400th Episode - Rick Takes the Hot Seat
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Experience amazing at your Lexus dealer. They go, Donald, ha ha ha, you're not that rich, ha ha ha. And it would be some, and then Trump would be like, fuck you, I fucked your wife. Ha ha ha.

Come get her. She's in the back of my fucking car. I mean, she literally came out and said that Ted Cruz's wife was ugly and that his dad was involved in the JFK assassination. And they come back with critiques of his health care policies. Why, Donald, you don't really have a health care plan, do you? What the fuck? Your task will not be an easy one.

Your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened. There is not a liberal America, any conservative America, the United States of America. Good night, and good luck.

Well, hey, everyone. This is Ben Howe. You've met me before. This is the Lincoln Project podcast. It's actually the 400th episode of the Lincoln Project podcast. So what I wanted to do today was bring on somebody that's very important to me, but important to so many Americans. He's a leader in politics, a thought leader, brilliantly intelligent.

He's a family man. He's just a really good person, somebody that everybody can look up to. He couldn't join today. So instead, we're going to be interviewing Rick Wilson, who leads the Lincoln Project. Hey, Rick, welcome to the 400th episode of the show. How are you doing? You know what, Ben? I'm tired as shit, but I'm doing okay, brother. Yep.

Good. You had him. You had him going there. You had it. I did. I did. They really thought somebody special was going to come. Right. But, you know, I. Ben Shapiro. Special guest. Yeah. Ben Shapiro is going to be joining today. He's going to speak so fast. The episode will be over three minutes. But with facts and logic, I will defeat you. With facts and logic.

But we wanted to flip it up today because you interview so many people. And so today, I mean, there's people who they, you know, I know it's weird for you, but they want to know about you. They want to know about how you got into politics. And I'm going to walk, I'm going to walk them through it. Sure. And let's start with personal. Rick and I go way back before the Lincoln project. Yeah.

We've both been here since the beginning of the Lincoln Project, but prior to that, we were both in Republican politics. We did quite a few ads together for people who wouldn't no longer speak to us. Right. We had a lot of friends that revealed themselves. And but.

I got into politics, you know, anybody who does what we do has been into politics their whole life. But I didn't really get into it until 2008, 2009. You've been in it much longer than me.

I have been in it since the dawn of time. That's what I'm that's what I'm gathered. So take us back to the beginning. What made you get into politics in the first place? It was it was purely an accident. Honestly, it was purely an accident. Now, I grew up in a pretty political family. And back in 1987, started doing a little bit of stuff for then Congressman Connie Mack, who was running for U.S. Senate.

And a lot of my people knew his people, blah, blah, blah. You know, my family knew his family, all that stuff. There's a lot of friend of a friend stuff in those early days of Republican politics for me. Worked for Connie for a little bit, but then I got... What year was this about? 87. I started in the fall of 87 with Connie and then got plucked up by just pure dumb luck.

into the Bush campaign in 1988. And I was a field director for him for a huge part of Florida. Um, not counting Miami, basically all, most of, most of the populated part of Florida at the time. Um, and I had, uh, had a tremendous, uh, experience doing that. And I actually figured out, um, you know, the way I started out was doing the grassroots and the organizing and the, and the, and the field work, which I,

Really kind of helped me understand the Republican base as I evolved out of that side of the business and into the media part of it. But in the middle of that, I went and worked in Washington for Dick Cheney when he was Secretary of Defense, Pentagon for four years. It was pretty...

pretty boring time. We had the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the invasion of Panama, the nuclear disarmament of the former Soviet Union, the invasion of Iraq to push Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. And at the very last minute, we had Somalia. So it was a pretty boring time. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that it was so uneventful. I know. It was kind of dull. We also did

uh, introduced and I helped do a lot of the PR and legislative garbage for the stuff. Um, the B2 bomber, the F 22 fighter, uh, the drawdown of the cold war weapon systems, our own, uh, nuclear disarmament stuff. It was, uh, again, it was a pretty quiet time. I mean, I really, you know, pretty much a nine to five job show up, do the bureaucratic thing and leave, or I don't think I slept for four years. Well, I know that, you know, when it comes to Dick Cheney, uh,

he's come out on the right side of history when it comes to Trump and has even said he's going to vote for Kamala. So while you can still be proud of your work with Dick Cheney, I know that there's at least one

at least one person that you're not happy you worked with, who would you say you look back on and think, oh man, I can't believe I worked with them? It's clearly Rudy Giuliani. I went to work with Rudy as a media consultant with my then partner, Adam Goodman in 1997. We did a very successful campaign for Rudy. This is when Rudy was considered like the savior of New York.

And it's easy to sort of like wash that away now that he's so insane. But it was really an important race and an important time. And he looked like in some ways. Everybody loved Rudy back then. Everybody loved Rudy back then. And this is before 9-11.

And so Rudy had this very special place in the political ecosystem at the time. And, you know, Republican senators and congressmen and governors would come and visit and say, how do you do this? How did you get elected by a Republican in the city that's five to one Democratic? And, you know, look, improve the economy, clean up the streets. You know, those things actually kind of worked and they still work. And if Democrats aren't careful, they will work on them in big cities like L.A. and San Francisco at some point.

Uh, and, uh, and we were all very, probably had a big alumni network of folks and then, uh, went back to New York as senior advisor to the mayor for a couple of years. And then, uh, was went into the 20 or the 2000. Good God, I'm old. The 2000 campaign, uh, where he was going to run against Hillary, but instead he chose to have a girlfriend and, uh, then got prostate cancer.

