Rick Wilson

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
When Donald Trump goes to sleep at night, there is
one man in his nightmares, and it's today's guest, Rick Wilson.
He is the co founder of the Lincoln Project, a
veteran Republican campaign operative, and one of Donald Trump's most
effective and outspoken critics. He joins me to talk about
how the Maga movement took over the Republican Party, what

(00:20):
really gets under Donald Trump's skin, and why the Epstein
file cover up is so bad for Republicans running in
the midterm elections. By the end of our conversation, he'll
tell us why Democrats have a good chance of winning
those twenty twenty six elections. But first, make sure to
like this video, subscribe to this channel, and hit that

(00:40):
belt to stay informed about how you can defend democracy.
Rick Wilson, Welcome to Defending Democracy.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Hey, Mark, good to be back with you, my friend.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
All Right, So I introduced you by saying you are
the man who gives Donald Trump nightmares, and I meant it.
So you started the Lincoln Project and your current path
to do that. So tell me what it is that
you think makes you so effective at getting under Donald
Trump's skin.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
For better or for worse. I lack a sense of
fear or panic. And I just I understood from a
long career in the Republican Party something that happened right
as Trump became powerful in the system, which was that
all of us jaded, cynical consultants were the actually the
guys who really believed everything we said, the Constitution, the

(01:29):
rule of law, personal responsibility, and integrity, and the rest
of the party was like, whatever comes next, it gets
us into the next, you know, the next job, we're
going to be with it. And then Trump was that
and I just decided I wasn't gonna, you know, be
a part of it. I said, I wasn't going to
live a part of that in that world that way.
And so you know, I wrote a couple of books

(01:49):
about Trump. In twenty nineteen, I helped form the Lincoln
Project with a bunch of other ex Republicans, and I
continued to be the creative director of the Lincoln Project.
And I recognized part of it was you couldn't fight
Trump on the terms that the old politics of our
country were fought on. We were never going to have
a policy debate with Trump. You were never going to

(02:10):
have an issues debate with Trump. It was going to
be about emotion and gut and character and heart. And
so one of the things I try to show and
model for other people a lot like what you do,
is just not to be afraid of the perception he's
somehow all powerful, but to go and hold up the
real values that the country was really built on and

(02:32):
not this sort of modern iteration of it that Trump represents.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
So there is a lot in what you just said
that I want to unpack because you know, and I've
said this on a number of these interviews I've done
with former Republicans that you know, you all really are,
in many respects the heroes of this story. I mean,
you know, it's easy for me to be fighting against
Donald Trump in some respects because I've been fighting against
Republican politicians my whole career. Now, there's definitely a difference,

(02:58):
and I want to be like crystal clear about that.
Donald Trump is like nothing else we have ever had. Uh,
And so the level of fight that I bring to
Donald Trump is different, and in the formats are different.
But but you know, you and a handful of others,
you know, I had Nicole Wallace on I've had Michael
Steele on Sarah Longwell, George Conway, and I always sort

(03:19):
of have to ask this question about, you know, what
happened to your colleagues, Like did they never believe in
any of it? Or did they was it all a
game to them?

Speaker 2 (03:28):
Like? What? What?

Speaker 1 (03:29):
Why are there so many Republicans who seem to know
better who are now you know, just part of his
you know, his brand of maga. I mean you could
look at people like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, h Lindsay
Graham who were very critical of him. You can look
at operatives who thought that he was just a fraud.

(03:50):
Like what happened within the Republican Party.

Speaker 2 (03:54):
Mark had advance. I think I think two things happened
the Republican Party. The first was the emergence of a
separate populist conservative subculture. And 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

(04:16):
news they got, pick and choose the world they wanted
to have represented to them. And 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 to be And they're on a hamster

(04:40):
wheel of that. So the perverse incentive structure inside the
party was the opening act of it, the second act
of it. And I had a conversation with a good
friend of mine, former member of Congress in twenty seventeen,
right after Trump was elected, and he did a town
hall meeting, and red hat guy pops up right in
the beginning, are you going to be with mister Trump

(05:00):
one hundred percent of the time? And my friend says, well,
I hope, so we're gonna work together on tax cuts
and regularly good answer, guy pops beck up. No. No.
I asked if you were gonna be with them one
hundred percent of the time, and my friend gave the answer.
He said, well, look, if they're going to be right
for our district, I'm gonna be with Donald Trump one
hundred percent of the time. But if it's wrong for

