They will be brought to their knees’: the co-founder of the Lincoln project warns against firing Trump

Rick Wilson, a veteran Republican strategist, suggests the former president is still in power despite the many crises

Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump sitting together at a table

Donald Trump, the former US president, is all stranded. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is ready to dethrone him. This is a view currently in vogue among many in Washington.

Not so fast, said Rick Wilson, a veteran Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group that rose to prominence with go-for-the-jugular ads before becoming mired in scandal of its own.

Donald Trump, the former US president, is all stranded. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is ready to dethrone him. This is a view currently in vogue among many in Washington.

Not so fast, said Rick Wilson, a veteran Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group that rose to prominence with go-for-the-jugular ads before becoming mired in scandal of its own.

The new conventional wisdom – or wishful thinking – among many pundits is that, after surviving crisis after crisis, Trump has finally met his Waterloo. Numerous federal, state, and congressional investigations and polls showing DeSantis ahead or equal lend credence to this view.

However, some have noted that Trump maintains a firm grip on his base and, as in 2016, that may be enough to win the Republican primary in which the anti-Trump vote is split among several candidates.

Wilson, 59, author of Everything Trump Touches Dies and Running Against The Devil: A Plot To Save America from Trump and Democrats From Themselves, said: “He controls at least a quarter of the Republican base. Even if it's 15% and he runs Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and he wins the primary because he has 15% entries, that's the ballgame. It is over. Done. Everyone, everyone stop crying.

He added: “Right now they're all talking so much nonsense: 'I'm not going to agree with Trump. I'm going with the hot new number, DeSantis.' When DeSantis hands his ass to him, when his clock is cleared in debates or forums or just by Trump grinding him up, mentally eating him alive for weeks on end, and suddenly Donald Trump's numbers start posting again, all the conservative thinkers who are today like, 'We will never vote for Trump again, we have integrity!' will find excuses for themselves. "Well, you know, we don't like Trump's tweets, but other than that it's pure communism!"

"This is all bullshit, it's all a fucking game, and the game is going to be played in a way that doesn't produce the results the donor class says they will get."

Wilson, who began his career during George HW Bush's 1988 presidential campaign, worked as a political consultant and advertiser for many state candidates and parties. In December 2019, he and other Republican operatives founded the Lincoln Project, a political action committee that attacked Trump with jabs that "when they get low, we get high" Democrats avoided.

Several of the founders have acknowledged their role in the Republican party's decline into a sport of blood, hypocrisy, and extremism. Wilson told the audience at the group's launch event: “We have, as the great political philosopher Liam Neeson once said, a certain set of skills. Skills that make us a nightmare for people like Donald Trump.”

He produced slick commercials that got under the president's skin and helped make the Lincoln Project the most famous of the so-called Never Trump groups, raising tens of millions of dollars.

But its meteoric rise was followed by an equally spectacular fall. Group co-founder John Weaver was revealed to have been sending sexually charged messages to multiple men, sometimes with offers of jobs or advances. There have been vague accusations of accounting and financial impropriety that Wilson and others categorically deny. A number of well-known figures resigned.

But the Lincoln Project survived in a more streamlined form and continued to wage war on Trump and Trumpism in the midterms. Paradoxically, its continued relevance hinges in part on Trump's; without him, it loses the very reason for its creation. It has launched attacks on DeSantis as the “new ultra-Maga megastar” who poses his own threat to American democracy.

Living in the Florida state capital, Tallahassee, Wilson is ideally placed to observe the governor, a former US naval attorney and congressman whose brand of conservative populism and "anti-wokeness" helped him win re-election by nearly 20 percentage points. over Democrat Charlie Crist.

He said: “Ron DeSantis won the election in Florida against a three-time loser, a campaign run by the best Republican in the country, and I mean that because I'm a guy who has helped over the years elect a lot of people. in the great state of Florida. The quality of our operations here makes it look effortless.

“Has Ron DeSantis ever been to a rodeo? Was he there in the fight? Is he really facing the campaign full of brutality and cruelty that Donald Trump will carry out against him? He hasn't. It's like he walked onto the field to third base and thought he hit a grand slam home run. It's easy for Republicans to win in Florida. That's how it should be: we built it that way. In the Republican primary against Trump, even Trump in his weakened state still had an innate sense of ruthlessness and cunning that Ron DeSantis lacked. How did Trump know that? He witnessed the debate.”

Wilson was referring to the governor's debate in which Crist asked his opponent to commit to a full four-year term in the governor's house; like a rabbit stuck in a headlight, DeSantis, 44, struggled to answer directly.