It was, it was not, it was not the most effective strategy to, to advance his career. You know, I'm, I'm curious, like, what I want to know is, and I feel like other people would want to know this too, like,

Okay, we see Giuliani these days with like, you know, the makeup falling on his face and calling for trial by combat and, you know, all this Looney Tunes stuff. Yeah. Were there any signs? Were there any signs that that's who he was? Oh, yeah. There was always bad Rudy.

And one of his great advisors was this guy named Ray Harding, who became a real big political mentor of mine. And Ray has one of the most colorful life stories you've ever seen. Enormously intelligent, enormously experienced in New York politics, enormously corrupt in the end. I went to jail. Ray was a...

Uh, he was the chairman of the New York liberal party, which is Ray said to me the first time I sat down with him, he goes, it is neither liberal nor a party. It's my personal fucking political machine. Okay. Um, but Ray taught me a lot about Rudy and he said right off the bat, he said, listen, uh, just as in, you know, philosophy, not all great men are good men.

Rudy can be a great man, but he is rarely a good man. And it was a good point to remember. You know, Rudy. No, there's others like that. Like Newt Gingrich comes to mind right away. People used to say that about him all the time. Sure. I mean, Newt had a ferocious intellect, but he was also a ferocious asshole.

And, you know, Rudy had that in him. He was always poke, poke, poke, poke, push, push, push, always trying to push the edge of what he was going to, what he could get away with. And, you know, honestly, it was not a great look a lot of the time.

Here's what I don't understand, though. He did at least, even though he may have had these attributes, it's hard to look back at his time in the late 90s and the early 2000s and think of him as a man who wasn't his own man. Like, he seemed to chart his own course. And for the last few years, he has just done what, it seems like he does whatever Trump wants. Ben, he was, he could not have been

in that era, more dismissive of Trump. He was, he treated Trump like an asshole. And it was always the sort of, how do I put it? It was always this kind of, you know, we're going to give the guy a couple of fucking parking passes for this year, or maybe we'll invite him to a ribbon cutting somewhere. But it was never,

Oh my gosh. My Lord and Master Donald. It just never was. It was never that way. It was never that way. This is the effect he seems to have on people. Yeah. He's ruined a lot of people by putting them at

Reince Priebus, I didn't think he was somebody who was going to really get behind him. And he did. You know, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, like all of these guys that you thought of as like them or dislike them. They are who they are. They all just kind of became Trump's people.

They really did. And I mean, and you look at that, that corruption that that Donald Trump exercises over everybody, it's almost as if everything he touches dies. It was certainly something that that you could see it with Rudy almost more cleanly than anybody else, because when you looked at him and when you when you considered who he had been, it made the fall even more abrupt and horrible.

It made him look even more like some guy who'd been taken for a ride by this guy. And that was a fact. He got played by Trump because, and I'll never forget, so I'm in late 16 after the election, oh, I'm going to be Secretary of State. I was like, who the fuck you are? Get the fuck out of here. He's going to screw you. And sure enough, he did. And I think that was what actually, I think that was the moment,

Rudy actually kind of broke. He wanted to be back in the, in the Trump, in the, in the, not in the Trump world, but in the world of politics in the middle of the fight.

And so in the end of 16, he became this leading surrogate for Trump because Rudy enjoyed that stuff. He liked being he liked being out there beating around, beating, beating down the doors at the at the networks and and being out there really causing a ruckus. And, you know, I would say he was doing it more on behalf of the party in 2016 as opposed to Trump himself.

And then it just slowly shifted over time into into being about the man. I think that's right. I think that's right. And I think there's a degree of which you can never underestimate that thing. And I think it's Joe Trippi who said at one time, it's like there's only one cure for wanting to be president and that's death.

Rudy ran a very expensive and very bad campaign for president in 2020. It did not work well. It went very, very bad. I'm sorry, excuse me, 2008. No, yeah, you're right. I'm so tired. Same year as Alan Keyes was running that year. Alan Keyes! You know. He was a fun guy. Oh, Alan was a fucking charmer. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I used him as the example of like the last clown we had had before Trump ran in 2016. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the nature of circus is that the clowns come running toward it. So you're always going to have some. I mean, when you look at it, one of the things we talk about a lot is the party that that I grew up in and you grew up in used to even if it was imperfect in how it addressed these things, it used to believe in certain things.

And it believed in like the rule of law and limited government and all these things. And again, imperfectly. Oh, very imperfectly. But now it's gotten to the point where, and that's what I look back on my career and I'm like, how many people

that I elected and almost, no, I don't think I have anybody that I helped elect that's, well, maybe a couple that still, none that I have any influence with anymore. But how many people that I helped elect who, who could have

stood against the power of Fox and Facebook and the Trump base and said, no, I'm not doing it. They are so afraid of the base. And I mean, you and I came up, we were both sort of still, we were making a lot of our bones during the Tea Party era. And man, you talk about something that started out with a legitimate good intention and got hijacked so fast by this class of grifters and weirdos and

And really skeezy, scummy people. Somebody asked me if MAGA is just like

the, uh, the continuation of the tea party. And I was like, in terms of spirit, sure. But in terms of actual people, no, because they're dead. Like they were all really old when I first went after the tea parties, everybody there was like in their seventies and eighties already. And I'm like, it's not the same movement. There's a whole new generation of people that have taken it over. Um, yeah, the actual real tables are a bitch. Yeah.

