are also still trying to sell immigration as a net win, but it’s also destroying our agriculture system around the country and raising food prices. There are all the components here for a Democratic sweep of the House.
You really need to read the whole thing, or you can watch the full interview here.
Rick Wilson is one of very few non-corrupt Republicans and he is very smart … another rare trait. The most salient question is: will things get bad enough for those cultural warriors who would rather sell their mothers into slavery than vote for a Democrat come next November?
If these were even close to normal times, I’d say yes, Republicans will get slaughtered during the mid-terms. But if Trump is still alive by then, I still think he’ll pull some of his lunacy crap and try to suspend the election. It’s already beginning: that Democrat who won the special election in Arizona is not being sworn in by Trump’s caddy in the House, Mike Johnson, because that would mean the Epstein files would have enough votes to be exposed to the light.
This so-called culture war is a dangerous game and could result in the next civil war. The administration is trying to normalize military in the streets, “war zones” in our cities and illegal attacks on foreign vessels. Now the orange monster is ORDERING Israel to stop attacking Gaza. Really? He gets to dictate the narrative to the guy who needs the war to keep from going to prison? Oh, that elusive Nobel Peace Prize …
And the idiocy will continue until …
Does Rick think the rural sect will abandon Trump for Democrats? I’m having a hard time seeing it from our vantage point here in the Midwest. Maybe they’ll stay home, but I don’t see racists voting for Democrats, no matter what. However, I do see cult members not voting at all.
Independent voters may switch, and I do think Democrats will come to vote on buses. Rick is a smart guy and gets his news from multiple sources, whereas the cult is fixated on Fox News and the right-wing podcasters. Many of these alternative news sources on the far right have found homes on Musk’s X. There is a big split within these cult members because of Israel’s control over our government in Washington, and rightly so.
Any savvy political person knows who is manipulating the news media and our politicians in Washington. I’m starting to hear that some Democrats are turning against AIPAC now. We’ll see if that catches fire…
The folks in the UK are also waking up to their corrupt government. The government apparently went into mourning over one synagogue victim recently, while UK journalists and UK boats are being killed and arrested by Israel. And, the IDF slays dozens of Palestinians daily and has for two years.
Sorry, Vern, but Trump doesn’t make policy in Gaza. Bibi tells him what to do. Folks have finally caught on that Russia and Putin don’t control Trump – Bibi does. Trump doesn’t want to piss off Russian oligarchs who spend lots of money at his real estate properties. Mostly, corrupted oligarchs and Trump launder their money like a good patsy.
If your political strategy is based on lying to cover up for the cult leader who also lies daily, it’s a problem. Being a dishonest grifter doesn’t build a movement – it breaks down eventually. The folks who believe that Trump is a truth teller are too far gone to even worry about.
“…that you can’t have a policy debate with a man who is totally uninterested in issues….” actually ought to be obvious to legions of people. This sad approximation to a person is not capable of debate, debate has rules, and he is not “into” following rules, we know.
Vernon, you make some really salient points, nicely.
I also expect that Trump will work to avoid the mid-terms, as, he will say, “But, we are at war, and I’m suspending the election…because I can, because I want to, because I don’ wanna loose.”
Wilson’s insight, the this is a cultural thing, is invaluable, it seems.
Sadly, there are people who ARE in the “coastal cities” that Wilson refers to that are, nonetheless, into Trump.
There is a huge, granite ball of stress rumbling down the pike at us all.
Going off to read the interview.
Hopefully we can tie this Big Billionaires Bill, along with the Epstein cover-up, around the neck of the MAGA/GOP like a millstone and throw it overboard from the ship of state.
What will the collapse of the country look like? I had never considered that before.
One thing that I recognize is that everybody else I know, and I live supported by a web of supply chains. We don’t make anymore. We buy everything we need. It comes from afar. Each supply chain needs labor, materials, energy, waste disposal, expertise, and information. The ownership, between public and private, of that unfathomably complex matrix of transactions has to be orchestrated somehow, and those means are failing by a combination of corruption and incompetence.
We’ve seen this in other countries, but none have had the significance to the whole of humanity as this time. Humans have no historical precedent to guide them through this collapse or the eventual recovery from it.
We’ve exceeded our level of competence as a nation. Trump is a symptom, not the cause of this. We elected him, and those who voted for him will sink just as low as those who voted for Harris. Like it or not, we are all in this together, and by all, I mean every human.
A GREAT interview!!!! Thanks!
I think most people on this blog would like to see OJ go away. I’m concerned about what we get when he’s gone. We’re leaving at least one third of our government in the hands of Peter Thiel through his surrogate JD Vance.. He might even bring in the father of the movement, Charlie Koch, to keep the Congress in line.
I’ve said before that I don’t believe the Heritage Foundation is libertarian. In fact it seems more anarchist. They really don’t want government to do anything except protect them and their property from the peasants and their torches.
I dunno, Todd. Even for these two jackasses, it seems even too perverse for something like: “Okay. I’ll keep buying weapons from you if you tell me to stop bombing Gaza. You know, win-win.”
I think the elusive Nobel Prize is what keeps insanity churning. We’re just not used to seeing world leaders behave like the escapees from “Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” It takes some getting used to.
I agree with a lot of Wilson’s analysis. However, he is still blinkered by his own biases. He implies your current situation is due to relatively recent developments. The roots of this go back a long way, to the southern strategy, through Nixon and Reagan, Obama (!!), etc. It’s rooted in bigotry and fear. In a certain sense, it’s been an undercurrent throughout your country’s existence.
Trump (with birtherism, Qanon and other conspiracy theories) galvanised the deep cultural resentments into something more active, more monstrous.
If Dems do take back control at some point, there is a real problem that needs to be addressed. It’s one that doesn’t get talked about much. The ethics and legality expected of the government are largely controlled by “norms” and precedence. This served you for more than 200 years, so… you know… well done. 🙂 But with a corrupt SCOTUS backing a corrupt administration, that’s all out the window now. These “norms” need to be codified into law with detailed expectations and punishments. The courts must be reformed, especially SCOTUS.
This may be one of the reasons that Democratic leadership is flailing right now. They have no obvious and concrete actions that can be taken to counteract the corruption and illegality. It leaves them foundering and appearing ineffectual and out of touch. And these are not good looks.
Rick talked about the marketing strategy of the dems. It’s so bland that it always makes me think lolly pops and little girls. Did anyone else see the new Democratic add on the shutdown? Talk about milk toast! Compared to the Republican ad, which features Voght as the grim reaper, it’s truly weak!. Marketing is the name of the game. Dems have to do better. Maybe they should hire Rick Wilson to manage their media.
Peggy: I agree. Schumer is pure milquetoast. He tries to convey outrage at Trump’s show business, but he and our dems come off looking as weak, rudderless and confused as they are. I don’t understand what more motivation they need to go on offense. Rick says attacking Trump works – go for it!
I’m with Rick. The Dems need to get dramatic. I’m hoping that this interview will be noted by the DNC, Schumer, at. al.
Get out there on October. 18th!!!!!!!