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Hey everyone, it's Reed. Before we get started, I just want to say it's been three years since I took over as the host of The Lincoln Project, and I cannot say thank you enough to each and every one of you who listens, who downloads, who shares. I meet people out who said, I've heard you talk. Thank you so much. And all I can say is thank you. Thanks to everybody out there. As we get deep into 2024, please,
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Welcome back to The Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reid Galen. Today, I'm joined by the one, the only, my Lincoln Project co-founder. We are in person together in the same room, in the flesh, the one, the only, the Rick Wilson. Rick, welcome back. Reid, good to be with you in the beautiful city of Los Angeles, California. That's right, Los Angeles, the city of angels, where what city is better represented by its airport than Los Angeles? Right.
I told somebody that this morning. If I go to hell, it will look just like L.A.'s.
All right, Rick, lots to go over here. It's a busy time. It's hard to believe we're almost to March. We were just having a meeting and we said eight months to go. And I feel like every time we have another call or another meeting, Rick, it's another month gone by. And so there's always the, you know, there's nothing longer than a week in politics and there's nothing seems to be shorter than a year in politics. You know, there's an old clash like the minutes drag and the hours jerk.
And right now there's been this long window where the primary and the Republican side felt like it was going to last forever. A lot of people wanted it to last longer and dreamed it was going to last longer. But now we're in reality. Now we're in a world where, as we've been telling people for two years, two and a half years,
This race will end up being between Donald Trump and Joseph Robinette Biden. And that's the only battle people should really have been thinking of from the beginning. Everything else was a fantasy. Everything else was a dream. And as we go into this next part of the year, you know, you can see what's happening. The behavior is going to get more markedly crazy. Trump is going to ratchet up the rhetoric, the violence. And folks,
reading our talk about this earlier today, do not buy any of the spin that the Trump campaign is feeding to the New York Times of Trump will now be talking more about policy and he will moderate his positions and he will be talking about his plans for the future. No, he's going to eat up all the scenery, set his ass on fire, run around the stage and
and make this election into the travesty that we know it will be with Donald Trump in charge. Well, and frankly, that's the only way he can win. So let's talk a little bit about that, Rick. I want to talk a little bit about South Carolina. I want you to give us a little bit of a sort of logistics lesson on the RNC, and then we can talk about, then we need to do a little history lesson too. So, all right. So Trump beats Haley by 20.
in South Carolina over the weekend. You know, again, he is the former president. He is the head of the party. He controls most of its levers. You know, it was his people who controlled soon to be ex-chair Ronna McDaniel, who's on her way out here in a couple of weeks. They rigged the entire primary season for him. We have been saying for a long time that no one was going to beat him. Nikki Haley's not going to beat him now. And, you know, frankly, I'm agnostic, Rick, as to whether or not this is
playing some sort of long game for 28, whether or not she's hoping he keels over or whether or not she's just trying to take him out. Like, I really don't care. I'm agnostic as to why she's doing it. But again, I think from my perspective, and I know it's interesting, Rick, we say something like three months ago and, you know, three months later becomes conventional wisdom, you know,
So she gets 40%. It's her home state. Okay. But similar combined results from Iowa and New Hampshire, now South Carolina. Remember that in the Nevada primary, we shouldn't overlook this. There was a Nevada primary and a crazy Nevada caucus. You could only participate in one or the other. Everybody laughed because Haley only got 30% and 70% of anybody else. But that's still 30% of primary voters participating.
that chose Nikki Haley. And so, Rick, it seems to me that Trump has a shrinking base that he has not consolidated. Trump's base is, and look, this is an inevitability of life. Trump's base in 2016 was fairly old. A lot of them now are gone.
A lot of them that were Republicans in 2016 who said, I'm going to hold my nose, I'm going to vote for this guy, and, you know, maybe it'll work out. They now know how it works out with Trump. And in 20, enough of those folks, with our help and other people's help, either voted for Joe Biden or didn't pull a lever for Donald Trump, and either choice was a good choice for this country.