(05:21):
the district and it's wrong for you, I'm gonna fight
for you first. By the time he got on stage,
his wife had sent him like ten nine to one
to one text because people were already harassing her, harassing
people at her job, posting threats on their Facebook page.
And so the fear of a lot of the mob
shapes the politics of the are the headspace rather than

(05:44):
the politics of a lot of these elected officials. January
sixth broke all of them. Now they are afraid of
being murdered if they go against Trump, and that's just
a pure fact. They can deny it all they want.
They don't want a primary election with some Trumper, but
they really don't want to be killed. And they got
the message Trump Trump successfully sent the message to January sixth,

(06:07):
I will send a mob to kill you. And that
is a really powerful shaping force they don't want to
talk about, but it's there, and it's there every day. Okay.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
The second thing, the second thing I wanted to unpack
from your first answer was about how you get on,
how you approach, for lack of a better term, your
role as a prominent Trump critic in affecting how how
Trump and Republicans react. In other words, there's I kind

(06:40):
of view you effective in two In two frames, you
are effective in persuading voters, right, and that's like a
very important thing. But you are uniquely or I won't
say uniquely, you are extremely effective and at the top
of the list of people who are effective in essentially
throwing Donald Trump off his game. And so what is
it that you understand about that second thing, like how

(07:05):
the how Trump gets thrown off his game that that
others maybe don't get. I, for better or for worse,
I'm an anthropologist of Donald Trump, and mostly for worse because.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
I hate having the guy in my head all the time.
It's just it's messy. But I understand who Trump is.
He is not the towering figure. He's a guy who
was raised by parents who basically hated him. He has
always felt like a fraud. That's why he's always done that.
I need the gold leaf, I need my own, my own,

(07:35):
you know, you need to treat me in my tower.
I need all the appurtances of royalty. All those things
show you a weak man. He is. He is driven
by his appetites. He's driven by his and look, those
appetites have always been four things, attention, money, sex, and humiliation.

(08:00):
The sex part less so now he's in his eighties,
but the attention He grew up in a political culture
in New York that I understood from being in New York,
the page six culture. He understood how he could use
gossip and in the window and humor and spectacle to
promote himself. The money part, that's just, you know, that's

(08:22):
sort of a deeply wired thing about Trump. He's never
been the guy he claimed he was. Oh, I own
all of Manhattan, I'm so rich, I'm so this, I'm
so that. He never was real real developers in New
York City. When I worked for Giuliani in the nineties
and early two thousands, they laughed at Trump. They thought
he was a joke and he was the sex part,

(08:43):
you know, put all that in the rear view mirror mostly,
but it's it's always been wrapped up with an abysmal
treatment of women and people in general. And the final
part is he's a sadist. He enjoys humiliating people when
they bowed down him. It's never the last time they
bow down to him. He wants, if you say, mister Trump,

(09:05):
I'm gonna do X for you because you win. The
next time he comes to it's going to be I
want five times X or ten times X because he
loves humiliating people, especially people he considers to be of
a higher social status than he is or a higher
intellectual status than he is. And I understand that at
a pretty deep level. And I also understand that fascists

(09:27):
can't be ridiculed. They hate it. You're seeing it play
out right now with the firing of Jimmy Kimmel. Ridiculing
the dear Leader is their kryptonite. And I'm just not
afraid to do it. I'm afraid to say who and
what he is, and I mean false modesty is the
worst kind. I'm pretty articulate at insulting Trump, and he
really doesn't like it, and his people really don't like it.

(09:51):
And I know I can either do social media or
advertising or written articles where his people monitor them and
they work about them and they take them to me go,
oh my god, did you see what he said, sir?
And you know, if I can take Donald Trump off
his game from breaking the Constitution or abusing American law

(10:11):
or abusing American citizens for even a half an hour
a day, I feel like I've done the right thing.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
So let me ask you a question about the bowing down,
because I completely agree with you that Donald Trump seems
to take a pleasure in humiliating the people who bow
down to him. In other words, rather than them rising
up in his estimation, they actually just sign up for
even more humiliation. And the example I always use is
Marco Rubio. Like people the media keep saying Marco Rubio

(10:38):
has all of these jobs because he is in fact
being highly thought of. No, actually, Donald Trump is humiliating
Marco Rubio by basically saying, we don't need you to
be Secretary State.

Speaker 2 (10:49):
We don't need to be any of these things.

Speaker 1 (10:51):
You're just gonna be the collector of the odds and
end titles of the administration of things we don't care about.
But I want to ask you about the what you
know you mentioned Jimmy Kimmel, what what for example, ABC News,
we can take our ABC Disney, We could take.