To close the loop on Rudy, though, I want to know, can you remember the last time you spoke to him? And I don't mean like when you ran into him that one time. I mean, like the last time you actually spoke to him in a way. Yeah, it was December of 16. And it was just like, you know, what the fuck have you done? Your legacy is going to be shot to shit. This guy is going to eat everybody up. And Rudy at first thought he was going to be secretary of state.

And then he thought he was going to be secretary of Homeland security. And then he thought he was going to be attorney general. And I remember attorney general. Yeah. Yeah. At that point, I just washed my hands the whole thing. I was like, fuck it. These people are nuts. He's never gonna, never gonna listen. And, and, and, you know, I, I, I did the, I said, uh, see, it did a CNN interview. I guess it was last year or sometime into last year. And somebody asked me about him in there, a question. I said, you know, here's the problem. If Rudy had just stopped, uh,

If he stopped, he could have still been a lawyer. He could have still done whatever. But he burned his legacy to the ground. If he had stopped when Rudy dies in a few years...

They would have named high schools after the guy. They would have named bridges. Oh yeah. They would have put up a 30 foot statue of him at ground zero. He'd still be a hero in, in New York. And people would have, they would have been like, people would have been saying, I wish that the Republican party was more like Rudy Giuliani. Like that's the kind of things that people would have said. And now it's this really sad and clownish and, and, and, and criminal legacy. I mean, he is, he's going to die broke because of the threats that were brought against, uh,

the election workers in Georgia that he's been found guilty of. He's in bankruptcy. He's been disbarred in New York and I think in D.C., maybe elsewhere, I'm not sure. But all of it is this like,

perfect exemplar of what happens with people who get in with Trump. Sooner or later, one way or another, you're going to go tits up. Sooner or later, one way or another, you're going to lose everything. And he did. And, you know, I kind of- Because everything Trump touches does, right? It does. I mean, it's legitimately one of my political rules that is held up. I'm like the fucking Isaac Newton of American politics in that. It's like a rule nobody can disprove.

But in all these cases, Ben, you know, you look at you look at the damage that he does to people and and the and the way he makes people compromise themselves and the way he makes people betray their principles. And look, you and I knew Ted Cruz back in the day and he was a weirdo. But Ted Cruz actually at one point believed in some things.

And now it's like, what can I do for you, master? He's Igor, you know, scraping around the room with a hunchback, like, Donald, master Donald, how may I serve you, sir? And all of them are in that box. You know, Marco Rubio, who I was a very big, you know, proponent of in Florida for years when he was running for president.

You know, Marco Rubio is out there now with like fake news lies about blah, blah, blah, because he's trying to be Trump's secretary of state. And I'm just going to tell you, if if Marco thinks he's going to be secretary of state, if Donald Trump is elected, he's he's not even going to get there. It's going to be Rick Grinnell or some other fucking idiot. And because no one who's ever criticized Trump ever gets to come back.

in a real way. Let me ask you this, though. So, you know, we both lived the... You were one of the first people to... One of the first Republicans to come out, you know, dire against Trump. And I was an early adopter as well. You weren't long behind me. That was right. And so I kind of know what was going on, but the viewers don't. When it started to become apparent, I would say right around the time

Ted Cruz dropped out. Right. I mean, we knew that we were in trouble already, but Cruz and Marco Rubio were still in. The Cruz and Rubio people were battling each other, which was just giving Trump the pathway he needed. And when Cruz dropped out, like that was it. We all knew. We knew. It's going to be Trump. What was going through your head at that time?

Well, I had been begging every campaign that I was close to and I knew everybody. I knew everybody in the process. And I, you know, I initially went to, went to the, to the, you know, the Mario people and I, Mario people, the Marco people. I said, listen, you must hit him. You cannot let him get away with beating you up on stage. The visual of him humiliating you and treating you like a child is

is destroying your campaign. So they had like a five-minute bold moment against Trump, but then...

all the advisors and all the women folk, as they say, inside the campaign. Like, oh, this is so awful. We can't be mean to Donald Trump. It's so bad. It was the New York selling watches in New York moment, right? Yeah, it was that and the dick joke. I mean, and here's the thing. All these people that were so upset about it. You know what, Ben? They got upset about something that that

was reflective of a fundamentally broken idea in the old Republican Party. It's that if you lower yourself to Trump's level, you're no better than Trump. No, if you let Trump win, you're no better than Trump. You know, and so I tried with the Jeb people and the Marco people and even Ted, you know, and Carly and all these other people that I had relationships with or knew people around them.

I begged them. You must hit him. You must never. And they would walk on stage with one joke that they'd spent a month focus grouping and they go, Donald, you're not that rich. And it would be some, and then Trump would be like, fuck you. I fucked your wife. Yeah.

Come get her. She's in the back of my fucking car. I mean, she literally came out and said that Ted Cruz's wife was ugly and that his dad was involved in the JFK assassination. And they come back with critiques of his health care policies. Why, Donald, you don't really have a health care plan, do you? What the fuck?

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Let's not forget, let's not forget the stupid pledge. You remember the pledge? Oh, dude. And let me tell you, I texted Reince Priebus that day. The na- I mean-

A text message that could probably get me like a restraining order was like, you dumb motherfucker. How fucking stupid are you? Are you the dumbest motherfucker on earth? Are you trying to set a new record? Because he will take that pledge and shove it up your ass. And folks, if you don't remember the pledge, Reince Priebus goes and gets this fucking like Office Depot thing you run through the printer thing.

And writes on like Republican loyalty pledge. And it takes it to Trump and says, if you'll sign this, we'll let you. And so Trump looks at it like every other contract oath or vow he's ever made. It's just whatever. And the pledge said, I'll support the nominee if I don't win. And the stupidest thing about that was it showed like there were a lot of us ringing the bell.

Oh, yeah. You guys have to stop thinking that Trump is this problem that goes away when the real nominee steps up and start accepting that this might be the real nominee. And if you get all these other Republicans to sign a pledge, they're all pledging to vote for him. And, you know.

None of no voters were asking for that. Nobody, nobody cared about it. Nobody. But as we as we have learned with with painful repetition of the bullshit that that that was a moment in the campaign where where his week, the weakness that Reince Priebus showed Trump did was not rewarded with like, oh, well, this is a serious party with rules internally. It was rewarded with I'm going to eat all of you.

I'm going to sit at the table. And he just talked about one by one. And like, they drink your fucking milkshake. And they never, they never really understood him. They've never understood where his power resides. And, and the fact that the, him not having a moral center, uh,

is very clearly a, I mean, it's a bad strength, but it is a strength because he can do whatever he wants. And these other guys are bound by these rules. Yeah, if you're untethered from rules or ethics or morals and the other guys play by the rules and have ethics and even some morals, you're going to win every time.

This is why a lot of people who criticize Lincoln, they're like, well, some of your ads are very, very naughty and you say bad things about Donald Trump. And why are you so mean to his base? Because you have to fight with the weapons that are actually being used in the battle, folks. You cannot, as we always say, bring a throw pillow or a live, laugh, love poster to a gunfight.

And and we bring we bring an attitude and a combativeness to the fight that does make a lot of people nervous. They don't they think, why aren't you talking about prescription drug coverage? Policy, policy. This is a good segue, though. When. OK, so in 2019, about midway through, you you kind of planted a seed with me that you were working on something.

Yep. And we're like, you know, stay tuned. Right. And then we talked later. How did it all come about, the Lincoln Project? Well, so there was a secret cave and we were all bitten by bats. No. Of course. Of course. Look, there were a lot of conversations between a lot of people. I'd probably say about 20 people at one point were in this sort of broad...

conversation going back and forth. And it was people like me and Reed Galen and Steve Schmidt and George Conway and a whole bunch of other folks too. And the core group of us who had been sort of trying to get it going realized in late summer, we were starting to see how the democratic debates were shaping up. And they were all these things driven by like

You know, Elizabeth Warren came out after one of the debates and I'll never in my life forget it. I immediately flashed this message to all the other people on the team or the coming, the emergent team. She walked out of a debate and she said, it was a great night. We never said the word Trump once. I was like, the fuck is this? What? What? I mean, Donald Trump was issue one, two, three, four and five. And if they didn't realize it, they were going to get their asses handed to him.

And so it came together. We formed the group. You know, and folks, a lot of the people that were in the initial formation aren't with us anymore for a whole host of reasons. Some of them were not great people.

Okay. One of them particulars are really shitty human being. And if we'd done that in the beginning, we'd never, uh, would have never had that experience. I lived that part of it with you. And, and the one reassurance I can give everyone is that the team that was making those spots, the team that was, that was pulling it all together. We're still here. Yeah. You know, it was me and you and Joey and you know, like that, that, that core group is still making the spots and, and,

Kate. Yep. Yeah. And at the end of the day, at the end of the day, you know, there are a lot of things that a lot of groups do. You know, we've been asked many times, like, why can't you do youth voter registration? And look, I'm not saying the youth voter registration isn't a very meritorious action. It is a very meritorious thing to do. OK, it's not what we do. So we're good at.

And what we're good at is communication, advocacy, persuasion in ways that almost no other group, and I will say this very bluntly, certainly nobody else in the Republican, ex-Republican space is in the same category or class as what we do.

And look, they do meritorious things. I'm not criticizing their existence, but when it comes down to ad making and communicating. It's not the same thing. Right. It's apples and oranges. We have a different take on things because we're different. And that difference. People need, they may need both, you know. Oh, yeah. We know what we're doing.

Yeah, we know our skill set. And as I joked at the Cooper Union in 2020, we were sitting in the Cooper Union. And folks, I will tell you, Cooper Union is where Abraham Lincoln gave his famous right makes might speech before the Civil War. And I'm a pretty confident speaker. I've given a lot of speeches. I talk all the time. I'm on TV a thousand, I don't know how many times. But when you're sitting...

or standing at Abraham Lincoln's actual podium, the world starts to feel really, really large around you. You're like, holy hell, what is this? And there was a sense or a moment there where all of us who had been there at the founding thought to ourselves,

This actually is a historical moment beyond, you know, forming a super PAC, beyond forming a political organization, beyond doing what we do. And, you know, in a way that, you know, we recognize the consequence of the moment, I think is what I'm trying to say. And it was not ever intended to be all things to all people. It was never intended to be, you know, this universal thing.

you know, product to make everything for everybody and make every group or every or every policy area or anything like that happy. We were meant to beat Donald Trump and we set out to defeat Trump and Trumpism. That was a phrase that that we said a hundred times, thousand times.

Still happens to be true. We're here to defeat Trump and Trumpism. We will do whatever it takes to defeat Trump and Trumpism. And we've shown it over and over again that that the most important superpower I think we've had is that we're not sentimental about the party that we used to be a part of.

We're not trying to save it anymore. We're not trying to make it all better. We're not trying to say, oh, well, you know, this guy's still okay. Because the truth of the matter is there's not a lot of good guys left in this world, in the Republican world. There just aren't. And I think also the political –

The party we were a part of, we can't be nostalgic about it because Stewart says this all the time. It didn't change the Republican Party. It exposed it. Yeah, it revealed it. Yeah, absolutely. 100%. 100%. And Ben, you know, people you and I have known for decades—

who have basically just gone quietly into the, into the, into the, like the, the, the trough. They don't care. They want to save their jobs and they want to save their, their like ability to get a good table in DC. And, and,

It shocks me every day how few of the people that we knew that were that that at least vamped ass and pretended to be the serious people and the people that really believed in conservatism, how much they've they compromise themselves for Trump. It is always shocked me. So what do we do?

Like, what happens next for Republicans, for people who left the party and the politically homeless? Well, I'm a deep believer in the fact that the country needs a center-right party as well as a center-left party. I don't think one-party states ever work out for anybody. I mean, look, folks, if you're listening to the Lincoln Project podcast, you're most likely not a MAGA conservative. You might be. But for our progressive friends, our liberal friends, you know,

States like New Jersey are not notoriously great places because they're run by one party. One party systems always lead to corruption and a distancing from a popular part of the population or a meaningful part of the population. So first off, we have to beat Trump and we have to beat Trumpism. And that means this year,

Our focus and folks, you know, in 2020, we focus on a lot of things, not just Trump. We did Senate races this year. We are locked in on Trump. That's our mission. That's our goal. We are going to end him. We're going to be done with it. We're going to take him to the to the woodshed, take him to the train station. We're done. We're going to eliminate Donald Trump as a political threat in this country by beating the shit out of him at the electoral on the electoral map. That's our goal.

The Harris campaign is doing a great job of it. We have a special role in this that we're going to play. And we're going to keep playing that special role because we are good at that role. It's my special purpose. That's an old one. That's an old callback. That's a very old one. But after this is over, you know, I have a theory. This is a zombie theory. Ben heard me talk about this this week and we were all out in L.A. doing a bunch of fundraising.

And the zombie theory is like Trump is the king zombie. He's the zombie that that leads the that infected the entire thing, the entire city. Even when you take the king zombie out, the rest of the zombies are running around still biting people. So there are going to be a lot of these MAGA elected officials that I think either the Lincoln Project or other groups or some combination in the future that we're going to have to pursue them.

And we're going to have to make sure that the idea of Trumpism is as politically poisonous as the idea of Donald Trump. Because they will try to keep bringing these nationalist ideas back, these hyper-populist ideas back. They're going to keep trying to put the paddles on what should be a dead ideological movement. So I don't think we're done. After that, a party can reemerge. I don't know.

Who's going to do that? Maybe it's Liz Cheney, because, you know, God knows I'd follow that. Well, you know, I mean, back in the day, like one of our biggest complaints about Donald Trump was that he would, you know, the Republican Party is this vehicle for ideas.

And he's ruining that platform. Sure. Thereby eliminating the place for those ideas to be heard. And the problem is he's doing exactly what we weren't. We, what we warned was he's going to make the very ideas you have toxic because they're going to be associated with this party, this movement, this guy. So if you're for low taxes, let's say, and if that was just a policy position for forever, uh,

Donald Trump is turning it into something terrible, which is going to make it that much harder for a center right party to come up because people are going to want to be associated with ideas that sound anything like Trump. A hundred percent right, Ben. And, and the idea that Trump has polluted the, the, the Republican concepts that existed once in, in a sort of definition way in the party, limited government. Um, and they don't want limited government anymore. They,

They think they were the opposite of limited government. Now the rule of law, he's got contempt for monarchists now. Yeah. They, there are, there are a lot of them are actually monarchists now, which is, you know, if, if folks, if you go read this guy, Curtis Yarvin and if you, if you must, as I like to say, he is one of these people who, who has absolutely changed the GOP and,

intellectual class by introducing concepts like red Caesar and, um, and, and neo-monarchy and all these things. And it's just, it's just a freak show. But when, if you have Republicans who come back and say, well, yeah, we want to talk about a lower taxes and maybe they mean, well, maybe they mean lower taxes. Um, maybe they mean lower taxes for middle-class people for once. Right.

But it will now always be associated with Trump giving Elon Musk a tax cut while everybody else gets fucked. That's exactly right. Yes. Exactly. It's a really dark... I think that was... It's the full appearance of what you said. It's the ETTD. It's... Everything that Trump touches, dices, and just involve people or other candidates or people who work with him. It's the very ideas that are being killed. Yeah. And...

Look, you know, a strong foreign policy that stands against dictators and authoritarians. And what do you have in this day and age? Donald Trump, like, you know, not, you know, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the two Republican presidents in our lifetime at the end of the Cold War. You know, Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall was not Mr. Gorbachev. Do you want it fast or slow?

This was not an area where there was a doubt for any period of time. There was never a doubt for generations where we stood on authoritarians. Sometimes we made deals with them, but we didn't think they were the model for America.

We didn't treat them like they were what we should aspire to. So it is a truly corrosive movement because it has absolutely shattered the ideological predicates of what the party should have been.

Well, you know, you mentioned the tearing down this wall and and, you know, Reagan famously taking on the empire and the fall of the Soviet Union and like communism has been defeated and all this other stuff. And it feels like and I already know the answer to this, but I'm going to act like I don't. It feels like, you know, a little bit about foreign policy as it relates to Russia.

And here and there, I think you may have done something in college related to that. And I think that people would be interested to know this about you. Look, I started out studying the Soviet Union. That was that was my my main focus in college. I mean, and I studied, you know, Soviet foreign policy and Soviet intelligence policy. And and, you know, my senior year, my my my my senior paper was.

about the Russian propaganda efforts in Europe against NATO deploying the ground-launched cruise missile. And then I went into the Defense Department in a job that was a glove fit for all this stuff. So I'm not a professional Sovietologist or a Russia scholar, but I sure am a pretty enthusiastic amateur about it. And I know a lot of people who are

Very senior former intelligence officials around this country and who served this country and those people who served this country in that capacity. And the idea that Russia under Putin in the year of our Lord 2024 is an ally of America is only possible.

In so far as people like Steve Bannon want to promote that or or Paul Manafort want to promote that or other people whose names I cannot mention due to legal matters want to promote that. And this idea of of the U.S. emulating Russia is only present in our society of people who know nothing about the history of Russia.

Donald Trump, the irony of Trump. Which includes Donald Trump. The irony of Trump is that his understanding of Russia quite literally ends up with Vladimir Putin's very strong. He's a strong man. He's so strong. Plenty of dictators have been strong for some time. But I don't know. Look.

That to me is one of the most corrosive ideas inside the Republican Party now. And it's very much like, well, Donald Trump is friends with Putin because otherwise nuclear war will immediately occur. Really? You think that? You think Vladimir Putin, a guy whose military is so fucking clapped out, they're using World War II tanks and Vietnam era fighter planes now against Ukraine. You think he's confident in winning a nuclear war?

Nobody's going to win it anyway. But this is not, this is a threat. Nobody wins a nuclear war. No, this is a threat Russians have been making for 70 fricking years. Don't do what we want. Could be nuclear war. It's, and there are something like 180 different times that Russian leaders of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would say things like, if you dare do this, it will be nuclear war. Okay, cool. Well, the boy has cried wolf enough times.

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There's some family history as it relates to... Yeah, I have a little bit of family history. I have a little bit of family history in that. Tell everybody about what's going on in your family. Well, not right now anymore, but my grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project. He was a sort of electrical engineer, applications physics guy, built things, not a theoretical guy at all, but the kind of guy that built stuff. And it's a phrase I learned much later, helped build the portable sun. Yes.

So, but no, and I think a lot about that. And I think a lot about, you know, when I got, when I got to the Pentagon, I used to think, and unfortunately he passed before I was born. So I didn't really get to know him personally, but I, you know, from diaries and family stories and everything else. But, but when I got to the Pentagon, we were at the peak of the Cold War. We had something like 56,000 nuclear weapons out in the world and, you know, 50, 50 between the U S and Russia at the time, basically.

And I always thought about like, like this concept that Reagan was willing at from the right to talk about massive reductions in nuclear weapons indicated just how seriously the creation that happened back in the 1940s has reshaped our universe, has reshaped our, our world and our thinking.

And how consequential a nuclear exchange would be. And Reagan and H.W. Bush, who... And think about this world. He depended on a group of bipartisan leaders as we started the talks with Russia to help carry this forward. And it was folks like Democrats like Sam Nunn and Joe Biden and Republicans like Dick Lugar and John Danforth who were...

who looked at the world and the country and what it needed and didn't give a shit about the politics of it, didn't give a shit about who got the credit. They wanted to build a world that was free from the danger and the terror of nuclear warfare. And look, we have reduced our arsenal. They've reduced their arsenal very, very dramatically.

Right now, there are about 7000 weapons on each side of which maybe 60 percent of those weapons are in some sort of deployable or deployed condition. But, you know, we live in a much safer world when it's rational, when when when our foreign opponents look at us and say, OK, these crazy motherfuckers built something like this. They're the only people who have ever used it.

we should all like step back from the edge. And Trump encourages people like Kim Jong-un to feel like he's protected. He encourages people like Putin to feel like he can get away with murder, which he does every single day. And so in all these things, I think there's a real...

incentive for a new center-right party to loop back around on that a little bit if and when one emerges to look at the world and say, do we want a rules-based international and national order or do we want chaos and autocracy? I'm in favor of the rules-based international order because it actually worked for us for a very long time. Well, I mean, if you create global instability, which he does,

And then there are nuclear weapons floating out there. Especially, you know, there's never a guarantee that a state that does have nuclear weapons is always going to be a state. We've seen states fail before. Sure. And these, you know, the idea that those could be loose at some point.

You know, that happens as a result of instability being created. And when you embolden people like Vladimir Putin and his allies in Iran and China and North Korea, you're just encouraging that future. And you've got a grandchild now. I do have a grandchild now. You're not...

You're not just thinking about like the extent of your life. You're thinking about a life that keeps going after you're gone. And so maybe, maybe this instability doesn't affect tomorrow, but if it affects it 50 years, it's still relevant to you. Right. When my granddaughter, when my granddaughter is in her twenties, when you think about the current rate, there'll probably be three or four more countries with nuclear weapons, at least.