And right now we are seeing this moment where there's a larger number than anybody thought was out there that is an anti-Trump vote. Now, look, our model that we talk about all the time, our Bannon line model, was in 2020 between 3% and 8%, as you know, in the various states. Now it's between 7% and 11% with the result of Dobbs, January 6th, Trump being insane, Trump being an adjudicated rapist, all these other factors.
have weighed pretty heavily. I'm starting to think, I feel this, I don't know this, that there's a larger model that we haven't even gotten to yet. I think it might be more than 7% to 11%. And we're seeing it in, I mean, look, Iowa is a conservative state. It is a really conservative state. And Trump is not pulling the numbers that this master of the universe who stands astride the party like a golden god,
should have pulled in these early states. And look, he went into those states. He spent money against Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis in Iowa. He spent money against Nikki Haley in New Hampshire. He spent money against her in South Carolina.
That strikes me like wanting to win and doing what it takes to win is all fine and good, but he was going to win all these states anyway. It is just, I think now there's a little bit of nervousness in Trump world that, and I look, even if 50% of that 30% stays home and it's only 15% of Republicans who are not going to vote for Donald Trump in the fall. Good. Cause we're in business. We're going to beat him. We're going to beat him like a cheap drum.
If that member holds. Well, and I would say this is that if you if you look back to Iowa where there was exit polling, 77 percent of self-identified caucus goers for Haley said they would not vote for Trump.
Of those, 43%, I think, said they'd vote for Biden. Then there was a bunch for another third party and a bunch for Robert Kennedy. And then in South Carolina, Rick, 25% of self-identified Republicans said that they probably would not vote for Trump in a general election. We talked about in 2020, 3% to 4%. You're talking 7% to 11%. But that range, I don't think it'll stay that high. It could be 25%. And that's catastrophic.
I mean, that's losing 40 states. Yeah. That will mean... And look, at the Lincoln Project, we're targeting the big four, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania. That will put states that are right now not on our list, North Carolina, Georgia, a couple other places. That will bring some of those states back onto, I think, the targeting for us and others to go after those places because it's...
If Trump can't reliably hold on to 15 to 25% of the Republican vote, particularly Republican women, he is going to get caved in. He is going to get whipped badly. And
I don't see a lot of things that the rest of the party is doing that should give Republicans any confidence. They're fleeing the house like rats off of the ship, including all of the grownups that were left. Right. You saw. Such as they were. Yeah, such as they were. But when you got Mike Gallagher and Katharine Morris Rogers. And Patrick McHenry. And Patrick McHenry and all these other people who were the last folks who knew where the light switches were and who knew how to operate.
to operate the systems, that is a sign of very little confidence in them holding on to the house. And if you end up with a blowout in the house,
Weirdly, House races are more predictive of how the presidential is going to end up going than Senate races. They have a different dynamic. And you see these Republicans like the like the 18 Biden 18. Those people are in a full scale panic right now. Yeah. So I want to talk about the non-Trump Republican, because I think the one thing that Trump has been able to count on.
year in, year out were white guys. And I think, Rick, and I'm still thinking about this, but I think that, you know, there's three groups of white men that are
crucial to him. It's the guys who have daughters at home or who have wives like them who are appalled by Dobbs, the IVF stuff. Now there's this story out of Missouri that they're going to ban pregnant women from getting divorced, like the stuff that an otherwise normal person would be like, that's ridiculous. Then there are the men who believe in America as a democratic beacon around the world,
Who probably old enough to remember the Cold War and remember that Russia's never been the good guy. Correct. And Vladimir Putin's not a good guy now. He's correct. He's out two years into the Ukraine war. He's killing his opponents. And he's not just it's not just Navalny. Right. They killed a Russian pilot who defected to Ukraine. They killed him in Spain last week. Right. Like so he is a murderous thug. Right. This is a psychotic killer.
And then, you know, the third group I started thinking about, I've talked about these guys a little bit before, Rick, or what I call the F.U. white guys. And they're right now, I think they're poised to do one of two things. They're poised to either stay home or lean into like a Bobby Kennedy Jr. They're probably educated. They're probably pretty well educated.