Speaker 2 (11:06):
Them as an example.

Speaker 1 (11:07):
You know, they they have already humiliated themselves, right, They
already paid him and his foundation or Presidential Library, whatever
it is, right, sixteen million dollars. Now they've come back
and fired you know, one of the most recognizable figures
on their station. Do you think they don't get the
fact that like this doesn't end like the more they give,
the more they will be required to do.

Speaker 2 (11:29):
They never seem to learn this lesson. And look, Bob Iger,
who made this decision before this was considered one of
the great CEOs in America. He was considered a guy
who had a really good grasp of the world and
a moral leadership style. And they want these various mergers
to that they're trying to do to be approved. And

(11:53):
inside the inside the room, I'm sure they're like, well,
the FEC or the FTC or the White House could
stop this if we don't do what they want. And
what will the shareholders think? The problem is that is
the alligator is always hungry. The alligator will always come
back for more. You feed it once, it's going to

(12:13):
come back up you run out of food, it's going
to climb up on the dock and eat you. And
so what happens next time when Donald Trump says, hey, Bob,
I want Don Junior and Eric on the board of
Disney tomorrow, or something bad could happen to you, you know,
And you've seen companies like CBS agreeing to have ideological

(12:36):
overseers installed at the pleasure of the White House to
monitor their content. Mark I look at this as the
corporate abdication of responsibility not to their shareholders alone, but
to the country is absolutely mind boggling. It's absolutely staggering.

Speaker 1 (12:56):
So you understand the impact of messaging and paid advertising,
free free press, all of the different ways in which
politicians and parties and candidates need to communicate. And one
of the things when you started linked project that became
clear is that you all had a different sensibility than

(13:19):
let's say, the traditional way in which people have messaged
against Republicans. And I wonder if some of that comes
from the fact that you had been a Republican and
you would not grasp at democratic media operative. What do
you think that, what do you write? Talk a little
bit about that, What is it that, What is the
difference that you see, What is it that you know

(13:41):
Democrats could be doing better?

Speaker 2 (13:43):
What is it that we could be learning? Sure, Look,
first off, let me say this. It's a great thing
about the Lincoln Project is we don't have a client.
We have America as our only client. We're not trying
to make an industry happy, or or or a or
an interest group happy. We're trying to save the country.

(14:03):
So we're not as constrained by the things that make
democratic advertising dull, recursive, boring to almost every voter. We're
not constrained by that. The other thing about it is
the Democrats go and they say, okay, we need to
do an ad about it X or y issue. They

(14:23):
will then focus group it. If anybody in that room
is offended by the ad in any way, the ad dies.
They make everything into this like vanilla paste of policy.
They always want to win a battle about issues or
policy because they still believe that that elections are waged
up here. When they're waged here and in your gut.

(14:45):
And so we understand that emotion is a powerful driver.
That emotion can be shock or ridicule or horror or
disgust or fear, and those emotions are really powerful in
the ellectual space. And so we use a lot of
those in our voter facing ads to communicate emotional power

(15:09):
about how you want to oppose Trump, or why you
should oppose Trump, or why you should make a different decision.
On the ads we focus just on Trump. That's just
pure psychological warfare against him personally. And so those are
a little different. But nobody else had ever done those before.
Nobody else had ever made those kind of ads before,
of targeting the audience of one, as we call it,

(15:30):
and when we started doing it. The first time we
did it was an experiment. It was to try to
get Brad Parscal fired, and we had heard a rumor
from inside Trump world that Trump was concerned how much
money Brad was making. So we made an ad that
looked like an MTV Cribs episode from the nineties about
how much money Brad was making. Was fired nine days later,

(15:51):
And we understand how to rattle Trump during COVID. We
put up billboards in Times Square first presidential campaign or
big superPAC camp ever do that about Jared Nevanka. We
knew it would take Trump off his game in the
last two weeks of the election because it would it
would it would mean that people around him went to
him and complained, and then he would get obsessed. So

(16:11):
we understand the psychology of advertising is not trying to
win a policy argument, and too often Democrats are like,
check out page seventy four of my climate change plan
and then you'll be convinced. Doesn't work that way in America.
And we also understand sort of the merger of all
of all the streams. Yes, paid advertising matters, it doesn't
matter like it used to matter. But social media matters.

