Marc Elias: Rick Wilson, welcome to Defending Democracy.
Rick Wilson: Hey Marc, good to be back with you my friend.
Marc Elias: I introduced you by saying you are the man who gives Donald Trump nightmares, and I meant it. You started the Lincoln Project and your current path to do just that. Tell me, what is it that you think makes you so effective at getting under Donald Trump's skin?
Rick Wilson: For better or for worse, I lack a sense of fear or panic. I understood from a long career in the Republican Party something that happened right as Trump became powerful in the system: 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. I decided I wasn't going to live a part of that in that world, that way.
I wrote a couple of books about Trump, and in 2019, I helped form the Lincoln Project with a bunch of other ex-Republicans. I continue 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 have an issues debate with Trump. It was going to be about emotion and gut and character and heart. 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 not this sort of modern iteration of it that Trump represents.
Marc Elias: There is a lot in what you just said that I want to unpack because. I've said this in a number of these interviews I've done with former Republicans, that you all really are, in many respects, the heroes of this story. 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, and I want to be crystal clear about that: Donald Trump is like nothing else we have ever had. The level of fight that I bring to Donald Trump is different, and the formats are different.
But, you know, you and a handful of others — I had Nicole Wallace on, I've had Michael Steele on, Sarah Longwell, George Conway — I always sort of have to ask this question: what happened to your colleagues? Did they never believe in any of it, or was it all a game to them? Like, why are there so many Republicans who seem to know better who are now just part of his brand of MAGA? You could look at people like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, who were very critical of him. You can look at operatives who thought that he was just a fraud. What is it that has happened within the Republican Party?
Rick Wilson: 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.
The second act of it: I had a conversation with a good friend of mine, a former member of Congress, in 2017, right after Trump was elected. He did a town hall meeting, and a red hat guy pops up right at the beginning: "Are you gonna be with Mr. Trump 100% of the time?" And my friend says, "Well, I hope so. We're gonna work together on tax cuts and regulation." Good answer. The guy pops back up. "No, no, I asked if you were gonna be with him 100% of the time." My friend gave the answer, he said, "Well look, if they're gonna be right for our district, I'm gonna be with Donald Trump 100% of the time. But if it's wrong for the district and it's wrong for you, I'm gonna fight for you first." By the time he got off stage, his wife had sent him like ten 911 texts because people were already harassing her, harassing people at her job, posting threats on their Facebook page.
So the fear of a lot of the mob shapes the headspace, rather than the politics, of a lot of these elected officials. January 6th 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 successfully sent the message on January 6th: "I will send a mob to kill you." That is a really powerful shaping force they don't want to talk about, but it's there, and it's there every day.
Marc Elias: Okay, the second thing I wanted to unpack from your first answer was about how you approach, for lack of a better term, your role as a prominent Trump critic in affecting how Trump and Republicans react. In other words, I kind of view you as effective in two frames. You are effective in persuading voters, right? And that's 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. So, what is it that you understand about that second thing, like how Trump gets thrown off his game, that others maybe don't get?
Rick Wilson: For better or for worse, I'm an anthropologist of Donald Trump. And mostly for worse, because I hate having the guy in my head all the time. It's messy. But I understand who Trump is. He is not a 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 needed the gold leaf, "I need my own tower," "You need to treat me in my tower," "I need all the appurtences of royalty." All those things show you a weak man. He is driven by his appetites, and look, those appetites have always been four things: attention, money, sex, and humiliation. The sex part, less so now that he's in his 80s, 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 innuendo and humor and spectacle to promote himself. The money part, that's just sort of a deeply wired thing about Trump. He's never been the guy he claimed he was. "I own all of Manhattan," "I'm so rich," "I'm so this," "I'm so that." He never was. Real developers in New York City, when I worked for Giuliani in the '90s and early 2000s, they laughed at Trump. They thought he was a joke, and he was. The sex part, you know, put all that in the rearview mirror mostly, but 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 bow down to him, it's never the last time they bow down to him. He wants, if you say, "Mr. Trump, I'm gonna do X for you because you win," the next time he comes to you, it's gonna be, "I want five times X or 10 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. I understand that at a pretty deep level, and I also understand that fascists 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 not afraid to say who and what he is. 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. I know I can do social media or advertising or written articles where his people monitor them and they worry about them and they take them to him and go, "My God, did you see what he said, sir?" And if I can take Donald Trump off his game from breaking the constitution or abusing American law or abusing American citizens for even a half an hour a day, I feel like I've done the right thing.