Well, off. They're making the mortgage. They're making the mortgage. Their kids probably go to pretty good schools. They know Trump's a goon. They don't like him. They probably don't like Biden. They think Biden's probably, you know, this way he's old. He's part of the establishment. But they're sort of like they know Trump's incompetent. They don't want that back. And so I think if you take that mix of men.
I think it's really, really hard for him to put any of that stuff back together because of the policy things, talking about the House that you've described, that Trump has forced these people into, right, which are broadly unpopular. We'll start with the last group first. Those FU dads, those guys who, you know, the Joe Rogan listeners and the meme appreciator types, those guys, when they look at RFK Jr.,
They love the crypto stuff. They love the anti-vax stuff. They love the fact that Republicans and Democrats alike are exercised that this guy's in the race. They love that sort of chaos candidate feel. And these guys, their dads probably voted for Ross Perot. And I think that there's a degree to which those guys are...
necessary votes for Donald Trump that are probably going to end up, some percentage of them at least, in RFK's pocket. And that is very bad for Trump. He needs those guys. The group before that, the Red Dawn type...
And that ranges from the latest of the boomers to the whole Xers and a lot of millennials who still remember, again, as you correctly point out, Russia is never the good guy in these stories. They've known it their whole lives, and they know that Russia's not the good guy right now. And I want to get back to Russia in our history lesson towards the end of the episode. Sure.
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Rick, strategically to think about this, you brought up something that sort of piqued my interest is in the electoral college camp, because right now you've talked about how there's Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada's been on the list previously, Georgia's been on the list previously. If you're the Trump campaign, if you're Chris LaCivita, and you're now trying to figure out how you have to not be on offense in Michigan, but on defense in North Carolina,
That's a much different calculus. And I'm curious, you know, where if you believe in a campaign that the two finite commodities are money and a candidate's time and they're tied to one another, Trump has no money. He's got less money. There was another story right before we started recording that, you know, even his small dollar donors are starting to sort of give up. 200,000 have dropped off completely off the list. And his time is going to be spent in courtrooms. Explain to me exactly how you have an expansive campaign where...
with a guy who is there. There are many more millions of Americans who dislike Donald Trump than like him. So put yourself in the Trump campaign shoes and say, where the hell am I going to win? Look, this guy is going to have to roll up the numbers in some key swing state. And right now,
It's not just that they don't have the cash on hand. It's that, you know, look at Biden's campaign. What have they done with that $250 million in their super PAC? They've pre-bought media for the fall. They've pre-bought television ads in all the swing states. Trump does not have the juice to pre-book those ads at a good rate.
Trump's campaign, their burn rate is so colossal, they're not going to be able to put a thousand door knockers into Michigan. They're not going to be able to field big get-out-the-vote operations because the Republican National Committee is broke. The Trump campaign is broke. The Trump super PAC is broke. Now, are they going to rely, hopefully, in their mind on
on Woody Johnson and Ken Griffith and all the big hedge fund and private equity guys coming back in and saying, here, Donald, here's a million bucks for me. Okay, let's say they get 150 people to give them a million dollars. That's a big lift for a campaign, by the way. They will burn through that money in a month because he's spending $30 million right now a month
on what we call the overhead part of the grift. The legal fees, paying for his plane, paying for the core operations of the Trump family enterprise. That money will go quickly and there's not more of it out there. Well, and
The difference is, is that he hoovers up so much attention that he doesn't need money like a normal candidate. But I will say you brought up something about the door knockers, which was in Arizona. I think over the weekend they had some pro-Trump symposium or something, and they had a guy out there saying, you know, if any of you are registered to vote by mail, stop, don't do it. And as you know, Rick, like guys, what we call the permanent absentee, the people who voted by mail, right?
It was a decades-long process to get the rules in place. The money we spent.
The registrars in all the counties, Rick, as you know, to get a little logistical here, keep track of who's voted. It doesn't say who you voted for. But if Rick Wilson is on my target list and I see Rick's deposited his ballot, I can take you off my list, which makes one, I know I've got to vote in the bank, but two, it makes my targeting that much more efficient.