(16:34):
Earn media matters, big narrative setting, ideas matter. So we
try to do all those things in a way. And yes,
a lot of it comes from our role as Republicans.
When I was a Republican, my job, and I kept
myself as anonymous as I could. When I was a consultant,
I didn't want to be out there in front of people.
I didn't want to be a public figure, none of that.

(16:57):
You would call me near the end of the campaign
if you needed the guy to bring in the really
rough stuff, the really bad ads, and I was that guy.
But Democrats don't have that instinct for the jugular. They
don't want to go out. They worry that the ad will.
You know, the Democratic Party had some ads pushing back
on the trans issue that we made and that other

(17:19):
folks made at the end of the campaign in twenty
four they wouldn't run them because they were afraid that
they weren't supportive enough of the LGBTQ community. Instead of
neutralizing the attack that Trump had used to hurt the
Democratic Party and thus the lgbt community astounded.

Speaker 1 (17:37):
So another question I have for you, which comes out
of a lot of my own thinking following twenty twenty four,
and I want to gut check this with you. Yeah,
and if you disagree, you should tell me I'm wrong.
I was fine, I oftentimes wrong. I reflected a lot
on Andrew Breitbart's famous saying that politics is downstream from

(17:59):
culture is And I wonder if sometimes we as Democrats
and politics generally we get we don't we we kind
of like resist that notion. We want we want politics
to be downstream of policy, like we want policy and
then politics to kind of like be the reflection of policy.
And so, you know, I don't know if you knew
Andrew bright Bart when you were a Republican, but I'm

(18:20):
sure you probably least followed him more closely than I did.
Talk to me about whether you think that is right,
what it means exactly, and like what we should be
doing about it.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
I think it's I think the proof case of it
is the solidity of the Republican base because it's not
a 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

(18:53):
a culture to change that culture over a policy. And
and even though the things that the Republican Party has
done to working class voters in the last twelve years
has been horrific, and as the next Republican I can
tell you that it's horrific, they still believe that the

(19:14):
cultural thing and that's God, that's guns, that's gay right stuff.
That an awful lot of this country that are not
in coastal cities, that are not 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

(19:37):
culture around them is changing in a way they don't like.
And 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. And you know, you're seeing them play it

(19:59):
out right now with the the aftermath of the Charlie
Current killing. You're seeing them play it out in the
in the 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

(20:19):
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 that will make it easier to
hurt the people they don't like. And so that culture
factor is enormous the trans issue. Last time, when we

(20:42):
take this election apart, as we would be doing for
a few more years, the reason that young men and
young Hispanic men and young Black men in part went
over to Trump was they were seeing on sports shows, Hey,
this guy wants to pretend he's a woman and compete
in sports. Isn't that wrong? And those those young men

(21:04):
they're not God bless them, They're not politically sophisticated. They're
not dealing with anything, you know, remotely consequential at that
point in their lives. It's eighteen to twenty four guys.
And so they were persuaded by that kind of thing.
And there were a lot of suburban moms who are
not far right extremists, but whose girls are in playing

(21:26):
soccer or playing track and field, and they were getting
targeted ads on their Facebook pages saying, Kamala Harris wants
your daughter to compete against this man. Scared the crap
out of him. That's a that's a culture reflex. And
if you don't recognize when when you're in a trap
like that as a Democrat, the Republicans will keep putting

(21:48):
the trap out there. My friend Read Galen says, it's
like they walk along and they find a bear trap
in the woods that go, oh, let me step on
this bear trap. Let's see if it works. And it works.
Culture wars are where democrats go to die. He just
stop fighting them in the way they've been fighting.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
Okay, So I want to I want to unpack about
unpack that. I was listening to Tim Miller, another former
Republican who's in the never Tramp camp. He he was
interviewing Joe Manchin about his latest book, and one of
the I thought really interesting conversations they had was about
this exact point, which is that you know, uh, West

(22:24):
Virginia is now you know, went from being democratic to
solidly Republican. And the narrative that we oftentimes hear is
that this was largely a policy shift, and and and
in fairness, Senator Mansion talks about the policy shifts under
Obama with respect to Cole and all of that. But
Miller gets to this question that essentially that you're saying
the same thing, which is like, okay, but that's fine,

(22:45):
But like Donald Trump's policies aren't any good for the
people was Virginia either, So like what's the deal? And
Mansion says very clearly, like at this point it is
just culture. Like it is like that culture that cultural divide.
There isn't probably any policy way that Democrats can convince
people in West Virginia in sufficient numbers to vote for
Democrats because they are better on the policy. So like,