Marc Elias: So let me ask you a question about the bowing down, because I completely agree with you that Donald Trump seems to take 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. The example I always use is Marco Rubio. People, the media keeps saying Marco Rubio 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 of State. We don't need you to be any of these things. You're just gonna be the collector of the odds and ends titles of the administration of things we don't care about." I wanna ask you about what you mentioned, Jimmy Kimmel. For example, ABC Disney, we could take them as an example. They have already humiliated themselves, right? They already paid him and his foundation or presidential library or whatever it is, $16 million. Now they've come back and fired one of the most recognizable figures on their station. Do you think they don't get the fact that this doesn't end? Like the more they give, the more they will be required to do?
Rick Wilson: They never seem to learn this lesson. 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 that they're trying to do to be approved. Inside the room, I'm sure they're like, "Well, 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 the alligator is always hungry. The alligator will always come back for more. You feed it once, it's gonna come back up. You run out of food, it's gonna climb up on the dock and eat you. So what happens next time when Donald Trump says, "Hey, Bob, I want Don Jr. and Eric on the board of Disney tomorrow, or something bad could happen to you"? You've seen companies like CBS agreeing to have ideological overseers installed at the pleasure of the White House to monitor their content. Marc, 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.
Marc Elias: You understand the impact of messaging and paid advertising, free press, all of the different ways in which politicians and parties and candidates need to communicate. One of the things when you started the Lincoln Project that became clear is that you all had a different sensibility than, let's say, the traditional way in which people have messaged against Republicans. I wonder if some of that comes from the fact that you had been a Republican and you had not grown up as a Democratic media operative. Talk a little bit about that. What is it that, what is the difference that you see? What is it that Democrats could be doing better? What is it that we could be learning?
Rick Wilson: Absolutely. First off, let me say this. 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 an interest group happy. We're trying to save the country. 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 X or Y issue." They 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 elections are waged up here, when they're waged here [heart] and in your gut. 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 electoral space. We use a lot of those in our voter-facing ads to communicate emotional power 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. So those are a little different, but nobody else had ever done those before. Nobody else had ever made those kinds of ads before, of targeting the audience of one, as we call it.
When we started doing it, the first time we did it was an experiment. It was to try to get Brad Parscale fired. 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. He was fired nine days later. We understand how to rattle Trump. During COVID, we put up billboards in Times Square, the first presidential campaign or big super PAC campaign to ever do that, about Jared and Ivanka. We knew it would take Trump off his game in the last two weeks of the election because it would mean that people around him went to him and complained, and then he would get obsessed. We understand the psychology of advertising is not trying to win a policy argument. Too often Democrats are like, "Check out page 74 of my climate change plan, and then you'll be convinced." It doesn't work that way in America. We also understand sort of the merger of all the streams.
Yes, paid advertising matters, but it doesn't matter like it used to matter. Social media matters. Earned 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, 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 — 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 there. The Democratic party had some ads pushing back on the trans issue that we made and that other folks made at the end of the campaign in '24. 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. Astounding.
Marc Elias: I reflected a lot on Andrew Breitbart's famous saying that politics is downstream from culture. I wonder if sometimes we as Democrats, and in politics generally, resist that notion. We want politics to be downstream of policy. We want policy first and then politics to kind of be the reflection of policy. I don't know if you knew Andrew Breitbart when you were a Republican, but I'm sure you probably at least followed him more closely than I did. Talk to me about whether you think that is right, what it means exactly, and what we should be doing about it now in 2025.
Rick Wilson: I think the proof case of it is the solidity of the Republican base because 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.
So that culture factor is enormous. The trans issue last time, when we take this election apart, as we will 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 young men, God bless them, they're not politically sophisticated. They're not dealing with anything remotely consequential at that point in their lives. It's 18- to 24-year-old guys, and so they were persuaded by that kind of thing. There were a lot of suburban moms who are not far-right extremists but whose girls are playing 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." It scared the crap out of them. That's a culture reflex, and if you don't recognize when you're in a trap like that as a Democrat, the Republicans will keep putting the trap out there. My friend Reed Galen says it's like they walk along, they find a bear trap in the woods and go, "Hell, let me step on this bear trap. Let's see if it works." And it works. Culture wars are where Democrats go to die. They need to stop fighting them in the way they've been fighting.
Marc Elias: I was listening to Tim Miller, another former Republican who was in the Never Trump camp. He was interviewing Joe Manchin about his latest book, and one of the really interesting conversations they had was about this exact point, which is that West Virginia went from being Democratic to solidly Republican. The narrative that we oftentimes hear is that this was largely a policy shift, and in fairness, Senator Manchin talks about the policy shifts under Obama with respect to coal and all of that. But Miller gets to this question that essentially you're saying the same thing, which is, "Donald Trump's policies aren't any good for the people of West Virginia either. So, what's the deal?" And Manchin says very clearly, "At this point, it is just culture. It is that cultural divide." Isn't there 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? What's the way out of this?
Rick Wilson: Well, first off, Democrats have to stop talking to working-class voters 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." It's not the way you win those voters over. It's, "We know you feel pain. We know 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 stick to a set of talking points that are approved by the AOC-Bernie wing of the party, because most of the country is not that. Especially in the swing seats, these seats are largely white, largely slightly above working class, and you've got to go talk to people where they are.
Give me 10 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." In North Carolina, when a lot 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: "We're gonna get job retraining." And then job retraining never showed up. Or if it was job retraining, it took them from having a good 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. A lot of the things that the Democrats really focus on disconnect from those working-class voters, especially in suburban, exurban, and rural areas. And that includes guns.
It's not that that's not a problem space in the country, but it is a way that Republicans have built a cultural wall. "So yeah, they hate you, they hate God, and they hate your guns." I mean, I can tell you from experience, that's how we took North Florida and transformed it from a solidly Democratic base to a solidly Republican base in the 1990s. So getting in touch with people where they are, 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 ask them questions. Go engage with voters. Go hear what they have to say and don't disrespect them. Don't say, "Well, that's stupid. Climate change, you know, we need less manufacturing, not more." 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 yourself from talking to those working-class voters. That's my take on it.
Marc Elias: Okay, you are obviously an expert in messaging. You're also an expert in political analysis. So I'm now gonna tap into your crystal ball. We are still more than a year away from midterm elections, and that is always a dangerous time to ask people to predict outcomes, but I got you here, so I'm gonna put you on the spot anyway. Talk to me a little bit about what you see the landscape of 2026 looking like in the House and Senate. If you want bonus points, you can add in governors and others. What are the opportunities? What are the risks? How do you see this playing out?
Rick Wilson: 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 26 points underwater on inflation and prices. There is something that MAGA voters will do 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 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.
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. 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 voters to believe because it's not credible. It doesn't work.
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. That's a mistaken predicate. We're going to fight it out over 25 or 30 seats if Trump's numbers continue to remain so low. Remember the YouGov poll this week: he's 13 points to the negative. Overall, he's about nine points to the negative. 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. 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 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 still, and that a cut in interest rates will fix it. It's not gonna fix it. Homes in Florida, Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, particularly 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.
The Senate, if you squint, turn your head, and look 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. 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. Why is it that the Justice Department today is like, "We're gonna name all trans people as terrorists"? They're not gonna 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. Link those two things together, and you've got a winning formula for 2026.
Marc Elias: So you had pretty good success when you were a Republican consultant, including in New York, and Donald Trump, one would think, has 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 I think most people think that that is where Republicans right now are playing offense. I noticed you listed that, though, as among the places that you think Donald Trump is vulnerable. So that's a little counterintuitive to what most of us assume, which is that those are actually the issues that Republicans excel on. Could you just unpack that piece of this a little bit?
Rick Wilson: It's rare that a second-order effect starts to impact politics, but right now, again, across the Sunbelt 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, my family is in ag in Florida, and we can't find people to do citrus this year. They're just not there. You can't pay Anglos to do it. They won't do it for any amount of money. 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 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 shot works in politics, but that's a rising concern. Among farmers and folks in the construction trades and restaurant trades and industry, this evaporation of a large fraction of the workforce has not had an uplift for them, and they're not hiring new people. These people do jobs that no American is going to do. Home health aides across states with an older population — Florida, Arizona, Nevada — a lot of them are here either legally or illegally, and now they're not around for that anymore. And so that price is going up. The big bad bill is having some impacts on the immigration side as well because they're trying to make sure that no one in this country has a sense of confidence that they can keep a job.
You know, the rural hospitals closing, it's also gonna end up, even if they don't close because of the big bad bill, they're gonna end up sucking wind because they can't get staff. The whole thing has been an economic disaster underneath the surface that nobody's, nobody on the 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. That's really hurting the economy. The food price is going up in part because we can't get food off the fields.
Marc Elias: One of the biggest issues for my audience, something I talk a lot about, and I know it's something you care a lot about, is not something we have discussed. There's a lot of debate out there in the polling world, in the general public, in 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? Whether these are freedom of speech, the fact that, as you pointed out, Donald Trump is now creating enemies lists. They are abusing the Department of Justice in unprecedented ways. The FCC has now become an arm of Donald Trump's effort to kick out, you know, censor media organizations and bring them to heel.
One of the things I always hear from folks is, "Well, you know, that is not what voters writ large care about, that these democracy issues, rule of law issues, 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." I don't doubt that that's what the polling shows, if that's what it shows. I do wonder whether democracy is one of these culture issues that Democrats could build around, that you could say that following the rule of law is not just a policy, it is actually a culture of democracy. Am I wishful thinking here, or is there any salience among voters outside of my audience, people who watch these videos, for these issues?
Rick Wilson: I had a testy discussion with a Democratic consultant not too long ago. It was on the same subject. 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 is without the rule of law." There's a backdoor way into that democracy debate, and it's corruption. A functioning democracy, a functioning republic with good systems, good rule of law, legislative checks and balances, an appropriately non-political judiciary, that helps prevent corruption, which hurts people. But the system Trump is building is profoundly corrupt, 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 message? A lot of the time. But Democrats have resisted making democracy a front-center issue. I don't know 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 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, 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 is a selling proposition for democracy that a lot of folks have got a chance to tell that story, both in the candidate space and in the narrative-setting space.
Marc Elias: 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. It seems to flare up and now it seems to have disappeared a little bit. And this is the Epstein files. It is clear to me that Donald Trump does not want whatever is in the Epstein files to become public. So it has the benefit of getting under his skin, right? Like that's box one. But the second is it seems to be an issue that actually a lot of Americans care about. It's an issue that reflects something in the American psyche that they think is wrong. So, what do you think of the Epstein files? Do you think of it as a get-under-the-skin issue, a culture issue, an issue that is sort of nichey, or something that has broader appeal?
Rick Wilson: I think the Venn diagram overlaps. I think the reason that even Republicans want the Epstein files released is not just about Trump. It is about powerful people abusing people with no power. And that's, to set aside the sort of snarky nature of teasing Trump about the Epstein files, it is a story of powerful men abusing young girls, raping 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 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.
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 saw Kash Patel 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. I'm not exactly close buddies with Thomas Massie, but when he said there are 20 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 tried to cover it up. The old saw about the cover-up being 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.
The other part of it was for 10 years, every Republican was told the Epstein files are out there. "Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George Soros, they're all in there." And they were told that for 10 years. And now Kash Patel and Pam Bondi 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 billion-dollar lawyer letter the other day threatening me about saying anything else about it. His problems are, Trump's problems in the Epstein files are gonna grow and grow and grow. It's not gonna go away. Nothing makes it go away. And again, it is a story not about sex, it's about the abuse of young women by powerful men.
Marc Elias: 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, frankly, not just Democrats, among all Americans or many Americans. And I always say that Donald Trump wants us to be despairing because despair plays into his sense of complete powerfulness, that 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 doomscroll? Like, what do you tell everyday Americans that they should be doing at this time?
Rick Wilson: First off, and this is something that I had to do for myself 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. Doomscrolling is algorithmically designed to make you feel like shit. Whether you are 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 he brings into the body politic and the culture more broadly.
But I also tell people, there is one cure for feeling like the world is coming down around you, and that's to get in the fight. Stand up, speak out, find that one thing that you can or want to do to push back on this. Find 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. It could be anything. I have a friend of mine who is a public figure in a red state, a business person, who cannot do most of this sort of publicly facing stuff. This person spends a lot of time text banking and phone calling for Democratic candidates. And they're like, "You know what? I wish I could be out there, but at least I feel like I'm doing my tiny little thing I can do." And everybody needs to find that thing that they can do.
You fight this stuff out in the courts to the survival of the country and it's working. We fight it out in the narrative space, the storytelling space, the communication space. The Bulwark fights it out in the journalism space these days and in bringing insight together. Folks all across Substack are building this new journalism to participate. There's a young guy out in Colorado who writes for Lincoln Square, a guy named Evan Fields. 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." I was like, "Start writing about it." And he's become this really talented voice articulating as a young guy who should be a Republican voter on paper. But he's like, "I can't be a part of that country. That's not the country I served an oath or swore an oath to." So, you know, there are just a lot of folks out there who feel like there's nothing there for them to do in the fight, but there always is, folks. You gotta find the thing that you can and want to do.
Marc Elias: 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 comes 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.
Rick Wilson: Thank you. Thank you, Marc. I appreciate you, my friend. I'll talk to you soon.
Watch the full interview here.
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