And Trump single-handedly wrecked that for them. In every major state where there was a Republican takeover, and I can speak very, very directly to Florida and Wisconsin having been around for those takeovers. In Florida, the secret sauce was absentee ballots and then early and mail-in voting.
and then early voting days. All those things are being taken away or restricted, and Trump himself has convinced Republican voters that if their ballot gets mailed in, it's going to get stolen by George Soros or the ghost of Hugo Chavez or some other crazy fantasy. And
Every professional Republican campaigner around Trump, when he says those things has got to just be like, God, take me now, strike me now, Lord, because I can't do this. And his predicate for 2020, you know, I lost because they lost.
turned in so many ballots. Well, that happened to be in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, right. Oh, I wonder who they are. Right. But if you end up with, let's call it
15 to 20 percent of the Republican vote who says, I'm not going to touch a mail-in ballot anymore, then you're putting your entire campaign, you're rolling the dice one time on election day. You know this very well, Reid. These programs for absentee ballot chasing is what they call it. As Reid said, if the local county election supervisor, they do a list every day and anybody can get access to it, the parties can get access to it, campaigns can get access to it,
You're not spending any more money once you have my vote in the bank. That means you're not going to target me for digital ads. You're not going to spend any more on direct mail. You're not going to phone bank me. You're not going to text bank me. You're going to do that to other people who haven't turned their vote in. And what he's saying to these people is let's reduce this back to the stone age. Let's go back to the primitive times where we used to do this all rolling the dice on one day. We used to not know how elections were going to come out.
Because there was always uncertainty. You know, and now if you've got a good early voting program, a good absentee voting program, you have a really good understanding of what it takes to win on Election Day. Right. Which is why in 2020, Trump and the Republicans had to build up this this idea of the red mirage that like you are going to see Trump winning and then oops, all of a sudden he's losing because, of course, again, to get back to the mechanics of voting or how election counting, I should say.
is that election day votes get counted first in most places and absentee and mail-in ballots get back. Correct. Now, why you wouldn't count them ahead of time is- Florida counts them ahead of time. Florida does it on the come. We have daily tallies, but a lot of states don't. But speaking of that, Reid, I remember election night in 2020. We were together in Park City with the team.
And all these MAGA people were seeing those early voting. It was like, oh, you failed. It's over. They were picking out curtains for Donald Trump's second term. And yet,
As reality slowly bit them in the ass, they found out that this whole thing, this whole red mirage, they weren't fooling Democrats. They were fooling themselves. Right. And again, that's, you know, stop the count and everything else. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about the Republican National Committee. So I grew up in that building. We both worked in that building. 310 First Street Southeast. I went there as most kids go to summer camp. I actually went to that building many summers because my dad worked there.
And so there's been a lot of talk about Trump's taking over the RNC. So he has thrown Ronna McDaniel or he's about to throw her to the wolves. She quit today or effective March 9th. So they're going to have some other goon come in and replace her. And then it sounds like Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, will be the co-chair. So in the Republican Party, guys, you'll have a chair and a co-chair. If the chair is a man, the co-chair has to be a woman and vice versa. Correct.
And then Chris LaCivita, who we mentioned before. The COO. The COO. And he's what we call Mr. Swift Boat. He was the Swift Boat guy. But Rick, talk about...
The process of why the campaign takes over the RNC, and you said this, is that the RNC would basically deem him the nominee in March. So take us through that, why campaigns do that. What's the whole point of it? There are various pools of money in federal election law, and I'm not going to bore people with every single derivation of that, but they want two things right now.
They want right of first refusal on every dollar the RNC brings in from its list. And it has a large mailing list. It has a very large fundraising operation. It's under stress because Trump's been essentially costing them a lot, but they want first refusal on every dollar, which means every dollar is going to go to Donald Trump. They want their legal bills covered by the RNC. There's a little bit of a mini rebellion going on right now, but
I am pretty confident we're going to end up with the RNC, you know, saying, yes, we'll cover your legal bills. Why are they going to do that? Because very quickly now, they want to convert to general election money and convention money because they're, like I said, the folks are various pots of money there.
They want to give Trump a financial buffer by switching to the general. They also want to give Trump a legal buffer so that he can say, I am the Republican nominee, not prospective, not hypothetical, not likely or probable. I am the Republican nominee. I've been predicting this for a while. I think that there's a way to do it in the rules. I talked to some people who are smarter about the rules than I am. And folks,
if you want a complicated thing, it's like the trade regulations of the Byzantine Empire. It's 3,000 pages of rules for the RNC. It's crazy how detailed it is. But they've already shown that they're going to put in Trump stooges and cronies and
into that world. And La Sabita is there. And, you know, as we all know, Chris La Sabita is one of the most brilliant and respected in the competition. A few smarter. You know, and he's definitely the smartest person in the Trump orbit by far. Probably smarter than Donald Trump by a good bit, I would say. I mean, take the baseline. It's a low bar, but so, but Chris is a very smart guy and he's going to go in there and he's going to see every dollar that flows through. He's going to be able to say, well,
This way, the campaign doesn't have to spend on this and on this and on this. The RNC could pick up the ball on it, including those things like absentee ballot chasing and voter calling and all those things. They can spend a lot of those cost centers into the RNC. And with Laura Trump there, she's going to keep an eye on the family interest and the family vig that they're going to take out of this thing.
And the entire thing just stinks on ice for Republicans beyond the RNC, because everything the RNC would be doing in the states, money that they would be sending out to the state parties, I would bet dollars to donuts that money will not go to the state parties. It'll go to the Trump campaign. Right. And I assume the Democrats have a similar thing. But I mean, in the Republican side, you call it the victory program, which is
presidential campaign and the RNC have a joint fundraising committee. There's a way to mix money. And there's shenanigans for days. Yeah. Like in 88, when I was on the Bush campaign in 88, two weeks a month, my salary is for victory, two weeks a month for Bush quail 88. Right, yeah. All that kind of legislative... And we did that in... Or budget domain. Right, right. And we did that in 04 as well. And the other part...
too, is that, you know, so yeah, it's all about money. That's really the whole thing. And I remember once in 2000 doing an event in Maine and talking to a Secret Service agent. And he's like, now this is a campaign event. I said, no, this is a victory event. And he's like, what's the difference? And I explained it to him. And so, you know, at a campaign event, it would say Rick Wilson for president. At a victory rally, it says Rick Wilson, Reed Galen. It has 18 other- And John Smith for state Senate. Right. And he goes, you know,
If you guys were in any other business, I'd be arresting you for money laundering. And I said...
100% you would. Absolutely correct. You know, we should remember too that, and I believe this is actually a definition under the Federal Election Commission, but both the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee, at the end of the day, their only legal role, their only stated role is to nominate people for president, not even down the ballot. It's a collection of state parties that determine the way that the
delegates and all that other stuff is going to work so that they can ultimately nominate a candidate for president of the United States. And we should remember this too, Rick, is that things are so wrapped up in, you know, the Republicans and Democrats because we are a two party system for so on. But these are technically private organizations. They can make corporations. They can make whatever rules they want. Correct. And so the RNC, just like every other Republican institution, is
No one in that organization is going to go up against Donald Trump and say no to him. Like right now, Haley Barber and a couple of other people like, well, we're going to do a resolution since we can't pay Trump's legal bills. That is going to go over and get about four votes. And at the end of the day, Haley is too rich and too old to give a damn. Right. And those four committee people will be turned out the next time there's an election. They'll be turfed the minute there's a vote. Because look, we all understand this at this point.
MAGA has taken over the Republican party and MAGA is whatever Donald Trump says it is that day. They're desperately looking for additional sources of cash everywhere they can. The RNC takeover is like the penultimate grift in this whole thing. The next grift will be the convention, which they'll raise money for and Trump will probably cut it back to one night. Right. You know? Right. Right.
But there's not a lot of stupid money left. It's hard to get the money they're going to have to get from here on. And, you know, does he get a $50 million check from Elon or something one day? Who knows? Right. But again, this is the thing is that theoretically the money will be unlimited. I mean, remember Trump almost bankrupted his own campaign in 20. Yeah. In the fall of 20. I wrote a piece about it in 16 because they burned through. Remember Trump went bankrupt.
completely dark for three weeks in September, except for like the showing up for debate stuff. But they went dark. They went dark because they were broke. So, Rick, let's close with a little history lesson. So I want to go back. I don't know. It's probably 10 days or two weeks now. So Tucker Carlson is over there interviewing Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Putin is just making things up.
I mean, he knows he's lying. Right. So he, you know, says things like, you know, Ukraine has been part of Russia since 700. And, you know, it's full of banderites and it's full of Nazis. And, you know, it's really part of the Russian Empire. He says that Hitler was forced to invade Poland in September 1st, 1939. The Soviets came in, I think, about two weeks later from the east. And, you know, they had a big party.
So let's just remind everybody about a little thing, a couple of things. One is Poland was the next country on Hitler's hit parade in 1939 after Czechoslovakia and, you know, and all the other sort of states he'd rolled up. One thing people don't remember, though, is that the Soviet Union took over the same number of countries prior to the sort of British and French entry into World War II as the Germans had.
So the Russians, they became our allies by dint of what Trigby would call the Stalin rule, which is you got to fight with the guys you got to fight with. But these were not good guys. They were as predatory to their neighbors as the Germans were. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and Russia was a hunting license for those guys to go and expand their territory on both sides of the pact.
And so the idea that there's some sort of mystical Ukrainian-Russian inheritance and they belong to Russia in some way, first off, it's ahistorical. And second off, people who think Tucker Carlson is smart should watch that interview because Putin rolls him like a cheap rug in a garage sale. Putin steps on him over and over again.
over and over again and just smacks him around. And it really told me something about how weak all of these assessments of Russia from the Putin caucus in this country are. Remember, Tucker Carlson says, I'm rooting for Putin. You've got J.D. Vance cheerleading for Putin, Mike Lee cheerleading for Putin, all these other people minimizing Putin's evil, even in a week,
where Vladimir Putin murdered Alexei Navalny, his number one political rival, who he had imprisoned illegally for years, murdered him. Even after that, you had people like Lindsey Graham pretending that they weren't blocking Ukrainian aid. And the insanity of that, it tells you how little today's Republican Party knows
thinks of the American people and their knowledge of history. And it tells you how little they care about anything to do with America's security. I mean, these guys tell us this over and over again. They're saying, okay, well, you know, we're going to cut off Ukraine. And yeah, there could be tanks in Kiev, but oh, well, Donald Trump doesn't want us to vote for this bill. They say, we're not going to vote for a border security bill, the toughest border security bill in decades, because Donald Trump doesn't want it. My
Mike Johnson is going to say, I'm going to shut down the government because Donald Trump wants me to shut down the government to crash the economy. There is no one in charge in this party that gives a damn about American security at this point. And the idea that you have this ahistorical assessment of what Putin and Russia really is...
is, to my mind, it's malpractice, it's incompetence, it's maliciousness. And a few of them are actually sort of a fifth column for Putin now, guys like J.D. Vance in particular. Well, and, you know, it's interesting because you talk about the Christian nationalists in this country, Rick, are all agog with Putin and, you know, the Russian Orthodox Church and, you know, the guy that runs that, when the truth is, is that Putin pines Putin
for a time when he was an intelligence officer in the Soviet Union, which was definitionally an atheistic society. Trump, he's probably not an avowed atheist, but if he doesn't believe himself to be God, he doesn't believe anybody else's either, right? When I wrote two books about Donald Trump, I struggled to find any shred of evidence that Donald Trump
understood anything about Christianity or faith or particularly the evangelical movement, which worships him like he's the third coming. But, you know, I'm reading a bio of Putin right now by Philip Short, and it's dense and it's brilliant. It's about 900 pages long, and it is a granular bio of this guy and nothing
Nothing in his character should ever have led any American official to treat with this guy as anything other than a monster. And he has always been a monster. He has always been corrupt. He's probably the richest man in the world.
But he has always been corrupt. He's always been willing to kill his political opponents. And at a moment, again, where Navalny was murdered, and you and I met his daughter last year. Dasha. Dasha, yeah. And I find that to be something that is a real example of how morally broken Republicans are. And of course, Trump said, oh, well, because I'm in court for committing crimes, I'm just like Navalny. Yeah. Called himself a dissident. Yeah, he's a dissident.
And I had to defend it. Maybe. Yeah. You know, I called, I had a few choice words that we won't repeat for a family program, but the idea that Donald Trump is a dissident would mean that carjackers are dissidents and check fraud guys are dissidents and low rent scammers are dissidents. They're not. This is a guy who for the first time in his miserable, filthy six decades in business and public life is being held to any kind of account.
And, you know, so of course he looks at Putin as a hero. This guy that gets away with everything, the guy that's stolen. There's an estimate that Putin is worth like $150 billion that he's looted from Russia. So of course a guy like Trump admires Putin. And of course Republicans now are willing to say, you know, we really don't care about American national security as long as it's our friend Vlad.
Right. Well, and the whole thing too is, and we see this with the Russia-inspired Hunter Biden stuff and all of the rest of it. Have you talked about that on the program yet? Because that's an amazing story. Folks, all the things you heard from Jim Jordan and Jim Comer and all these other Republicans and Fox, a million Fox story, you'd think they'd learn their lesson by now. Saying, oh, well, there's...
smoking gun evidence that Hunter Biden was engaged in a criminal fraud with Burisma and that he gave Job every single bit.
of it turns out to be a lie. The source they depended on, the one guy they depended on for this ludicrous story, turns out he was being fed this information by, surprise, Russian intelligence. And it turns out none of it's true. Not a goddamn word of it turned out to be true, except that there's a company called Burisma and a guy called Hunter Biden, but there was none of this glorious conspiracy.
But, you know, look, the Russians, as Stuart always says, the investment they made in Trump in 2016 has paid off every single day since then. And they're going to do it again. They're doing it right now. Yeah. And, you know, the Russians, Rick, you and I were having a meeting with someone earlier and we say we always have to remind ourselves what are the things that they're willing to do that we would never consider. And now you can go pretty dark in a pretty big hurry, but we shouldn't be under any illusion. Right. This worked for them in 2016. Yeah.
It almost worked in 2020. And remember that, and I really believe this, that for Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump returning to the White House is an existential event. 100% agree. He lives or dies if Trump returns to the office. I mean, and I would say there's a real chance that if Donald Trump loses this election, somebody's going to walk up behind Vlad and put two in the back of his head and send the family the bill. That's an old Russian story. Oh, you'll look it up. But I don't think he lives...
for a day past Trump losing. And I'm here for that. Look, I think the guy is a, he has formed an alliance with people that we're told by, here's the paradox. Republicans are screaming every day, China, China, China, Iran, Iran, Iran. Who's funding Vladimir Putin right now to run this war? China. Who's building his cruise missiles and his drones? Iran. Who's providing him artillery shells? North Korea.
Nice friends you got there, J.D. Vance. Right. Well, because, you know, that Russian oil's got to go somewhere. Yep. Right? It's not going west, so it's got to go east. It ain't going west. Yep. Well, Rick, as always, thanks for joining me. Where can we find you on social media, and where else can we find you? I am on Threads and Twitter and Instagram, all at the Rick Wilson. You can listen to my podcast, The Enemy's List, and
And you can also listen to my other part-time podcast with me and Molly Jong Fast every Monday. We do an episode of Fast Politics. And if you really are interested, March 6th, Molly Jong Fast and I are doing a live show in New York City. Live show. Live show. Citywide. Live and in person.
All right. As always, gang, you can find me on Twitter and TikTok at Reed Galen on threads and Instagram at Reed underscore Galen underscore LP and over at Substack at the home front. Hope you'll check it out. Rick Wilson. Thanks for joining me. Thank you, sir. And everybody else. See you next time. Thanks again to everyone for listening.
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