(23:08):
what's the way out of this? Albert right back with
more of my conversation with Rick Wilson in a moment.
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(23:30):
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Speaker 2 (23:50):
Well, first off, Democrats have to stop talking to working
class voters who do comprise a plurality of all voters.
They've got to stop talking them like they're the enemy.
And they talk to them like they're the enemy. You're
stupid and don't understand it, so we're going to fix
it for you. Is not the way you win those
voters over. It's we know you feel pained, we know

(24:14):
you have a problem. We know that your factory closed down,
and we're not going to tell you that tomorrow is
going to be great because we're going to train you
to be a holistic windmill installer. We know there's a
real problem here. We're going to help you fix it
because we give a shit about you. Because we give
a damn about you. And don't try to make every
candidate in every district across this big country of ours

(24:37):
stick to a set of talking points that are approved
by you know, the AOC. Bernie Wing of the party
because the most of the country is not that, and
especially in the swing seats. These seats are largely white,
largely slightly above working class, and you've got to go

(24:59):
talk to people where they are. You can't. I mean,
I would like to have give me ten Jason Crows
to one AOC. When it comes to communicating to working
class voters, have people in the Democratic Party who say
overtly I care about what's wrong, I care about what
you're doing. You know, in North Carolina when a lot

(25:21):
of factories closed down during the post NAFTA window, we
were doing a lot of work there at the time.
We were focus grouping and polling voters and talking to
people at one point, and they really felt like the
Democrats lied to them, Oh, we're going to get job retraining,
and then job retraining never showed up, or if it
was job retraining, it took them from having a good

(25:43):
job in a factory setting to being in a call center,
and they hated that. It was really problematic to try
to sell that as a net net win. And look,
a lot of the things that the Democrats really focus
on connect from those working class voters, and especially in

(26:03):
suburban exurban and rural areas, and that includes guns. It's
not that that's not a not that that's not a
problem space in the country, but it is a way
that Republicans have built a wall, a cultural wall. Say
they hate you, they hate God, and they hate your guns.
I mean, I can tell you from experience, that's how

(26:24):
we took North Florida and transformed it from a solidly
Democratic base to a solidly Republican base in the nineteen nineties.
So getting in touch with people where they are. Stop
stop listening to Washington consultants who say, well, we're going
to go and talk about our new prescription drug plan. No,
shut up, it doesn't work. Go talk to people and

(26:45):
ask them questions. Go engage with voters, Go hear what
they have to say, and don't disrespect them. Don't don't say, well,
that's stupid climate change. Need you know we need must
manufacturing no more. Don't don't let the things that are
the incentive structure in Washington or in green rooms for
cable channels lead you down a path where you disqualify

(27:09):
yourself from talking to those working class voters. That's sort
of my take on that.

Speaker 1 (27:12):
Okay, you are obviously an expert in messaging, you're also
an expert in political analysis, So I'm now going to
tap into.

Speaker 2 (27:21):
Your crystal wall.

Speaker 1 (27:22):
We are you know, we are still more than a
year away from the term elections, and that is always
a dangerous time to ask people to predict outcomes. But
I got you here, so I'm gonna do I'm gonna
put you on the spot anyway. Talk to me a
little bit about what you see the landscape sure twenty
twenty six looking like in the House and Senate.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
What are the.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
Opportunities, what are the risks, what are the you know, like,
how do you see this playing out?

Speaker 2 (27:48):
Here's one thing I think the Democrats should take a
little bit of hope from. Not that the economy is terrible,
which it is and that's going to be a big factor,
but Donald Trump is so much weaker than you think
he is right now twenty six points underwater on inflation
and prices. There is something that maga voters will do

(28:09):
a lot of the time. Well, Donald Trump is helping everybody,
and you know it just hasn't gotten to me yet.
The economy is great, but it'll be here soon. But
right now, the economy is unspinnably bad for a lot
of his voters. When you go into the grocery store

(28:32):
or Target or Walmart or the gas station, prices are
not down, and you can't spin that away. You can't
pretend that's not happening, because it's happening. And Trump has
taken a massive amount of radiation on the economy. He's
taking a massive amount of radiation. His pulling numbers right
now are so far below where where they were in

(28:57):
the 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 twenty twenty six unless there's some unforeseen
economic miracle with a economy that's dragging on Donald Trump
pretty badly, an economy that is that is saying, Okay,

(29:22):
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.
So when Congressman Smith is out there saying, yeah, these
tariffs are great, Sorry about all the lost jobs and
higher prices, it's a less credible thing for even Maga

