Rick Wilson > Quotes

“It speaks to the fact that Trump’s notorious base is impervious to reason and immune to irony and is still a deep mystery to many who aren’t Trump supporters. They are willful, petulant, and full of pointless defiance. They’ve become defined by an obsession with Trump as the sole remedy for the offenses imposed on them by a rotating cast of villains and evildoers. In the process, they’ve become easy marks for every flavor of conspiratorial lunacy and gimcrack appeals to their worst instincts.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“STEPHEN MILLER The ideological zampolit of the Trump administration, Stephen Miller is brilliant, dangerous, and also needs to spend a week getting laid. My God, does it show. All that pent-up fury at Mexicans and Muslims is a bad look on anyone. One-time college besties with pudgy racist thought leader Richard Spencer, Miller is the thinking man’s racist on Team Trump.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“Facts, as Reagan famously said, are stubborn things. Truth and honesty are vital pillars of presidential leadership; they create an ineffable reservoir of goodwill for the moments when the man in the Oval Office can’t tell Americans all the details of a military or law enforcement operation. They are a buttress against attacks on his programs, his intentions, and his statements. Leadership demands trust. Trust that the president will keep his word, do as he promises, and deliver on commitments. Donald Trump, the Münchhausen of presidents, is a notorious serial liar and fabulist. He is a man who has boasted about his own dishonesty in life, marriage, and business.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“It’s one of the things I find most depressing about Trump. He’s trained his docile followers to believe in an America that is weaker, sadder, and smaller than we really are. I remain militantly optimistic about America, our rich talent and our amazing, messy, wonderful, ridiculous, crazy, passionate people. It’s too bad a central tenet of Trumpism is to run down the people of this country and describe a nation so lost and weak it requires an authoritarian strongman.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“The Party of Lincoln is now the Party of Trump, a weak, cowardly, amoral, and faithless husk of a once-great party of ideas and leadership. They’ll follow him into a political graveyard, red hats, tawdry nationalism, dumb policies, cruel tweets, and all. Their cult-like obedience to him has consumed their honor, and their souls.”
― Rick Wilson, Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves

“No, not every Trump supporter is a racist, xenophobic, alt-right man-child. However, every racist, xenophobic alt-right man-child is a Trump supporter.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“industrial-scale ass-kissing, and the worst instincts and beliefs scraped from the darkest corners of our national shame closet.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“Bannon’s confidence he is the smartest guy in the room isn’t misplaced in Trump World, and certainly not in the presence of Trump.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“If there’s a sharper critique of America’s failed education system than the breathless, mindless Trump voter, I can’t name it.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“Trump’s short temper, lack of knowledge or experience in national security matters, and inability to see beyond the time horizon of his next tweet will, in the event of a more kinetic crisis, leave American forces and interests at risk. God forbid an American warship fails in battle, or a Special Forces unit can’t complete a mission. He’ll likely declare them enemies of the people and issue a tweet to mock their shortcomings. The bad guys know the same things our allies know: This is a weak man in a weak White House. He is unreliable, untruthful, and unmanageable. No matter how many flyovers and tank displays are arranged to keep him clapping like a toddler, and no matter how tough he talks on Twitter, they’ve got his number…and America in their sights.”
― Rick Wilson, Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves

“Globalist” is Bannonese for “Jew,” y’all. Just letting you know, in case you’ve been living under a rock.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“Donald Trump is a terrible, horrible, no-good president. He’ll 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.”
― Rick Wilson, Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves

“Sadly, the Trump right is just as intolerant of people who vary from their narrow set of beliefs and values as the most fervent Social Justice Warrior on the left. They’re just as dedicated to suppressing speech they dislike; ask Michelle Wolff or any NFL player who took a knee to protest police misconduct.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“Trump’s base is the logical end point of both the anti-intellectualism and the oft-cited “paranoid style of American politics” predicted by the great historian and observer of American political life Richard Hofstadter in 1964.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“demonstrably weak and not very bright man,”
― Rick Wilson, Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves

“Hell, I would have picked a random guy walking out of a bus station over Trump.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“Donald Trump is like a monster from the laboratory of a jackass mad scientist, built to represent the perfect antithesis of Washington’s example.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“In the history of American politics, no campaign and no administration can rival the sideshow cast of characters who compose Trump World. Instead of smart, dignified men and women striving to serve the nation in the People’s House, they more closely resemble a casting call for the set of Real Housewives of Vulgaria. Team Trump is the dross in the American political melting pot, combining raging crony capitalism, conflicts of interest, ideological dead ends, industrial-scale ass-kissing, and the worst instincts and beliefs scraped from the darkest corners of our national shame closet.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“Bannon’s tenure in the Trump White House went about as well as expected; he’s a sloppy thinker, largely disorganized, and given to impulses that run him into political and ideological box canyons. He’s also a man who loves to have enemies. He needs enemies—real and imagined—to function.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“Changing hearts and minds in a society that has passed them by on many issues is boring and hard work. They’d rather compromise with a candidate who will nominate their preferred judges than uphold their values. Instead of working to change society through moral suasion, exemplars of faith, or even just better communications, they’d rather trust the federal government in the hands of Donald Trump to deliver their desired social end states. Call me crazy, but I thought that was the other team’s modus operandi.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“The increasingly hideous tone of the GOP is a long-term brand killer; we need to stop reveling in the fuck-you culture of constant, always-on outrage and offense. It’s juvenile, repellent, and self-limiting. Outrage has a reason, and a place. When it’s over everything, it’s about nothing.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“Some say America's forgotten workin' men rose up in a single, inchoate scream of rage at a system that for too long had provided them with nothing but empty promises, bad trade deals, and government-subsidized carbs. Some claim it's from a generation weaned on talk radio, Fox News, and the comments sections of a million tea party websites. Some say it's a sign of a merciless god testing us to the breaking point. I still think it's because we didn't let that old gypsy woman vote when she couldn't produce a photo ID back in 2012.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“All of this is building toward an economic disaster out of proportion to the mere correction we would experience after a long period of growth, all else being equal. No, the collapse next time won’t just be awful; it’ll be made more dangerous and destructive by an economic ignoramus trying to rage-tweet the country away from the economic cliff. My suggested portfolio in the coming Trump depression is gold, ammunition, and canned goods.”
― Rick Wilson, Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves

“Here’s the painful irony: The big-picture economy, which is largely out of any president’s control, is the real source of this president’s political strength with voters who like him. The SSRN poll for CNN in June 2019 had a striking finding. Of those who approve of Trump, a plurality of 26 percent said they do so because of the economy, more than twice the next most-frequent answer. In the same economic issue basket, 8 percent cited jobs as a reason for liking him. On immigration, 4 percent said that’s the reason they like him. When it comes to other aspects of Trump’s persona, support falls to the single digits. Just 1 percent said they approve of him because he’s draining the proverbial D.C. swamp. A whopping 1 percent said they like him because he’s honest, which proves you can fool 1 percent of the people all the time. All of this is a sign of trouble ahead for Donald Trump, because his economic record is a rickety construction prone to collapse from external forces at any moment. A BUBBLE, READY TO POP The long, sweet climb in economic prosperity we’ve enjoyed for a decade comes down to the decisions of two men and one institution: George W. Bush in taking the vastly unpopular step of bailing out Wall Street in the 2009 economic crisis, and Barack Obama for flooding the economy with economic stimulus in his first term. The Federal Reserve enabled both of these decisions by issuing an ocean of low- or zero-interest credit for ten years. Sure, the bill will come due someday, but the party is still going. While Trump took short-term political advantage of it, every bubble gets pricked by the old invisible hand. In the current economic case, the blizzard of Trumpian bullshit will inevitably hit the fan. We’re awash in trillion-dollar deficits, the national debt is asymptotically approaching infinity, and we have a president who’s never hesitated to borrow and spend well beyond his means, or to simply throw up his hands and declare bankruptcy when it suits him. We never did—and most likely never will—tackle entitlement reform. Nations don’t get to go bankrupt; they collapse. The GOP passed a tax bill that is performing exactly as expected and predicted: A handful of hedge funds, America’s top corporations, and a few dozen billionaires were given a trillion-dollar-plus tax benefit. Even the tax cut’s most fervent proponents know that its effects were short-lived, the bill is coming due, and in 2022 or thereabouts it’s going to lead to annual deficits of close to $2 trillion.”
― Rick Wilson, Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves

“They do need to make the case that Trump is a mentally and morally unwell man, and that he sold a pack of lies to the voters in the fifteen or so swing states that matter in 2020.”
― Rick Wilson, Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves

“Our close alliances are strained as never before. A frazzled NATO feels the eager heat of Russia’s breath in the east, with the Baltic states, Poland, and Germany wondering if we’re about to see a new Cold War, only this time with the United States more friendly to Russia than to the West. America’s role as a NATO ally will continue to degrade as Trump’s bromance with Putin, his extortion of the allies, and his utter ignorance of the traditions and meaning of the Western Alliance is demonstrated time and again. But hey, Trump Tower Moscow will make it worthwhile, right?”
― Rick Wilson, Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves

“If the Democratic Party has any leadership at all, they should dedicate themselves to narrowing the field, fast, and pushing the lower-tier also-rans into Senate, governorship, and house races as quickly as possible. The field remained so large in late 2019 it became a running joke.”
― Rick Wilson, Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves

“Sure, I want to save the Republic from Trump and Trumpism, but I don’t mind telling members of my party and movement to fuck themselves on the way there.”
― Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever

“Old people vote. You know who votes in the swing states where this election will be fought? Really old people. Instead of high-profile videos with Cardi B (no disrespect to Cardi, who famously once threatened to dog-walk the egregious Tomi Lahren), maybe focus on registering and reaching more of those old-fart voters in counties in swing states. If your celebrity and music-industry friends want to flood social media with GOTV messages, let them. It makes them feel important and it’s the cheapest outsourcing you can get. Just don’t build your models on the idea that you’re going to spike young voter turnout beyond 20 percent. The problem with chasing the youth vote is threefold: First, they’re unlikely to be registered. You have to devote a lot of work to going out, grabbing them, registering them, educating them, and motivating them to go out and vote. If they were established but less active voters, you’d have voter history and other data to work with. There are lower-effort, lower-cost ways to make this work. Second, they’re not conditioned to vote; that November morning is much more likely to involve regret at not finishing a paper than missing a vote. Third, and finally, a meaningful fraction of the national youth vote overall is located in California. Its gigantic population skews the number, and since the Golden State’s Electoral College outcome is never in doubt, it doesn’t matter. What’s our motto, kids? “The Electoral College is the only game in town.” This year, the Democrats have been racing to win the Free Shit election with young voters by promising to make college “free” (a word that makes any economic conservative lower their glasses, put down the brandy snifter, and arch an eyebrow) and to forgive $1.53 trillion gazillion dollars of student loan debt. Set aside that the rising price of college is what happens to everything subsidized or guaranteed by the government.17 Set aside that those subsidies cause college costs to wildly exceed the rate of inflation across the board, and that it sucks to have $200k in student loan debt for your degree in Intersectional Yodeling. Set aside that the college loan system is run by predatory asswipes. The big miss here is a massive policy disconnect—a student-loan jubilee would be a massive subsidy to white, upper-middle-class people in their mid-thirties to late forties. I’m not saying Democrats shouldn’t try to appeal to young voters on some level, but I want them to have a realistic expectation about just how hard it is to move those numbers in sufficient volume in the key Electoral College states. When I asked one of the smartest electoral modeling brains in the business about this issue, he flooded me with an inbox of spreadsheets and data points. But the key answer he gave me was this: “The EC states in play are mostly old as fuck. If your models assume young voter magic, you’re gonna have a bad day.”
― Rick Wilson, Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves

“Trump, the iconoclast hero of America’s forgotten working class, has delivered unparalleled prosperity and finally made America Great Again. He has built the wall, kept every promise, and told the truth at every point. He is the smartest, handsomest president in history, not of the United States, but of the world, and we are lucky to have him give up his valuable time to serve as our leader. His royal family beside him, he will lead us to greater heights.”
― Rick Wilson, Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves