Posted on 08/17/2018 12:03:59 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Rick Wilson is a long-time Republican strategist and the architect of all manner of knives-out campaign ads, including one particularly vicious spot from the 2008 presidential campaign that hammered Barack Obama’s connection to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright with the tag: “Barack Obama: Too Radical, Too Risky.”
He helped start the Never Trump movement. It cost him friends and all manner of potential political work. It subjected him to the threats and fury of Trump’s troll army. He was labelled a Rino (Republican in name only) and a party traitor.
And he didn’t care. Right is right, and Trump was clearly, transparently, unquestionably wrong.
At a time when honesty and integrity were as dead as a dodo in politics, Wilson demonstrated both.
He and his band of Never Trumpers fought mightily to remind Americans what it actually means to be a conservative. (With Trump in office and creating exactly the kind of chaos Wilson predicted, he has done a favour for those of us who haven’t been lost to the cult of Trump.)
He has written a book, a searingly honest, bitingly funny, comprehensive answer to the question we find ourselves asking most mornings: “What the hell is going on?”
The book is called Everything Trump Touches Dies. It pushes the modern-day Republican Party into the public square and roundly shames it for allowing Trump to become its standard-bearer.
Wilson absolutely clobbers the voters who make up Trump’s base and devour his conspiratorial ramblings, while admitting that he and other Republicans “didn’t see that there is a deep strain in American political life that isn’t seeking party rigour or ideological purity or even an independent iconoclast but the safe reinforcement of the pack of people just as pissed off as they are”.
“We underestimated the deep human psychological need to be part of a movement based not on hope but on channelling the comments section of the nuttiest blogs. That’s what Trump gave them. He was an avatar for their anger, their impotence, and their blame for everything wrong in their world,” Wilson writes.
It’s harsh. And it will undoubtedly cause Trump’s core supporters to dig in even more, but at this point, what difference does that make? Those loyal to Trump – accepting all his obvious faults and unforced errors, incapable of acknowledging the slightest flaw – are not coming back to any form of traditional conservative thinking. At least not now, in the throes of Trump passion.
When asked why he wrote the book, Wilson said: “I want people to be able to go back in a year and a half or so and say, ‘Oh, that’s how this happened. I wanted to lay down a marker and say, ‘It’s OK that you’ve been scammed. It’s OK that you’ve been conned. Here’s the evidence about how it happened and why you shouldn’t do it again.
“I also wanted to remind Republicans that you can be a party of decency and humanity and still be a conservative. I want people to have some reminder that you don’t have to live this way. Nothing’s forcing you to do this other than inertia and partisan policy reflex.”
The book doesn’t spare the liberal crowd, nor does it spare the author himself. Wilson readily acknowledges the part he played in feeding and nurturing the more rabid elements of the Republican base that metastasised into Trump’s slavish supporters.
He said in an interview: “I had to do a kind of tough assessment on this thing, and I did … Starting back with Sarah Palin, we built a system to turn on these people, to feed this endless stream that the liberals are trying to kill you, they’re coming for you … We built a set of persuasion tools that persuaded these people, and the arrogance of our position was, ‘Well, we’re all responsible adults; we’ll motivate these people during the election and then calm things down after’.
“What we never anticipated was that somebody else would grab that tool box. But the Russians and Trump sure did, and they ran wild with it.”
Everything Trump Touches Dies is a fascinating, fierce and fearless exposition of the political mess America finds itself in today. It’s a reminder that, for those who aren’t too far gone, ideological disagreement should never be grounds for hatred.
If you’re gonna blow your career to smithereens, you might as well make a few bucks off it, right, Rick?..............
Just how stupid are these people? Instead of writing a book, this moron should be taking notes.
Wow.
Who knew the depths of depravity that would be revealed.
Took a lot of words to avoid giving examples of what has died because of Trump.
Unfortunately when I try to have conversations with otherwise intelligent people who are opposed to Trump, their arguments end at statements like “Everything Trump Touches Dies”.
These people live in an alternate universe. Everything Trump touches has exceeded expectation. Everyone who tried to take him down have crashed and burned. Ask Meaghyn Kelly, the Bushes, Hillary, Marco, the corrupt FBI leadership. Lindsey Graham and Rand Paul were smart enough to change course, and both are winning people over again.
These government and political leeches evaluate not on results but on newspaper clippings.
Another Never-Trumper. Life is very difficult for them.
Loser
So did Ted Cruz.
Always good to hear from a new Democrat, becoming one is probably a good career move and many Democrat strategists will have a sullied reputation after 2018 and 2020 election.
There is a list of forty-some names of individuals who were at odds with or inconvenient for the Clintons, who are now DEAD. Where is the comparable list for President Trump?
Rick Wilson is a nutjob. Nothing to read here.
Quite the opposite. Everything he touches succeeds. Just not what the NTers and Leftists want to succeed.
The generations alive in 2018 can be thankful that the spirit of 1776, where that spirit and the explosion of freedom and prosperity which blossomed from their sacrifices, lives and exhibits itself today, with similar results.
SorozNazi is most likely source of funds, imho
Um, Rick, every campaign you touched died.
“Rick Wilson is a long-time Republican strategist and the architect of all manner of knives-out campaign ads, including one particularly vicious spot from the 2008 presidential campaign that hammered Barack Obama’s connection to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright with the tag: “Barack Obama: Too Radical, Too Risky.””
So glad John McCain had Rick Wilson on his side in that fight!
Hell hath no fury like a swamp creature deposed.....
The funny thing is, I think Trump has united the country in ways never before experienced.
Consider: All those newspapers uniting in their universal condemnation of Trump. Were they brought together or divided?
Consider: From the most abased ghetto rat to the most esteemed university professor, these people are all united in their opinions of Trump. What I like is all the tens of thousands of dollars these folks have invested in their left handed underwater lesbian basketweaving classes; they have achieved exactly the same level of opinion that the lowliest feral ghetto rat already has. Congratulations to them!
Consider: All of Hollywood has been brought together in a remarkably universal opinion of Trump. There is literally no difference of opinion in any of them. Oh, and if there is, they’re out of work.
Consider: All the folks now employed or in the workforce, when they weren’t before. All the folks now benefitting from a renewed vibrant economy.
I mean all except the last category are united in their hatred, but that’s their problem. They must like it, they bathe in it. They wear it like a badge of honor. They talk about it with their friends.
All Strings lead to Hillary
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