Here's the thing. When my grandfather was doing this and they were building centrifuges in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and building detonation systems out in the desert, they didn't know if the physics was all going to work. They didn't understand the whole thing. It was a theoretical construct. Honestly, guys, any country now can build a nuclear weapon if it has a basic understanding of machining, chemistry,

and physics. And those things are universal now. It's expensive, it's messy, it's blah, blah, blah. And there are some international things that try to prevent that. But if the Saudi Arabian government tomorrow said, we're going to build a nuclear weapon, the only thing that would prevent them from doing it is the actual fissile material, and they could get it. If Germany said, you know, okay, NATO fell apart, we better have something to deter Russia, they could have a nuclear weapon in a month.

This isn't like a it isn't like a dark secret anymore. The only thing that prevents it from being out there as a global problem is the idea in a lot of ways of American deterrence.

and British and French deterrence. You know, the people in the West who own nuclear weapons are seen as stabilizing forces in the entire equation. I don't know how we got into nuclear weapons from Republican politics, but it's a subject I can talk about way too much. It's one of my many intellectual rabbit holes. Listen, hey, I took you here on purpose because I wanted... This is me unpacking Rick Wilson. So, you know...

we're here today to talk about you. And if this is your area of interest, then that's what we should talk about. It's pretty clear, like to me as an outsider looking in, if I'm going to,

psychologically analyze you for a second. You got a, you got a grandfather who was involved in the, in the Manhattan project, a family grew up in that was political. You moved into, um, the realm of, uh, politics, uh, at a young age, as a result, you already had an interest in, in Russia, um, which was like the, the, the main adversary of the United States at the time.

And you kept your principles all the way through, all the way through leaving that very party. Yeah. I mean, it is, it is not, that's the thing about the Republican party that, that still disappoints me more than almost anything else in a weird way. We abandoned the idea of being a party that cared about the security of this country. First, make America great again is a lie in, in a large measure because they don't care about,

They really don't give a shit about American security. They care about making other dictators happy. I mean, there's a reason Trump's always praising Orban. He's very strong. He's a strong man. He's so strong. And it's because they want to emulate that stuff. And those are the things that the old Republican Party, again, as imperfect as it may have been,

that the old Republican Party would have rejected outright, would have said, get the fuck out of here. What are you talking about? Are you talking about emulating Orban or saying Kim Jong-un sends you love letters? I mean, I swear to God, think about that counterfactual for one second. If Barack Obama had ever said, I got a beautiful love letter from Kim Jong-un, there would be a nonstop shit show meltdown on Fox News and in every Republican would be

full timing that thought. They would lose their minds over it. Everybody flipped out when Obama like slightly bowed to the Saudi Arabian king. Do you remember that? Oh no, listen, I remember. Like very clearly. Yeah.

You and I were probably tweeting about it, actually. I think we probably were. This is what I'm going to do now, because I feel like I feel like we've got a good picture of you. But I want to I want to wrap it up with a couple of questions. Just just three questions. OK. Yeah. They're just going to give us an insight into you. OK. All right. So the first one. All right. Dr. How proceed. OK. So first. Yes. First question. Now, this was submitted of not anonymously.

The question was, who is your favorite staffer at the Lincoln Project and why is it Kate? Keep in mind, this is anonymous, but go ahead. Absolutely. You know, there's no other there's no other answer except Kate, obviously.

Um, okay. So college is one of our, our staff members who is, uh, a Gen Z-er. We hired her while she was still in college at the university of Texas. Um, and I'm making the horn thing that they do. Um,

And, and she is, uh, uh, bust her ass, hardworking, incredibly creative, uh, and a big part of our future because she's got energy and, uh, and my ass is dragging. Um, okay. Second question here. Uh, what is your favorite Lincoln project video? Favorite Lincoln project video. Um, uh,

You know, keep in mind what your editors is on the call right now. I am aware. I am aware. We've made so many amazing pieces of content over the years. On the fun side, on the funny side, on the like the sarcastic and funny stuff. I still think Impetus Americanus is one of the funniest things we've ever done. Because, and folks, if you haven't seen it, it's a National Geographic style ad.

And it reads very much like a David Attenborough kind of voice, like impetus americanus. Behold the rare small-pawed trump, impetus americanus. Notable for its exotic plumage, the trump is typically a ruddy orange color not found in nature.

Though Impetus was once considered an alpha predator, this elderly specimen now weighs somewhat over 300 pounds due to its diet of fast food. In its youth, it was known to pursue females with other predators like Molestus epstein.

Now it focuses on exploiting its home territory, the United States. Impetus americanus is known to be a master of deception and considered the most corrupt of its species. Its tweeted cries of anger are meant to distract its prey from its failures as the leader of its pack. Impetus americanus is considered endangered this November due to its own incompetence and failure.

But look, some of the stuff we did in 2020, I don't know how you top it. I don't know how you do better than some of the stuff we were able to produce and create

Um, but this year we've done some amazing stuff as well. And, and look, I, I mean, one day remains one of my favorite pieces. Um, um, uh, the, the Russia, the original all Russia ad that we did, MAGA church, uh, fellow, fellow traveler, traveler, traveler, which was, which was, uh, one of our original ads in Russian. Uh, and one of the most expensive Lincoln project ads ever. Uh, yeah, that wouldn't cost a little bit of money. Um,

Yeah. Long story, but long story. Yeah. But after the fact, but geez. Yeah. But I mean, OK, I can I can accept that. All right. You started with it, but it's Americana. And I would say that's correct. OK, you're right. That's one of our funnier ones. The the the Ivermectin ad was a piece of a piece of art. That was amazing. Oh, God made a dictator. God made a dictator. Absolutely. But folks, I mean, we've done work.

that people, and for Ben and I, neither of whom have what we refer to in the business as tiny egos. How dare you, sir? We get people saying to us, like this weekend, you got to make another Daisy ad. You got to make another Daisy ad. Make the Daisy ad. And I always say, nobody's making another Daisy ad. That ad was what it was. That ad was of a moment and a time. But we...