(29:43):
voters to believe because it's not credible, it doesn't work.
The laws of political gravity is still applied down the ballot.
So we're going to go in with a with an
environment where a change election is in the wind, and
a change election means that that it's not going to
be as as the D tripleC things. We're going to

(30:06):
fight it out over six or seven seats, that's a
mistaken predicate. We're gonna fight it out over twenty five
or thirty seats. If Trump's numbers continue to remain so low.
And remember the U gov poll this week, He's thirteen
points to the negative over always about nine points to
the negative. He's an unpopular president. And the Republicans have
defined themselves by only one thing being Trump's guys. They're

(30:31):
you know, they're they're there there. 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. So they're
stuck with Trump. 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

(30:53):
are getting how bad it is. We're in the middle
of a real estate collapse in about seven or eight
Sun Belt states right now, which we're not We're pretending
it's not happening still and that cutting interest rates will
fix it. It's not going to fix it homes in Florida, Georgia, Texas,
North Carolina, particularly across the Deep South in the Sun Belt,
we're about to have a real estate collapse. That is

(31:15):
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
the Senate. If you squint, turn your head and look

(31:36):
in the mirror, you can almost see a scenario where
we get the Senate back, especially if we end up
in a wave election that'll be a one seat majority
of the Senate's It'll be very tough to make it work,
but there are really good signs as long as the
Democrats do not fall for the bait of the culture war.

(32:00):
Why is it the Just Department today is like we're
going to name all trans people as terrorists. They're not
going to do anything of the sort. They want Democrats
to overreact to it and make that about what the
election is for Democrats. This election must be about Trump's
incompetence and the economy. Those two things. Link those things together,
and you've got a winning formula for twenty twenty six.

Speaker 1 (32:21):
So you had pretty good success when you were a
Republican consultant, including in New York and Donald Trump. I
would think it's had pretty good success on the issue
of crime and immigration. Now immigration is kind of a
different issue now than it had been in the past.
But you know, I think most people think that that
is where you know, Republicans right now are playing offense.
I noticed you listed that though, as among the places

(32:43):
that you think Donald Trump is vulnerable. So that's a
little counterintuitive, I think to what most of us assume,
which is that those are actually the issues at Republicans
excel on.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
So talk.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
Can you just unpack that piece of this a little bit.

Speaker 2 (32:56):
It's rare that a second order effect, it starts to
impact politics. But right now in again across the Sun
Belt particularly, but nationally, in certain sectors, you cannot get
agricultural workers. We've got a lot of food this year
that's going to rot on the vine because we can't
get folks to pick it. I can tell you this.

(33:18):
My family is in agg in Florida, and we can't
find people to do citrus this year. You can't. They're
just not there. You can't pay anglos to do it.
They won't do it for any amount of money. So
construction is another area that is suffering right now. And
you know, if you look at the average guy who
owns a construction company, he's probably a Trump voter just

(33:41):
demographically and right now, they don't have the ability to
complete jobs. So the second order effect. You rarely get
a place where a bank shop works in politics, but
that's a rising concern and among farmers and folks in
the construction trades and restaurant trades and industry. This this

(34:04):
evaporation of a large fraction of the workforce at has
has not had a uplift for them. And they're not
they're not hiring new people. These people, these people do
jobs that no American is going to do. You know,
home health aids across states that are with an older population, Florida, Arizona, Nevada,

(34:26):
a lot of them are here either legally or illegally,
and now they're not around for that anymore, and so
that that price is going up. The Big Bad Bill
is having some impacts, uh on the immigration side as well,
because they're trying to make sure that that that no

(34:49):
one in this country has a sense of confidence that
they can that they can keep a job. You know,
the rural hospital is closing, it's also going to end
up even if they don't close because of the Big
Bad Bill, they're going to end up sucking win because
they can't get staff. The whole thing has been an
economic disaster underneath the surface that nobody's nobody on the

(35:12):
Republican side with that magical thinking bs that Stephen Miller does,
that there were millions of Americans just waiting to go
out and do stoop labor to pick tomatoes and pick
tangerines and pick green beans. It doesn't exist. So and
that's really hurting the economy. The food price is going

(35:32):
up in part because we can't get food off the fields. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
So one of the biggest issues for my audience thing
I talk a lot about. I know it's something you
care a lot about. Is not something we have discussed.
And there's a lot of debate you know out there
in the polling world, in the general public and the media,
among democratic consultants, I'm sure among Republican consultants, although they
don't talk to me as much about the questions of democracy, right,

