For Democrats, the Republican consultant’s sequel to
the bestseller Everything Trump Touches Dies is a must-read
Interview: Rick Wilson on Running Against the Devil
Charles
Kaiser
Tue 14 Jan
2020 06.00 GMTLast modified on Wed 26 Feb 2020 17.54 GMT
All
Democratic presidential campaign managers should run out right now and buy a
copy of Rick Wilson’s new book – and then read it out loud to their candidates.
Unlike most
of the Washington reporters covering Donald Trump, Wilson, a Republican
strategist and ad man, wastes no time trying to be fair or balanced about the
career criminal who is the temporary occupant of the White House. His advice to
Democrats is beautifully summarized in his epilogue:
Do not, as
my party did, underestimate the evil, desperate nature of evil desperate
people. Do not come to this fight believing that the Trump team views any
action, including outright criminality, as off limits. [The 2020 election] is a
battle that decides whether they have an unlimited runway to create a dynastic
kleptocracy based on an authoritarian personality cult that makes North Korea
look like Sweden, or whether the immune system of the Republic kicks in and
purges them from the body public …
There is no
bottom. There is no shame. There are no limits … He is surrounded by cowards
with frightening and tremendous skills …
Like his
previous book, Everything Trump Touches Dies, Wilson’s new effort is a reminder
that the handful of Republicans who have found the cojones to break with their
felonious leader often treat him with considerably more violence than the
average Democrat does.
This is
refreshing. Wilson writes that Trump will “go down in history with asterisks
next to his name for endemic corruption, outrageous stupidity, egregious
cruelty and inhumanity, for diminishing the presidency and the nation, and for
being a lout with a terrible wig”.
The only thing
that can save him is a Democratic party too stubborn, undisciplined and foolish
to get out of its own way
Rick Wilson
The author
admits that he would prefer to have a conservative as president, but he’s
willing to throw his weight behind any Democrat in order to get rid of Trump.
His fear should also be ours: “There’s only one thing that can save him, and
that’s a Democratic party too stubborn, undisciplined and foolish to get out of
its own way.”
Because
Wilson has spent practically his entire working life as a Republican consultant
laying waste to Democratic candidates, he realizes his advice may be greeted
with skepticism. So he suggests he should be treated like a senior KGB officer
defecting at the height of the cold war: “The right response wasn’t ‘Fuck you.’
It was ‘Hey, we’d LOVE to check out this boatload of intel, plans, strategies
and data you’ve collected.’”
Wilson is
“coming in from the cold, whether you like it or not”. He has switched sides
because this is clearly an existential moment. “If Trump wins re-election,” he
writes, “freedom, opportunity and equality will no longer be the normative
social forces shaping the next generation of American children.”
The good
news for the Democrats is that “corruption is always a killer app in politics”
– and they have been doing a slightly better job of highlighting the
extraordinary “depth of corruption that orbits Trump” since they retook the
House in 2018.
His
lawlessness and contempt for ethics is a feature, not a bug. He ran as ‘too
rich to be bought’ but governs as ‘Hey sailor, wanna date?’ … Trump’s venality
and willingness to fleece the GOP rubes doesn’t repel them – it’s what attracts
them.
Wilson
thinks the 2020 referendum on Trump has to be based in large part on an
anti-corruption message: “If Democrats can’t tell Americans a tale of how
greed, corruption and self-dealing define Trump’s Washington, they need better
writers.”
Whether
“it’s lobbyists for Wall Street banks, big coal, the payday loan industry,
private prisons, or any other number of economic vampires, the Trump
kakistocracy really does have something for everyone: nepotism, cronyism,
pay-for-play, backroom deals for donors, abuse of power, lying to Congress …
and as a bonus, monetizing cruelty to children”.
Trump,
Wilson writes, is “sending a signal, loud and clear, that he’s for sale,
satisfaction guaranteed”.
He also
thinks foreign policy presents another gigantic opportunity “to mount a ringing
defense of America’s role as a force for good in the world”. Wilson thinks “the
case makes itself: from Putin to North Korea to Iran to Isis to Saudi Arabia”.
Trump has “cast us as a pay-to-play mercenary force and has divorced us from
the international priorities that once defined American power in the world”.
Wilson has
another, especially chilling message. One of the biggest problems facing the
Democrats is that Trump’s “madness, the narcissism, the eccentricities [and]
the pathological lying” have become “rationalized and normalized”.
That’s
partly because it’s almost impossible for the press to keep up with the
insanity of a president who was tweeted more than 11,000 times since he took
office – sometimes more than 120 times a day. But it’s also because a large
portion of the Washington press corps continues to bend over backwards to treat
him fairly, even though the breadth and depth of his crimes have far exceeded
anything Richard Nixon did as president.
Last
November, the New York Times executive editor, Dean Baquet, told Christiane
Amanpour: “During Watergate, the American press came to understand that Richard
Nixon had violated the law, and it was time for a change. The American press
did the investigative work that led that to happen.”
During the
2016 campaign, the Times failed miserably to do that investigative work about
Trump. It has done considerably better since he took office, but it is long
past time for serious journalists to reach the same conclusion the Times and
the Washington Post reached about Nixon more than four decades ago.
Trump has
violated the law many, many times, and it is time to get rid of him.
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