We have, I think, not being immodest here, but I think we've actually sort of redefined the media part of campaigns in the last five years a little bit because our ads are about what we believe and what we want to achieve. They're not all focus grouped and hammered out beforehand and the product of like,

you know, 70 people on a committee saying, well, we have to mention this. We have to say that we have to do this. We make ads because we know what they'll do and we know what they'll, what effect they'll have. And I think that has been something that is, that is, uh, I think I'm, I, I'm, no, I don't think, I know I'm very proud of the way we've accomplished building a system inside of, of Lincoln that changes the national dialogue that communicates things that matter, um, that talks about

you know, patriotism and, and politics and everything else that isn't like the sort of basic bitch standard issue. Um, frankly, kind of boring media we see out there a lot. And, and if you bore people in American politics, you lose them. But I think that the, where the right has gone off the rails on that is what we believe is that you can tell people the truth

and try to persuade them of something that you believe in and entertain them all the same time. And I think what the right hint tends to believe is that the most important thing is just that you entertain them. Forget whether or not any of the stuff they're doing is good, just as long as the masses are satisfied with their performance. I do have one more question. Apple pie or cherry pie? Pumpkin. Pumpkin.

Hold on. I'm sorry, that is incorrect. The correct answer was apple pie. Apple pie. Of those two, if I am forced to choose between those two, apple is the decisive winner. But as a rule, pumpkin pie, because it is both a breakfast and a dessert treat and a floor topping. Well, let me see if this makes any sense at all to have to tell people where to find you. I'm trying to treat you like a normal guest and say, so Rick...

where can people find you on, on the web and, and, uh, you know, give me some book titles and, um, let us know your, your online presence, my omnipresence. Um, well, I am at the Rick Wilson on Twitter still for the, for the moment. Um,

where I continue to abuse the right wing and Donald Trump. Uh, I am at the Rick Wilson on threads where you will see cute pictures of my fiance and my cats and my dogs and my life. Um, I don't share that stuff on, on Twitter anymore because every MAGA on Twitter is, um,

They believe that their best and highest calling is to abuse people. So we don't do that there. The Rick Wilson on Instagram. Really, I think the branding of the Rick Wilson should be fairly clear to most people by now. Yeah, right. It seems that way. That's the sub stack, too, right? The Rick Wilson. Yeah, it's the sub stack. Also, I have two books that you folks may have read or may not have read.

But you should. One is everything Trump touches dies. The second, the second is, interestingly enough, kind of the roadmap that helped inform a lot of what we do at Lincoln, which is called Running Against the Devil, a plot to save America from Trump and Democrats from themselves. I am working on two more books as we speak.

which will be hopefully coming out before I get sent to Gitmo. We're not going to go to Gitmo. We're going to win. Don't worry, folks. We're going to win. We're going to be fine. You know, I'd be remiss, by the way, if I didn't again address the fact that this is the 400th episode of the podcast. How does it feel? Do you feel celebratory? You know, I feel pretty celebratory. I mean, I guess I've been doing the podcast now for...

seven or eight months now and, you know, very ably handled before me by Reed Galen, who, who, who built this podcast up. But I, uh, I feel like we've gotten a, uh, we've got a great, a great, uh, line of guests, uh, in the last year. And I feel like we've got some guests coming up. They're going to knock your fricking socks off people. It's going to, it's, it's, it's going to hit, it's going to hit hard. Um, but yeah, I mean, we're, we're, and folks, the reason we do this podcast is

is in part because way back in 2020, we were looking through polling information and sort of like, where do people get political information?

Where do they find information they can trust and rely on and take action from? And it turned out a lot of people said, oh, podcasts. So we started the Lincoln podcast. And of course, I have the Enemies List podcast as well. You've got all of this. Great. You've got these podcasts. You've got these books. You've got, you know, your sub stack and your Twitter and your Instagram. But when are you getting married?

That is a great question. We are trying to plan that for sometime in the spring. My beautiful fiance, Renee, and I are respectful of the election being a very big impediment to that, but we are super excited about it. And we got engaged last June, and she is, as they say, a Bond girl, super smart and gorgeous, and I am...

I am way batting way above my being petty or punching way above my weight class. She's a little out of your league. Yeah. She's a little out of your league. Oh, only a little. Does she know that? Does she, does she know that she's out of your league or is that just like a secret that we should be keeping? So far I have tricked her into thinking I'm a pretty good catch. So we'll see how it goes. But she is, she's pretty remarkable. Yeah.

Don't let her watch this podcast. She can't know. No, no, no. Dude, I'm going to have to hack something in the router here at the house to keep this one from being played. Right, right.

Absolutely. Well, all right, everybody, make sure you get out. Check your voter registration at vote.org. Do it today. Make sure you're still registered. Most states registrations are closing quickly. If you can vote early, go vote early. I'm going to beat this into your heads until the beatings on this will continue until morale improves. So that's it. Awesome.

All right. Well, it's been a great show. Thanks for letting me host. You did great, man. And everybody will see you in a couple days. All right. Thanks, everybody.