(35:58):
whether these are freedom of each the fact that, as
you pointed out, that Donald Trump is now creating enemies
lists that he is targeting, they are missing, they are
abusing the Department of Justice in unprecedented ways. The FCC
has now become an arm of Donald Trump's effort to
to kick out kick you know, sensor media organizations and
and and bring them to heal. One of the things

(36:20):
I always hear from folks is, well, you know, that
is not what voters writ large care about. They that
these democracy issues, rule of law issues, the the fact
that Donald Trump should have to follow the constitution and
the law, that these are not what motivate voters. That
it is more those economic issues. And I wonder, I mean,

(36:41):
I don't doubt that that's what the polling shows. If
that's what it shows, I do wonder whether that that democracy, though,
is one of these culture issues that democrats could build around,
that there is a you can you could say that
you know that that following rule of law is not
just a policy, it is actually a culture of democracy.
Am I wishful thinking here? Or is there any salients

(37:04):
among voters outside of me and my audience people who
watch these videos for these issues.

Speaker 2 (37:09):
I had a I won't say a fight, but a
testing discussion with a democratic consultant not too long ago.
It was on the same subject, and I said, let
me tell you why democracy isn't a big issue with voters,
because you haven't made it one, because you haven't transformed
it into one, because you haven't made the sale to
their heart and their gut about how dangerous a world

(37:31):
is without the rule of law. And there's a back
door way into that democracy debate, and it's corruption. A
functioning democracy, a functioning republic with good systems, good rule
of law, you know, legislative checks and balances, an appropriately
non political judiciary that helps prevent corruption, which hurts people.

(37:56):
But the system Trump is building is profoundly and it
will hurt people. It will take away their rights, but
it will also hurt them economically. It will also hurt
them in terms of the kind of country their kids
are going to grow up in. And you know, look
we've tried to keep democracy as a front center issue
in a lot of ways. Yes, is a day to
day voter going to be more persuaded by an economic

(38:18):
message a lot of the time. But Democrats have resisted
making democracy a front center issue. And I don't know,
I don't know if I could, if I could characterize
that universally. It's not all of them. A lot of
them do believe that it's an issue and have worked
to make it one. But I do think there are
a lot of people who have just sort of looked

(38:39):
at it and said, oh, well, prescription drug prices polls
three points better than democracy, so we're going to go
with that. But that's a policy argument. Democracy is also,
as you pointed out just now, it's a cultural argument.
Do you want to be an American who lives in
a republic where your rights and liberties are protected or not?
That I think is a selling proposition for democracy, that

(39:01):
that a lot of folks have got to have got
a chance to tell that story, both in the candidate
space and in the narrative seting space.

Speaker 1 (39:11):
So that there's one other issue that I got to
ask you about because it is something I think has
a lot of power with voters across the spectrum, and
it seems to flare it is it flared up, and
now it seems to have disappeared a little bit. And
this is the Epstein Files. I mean, it is clear
to me that Donald Trump does not want whatever is

(39:32):
in the Epstein Files to become So it has the benefit,
I would say, of getting under his skin, right, like
that's like but but but but but The second is
it seems to be an issue that actually a lot
of Americans care about. It is a it is an
issue that reflects something in the American psyche that they
think is wrong. And so how do you think of

(39:52):
the Epstein Files. Do you think of it as they
get under the skin issue, a culture issue, a issue
that is sort of niche, or something has broader appeal.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
I think the ven diagram overlaps. I neither reason that
even Republicans, even a majority of Republicans, what the Epstein
Files released is not just about Trump. It is about
powerful people abusing people with no power. And that's the
set aside that you know, the sort of snarky nature

(40:22):
of teasing Trump about the Epstein Files. It is a
story of powerful men abusing young girls. There's a sense
of injustice about it. I think that has affected a
lot of Americans, where they say, we can't be a
country that permits this, that permits the powerful to have
no consequences and no accountability. The complexifier in this is

(40:44):
that Trump is, for whatever his set of reasons, desperate
to run what is now I think quite evidently the
largest cover up in American political history. This is now.
You've got the FBI director, the deputy FBI director, the
deputy director of the Department of Justice, and the Attorney
General all intimately involved in covering up this material. You

(41:08):
saw Cash Bettel this week have a complete emotional meltdown
at the House and Senate hearings. And there's a reason
for that. He knows there's something in here that stinks
that is bad for Trump, but it is also bad
as I'm not exactly close buddies with Thomas Massey, but

(41:30):
when he said there are twenty people here, and there
are bank owners and hedge fund managers and actors and
musicians and celebrities and powerful people in these files, and
the Department of Justice is saying no one was abused,
no one was trafficked. It doesn't stand to reason. So
the story, like many scandals, has become worse because they've

(41:54):
tried to cover it up. You know, the old saw
about the cover up worse than the crime is not correct.
In this case, the cover up is bad, the crimes
are worse. And that is why this has had so
much emotional power with Americans. And the other part of
it was, for ten years, every Republican was told the
Epstein files are out there. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton,

(42:15):
George Soros, they're all in there. And they were told
that for ten years. And now Cash Hotel and Pam
Body are like nothing, nothing to see here. What. No,
it doesn't work for them emotionally. So it's a bad
issue for Trump. It psychologically gets under Trump's skin like
very few other things. And he sent me a million

(42:36):
billion dollar lawyer letter the other day threatening me about
saying anything else about it. So you know, his his
problems are Trump's problems in the Epstein Files are going
to grow and grow and grow. It's not going to
go away. Nothing makes it go away, so you know,
And and again, it is a story not about sex.

(42:59):
It's about the abuse of young women by powerful men.

Speaker 1 (43:03):
So I am sure that as you travel the country
and as you talk to folks, you sense a real
despair out there among Democrats among frankly, not just Democrats,
among all Americans or many Americans. And I always say
that Donald Trump wants us to be despairing, because despair
a place into his sense of complete powerfulness that if

(43:27):
we if we give him that we give him power.
What do you tell folks when they say that they
feel helpless, that they don't know what to do, that
they that they doom scroll? Like, what do you tell
you know, first off, every day Americans that first should
be doing at this time.

Speaker 2 (43:42):
And this is something that I had to do for
my own self after a after a long time on Twitter,
I don't go on Twitter to fight with people anymore.
I go in, I roll a grenade in the room,
and I leave, have a little fun with it, shatter
the narrative a little bit, and I go. Doom Scrolling
is algorithmically designed to make you feel like shit, whether

(44:06):
you're on Twitter and it's designed to make you feel
like the world is full of racist scumbag a holes,
or whether you're on Instagram, and it's meant to make
you think that everyone is younger thinner and has better
hair and is richer than you are. All these things
are built to make you feel a certain way, and
Trump feeds into that ecosystem with all the negativity that

(44:29):
he brings into the body politic and the culture more broadly.
But I also tell people there is one cure for
feeling like for feeling like the world is coming down
around you, and let's get in the fight, stand up,
speak out. Find find that one thing that you can
or want to do to push back on this. Find

(44:52):
that one thing that makes you go, I'm gonna get
up this morning and kick the crap out of the
bad guys and go do it. And it could be anything.
And I have a friend of mine who is a
is a public figure in a red state, cannot cannot
do most of this sort of you know, publicly facing

(45:13):
stuff business person. And this person spends a lot of
time text banking and phone calling for Democratic Canadas and
they're like, you know what, I I wish I could
be out there, but at least I feel like I'm
doing my tiny little thing I can do. And and
everybody needs to find the thing that they can do,

(45:35):
and you know, you fight this stuff out in the
courts to to the to the to the to the
survival of the country, I think, and it's working. We
fight it out in the narrative space, the storytelling space,
the communications space, the bulwark fights it out in the
journalism space these days, and and and you know, bringing

(45:56):
you know, insight together. Folks all across sub stack are
bringing the you know, building this new journalism to participate. Yeah,
there's a like the young guy out in Colorado writes
for Lincoln Square and I guy named Evan Fields, and
Evan was a military vet and he just was like,
I don't know what to do. I don't know how
I can do any of this and be in this fight.
And I was like, start writing about it. And he's

(46:19):
become this like really talented voice articulating as a young
guy who should be a Republican voter on paper, on paper,
he should absolutely be a Republican voter. But he's like,
I can't be a part of that country. That's not
the country I served an oath or score an oath too.
And so you know, there's a lot of folks out
there who who feel like there's nothing there for them

(46:41):
to do in the fight. But there always is folks,
you got to find the thing that you can and
want to do.

Speaker 1 (46:46):
Rick Wilson, you are a fighter. I mean you are
a leader of the fight. And I say this on
behalf of millions of Americans. Thank you for everything you do.
Thank you for putting yourself out there. You know it
is not easy sometimes to take the incoming that come
with standing up for what is right and standing up
for democracy. You are a hero and a champion, and
thank you for joining me today.

Speaker 2 (47:06):
I appreciate you, my friend. I'll talk to you soon.