Rick Wilson on Republicans after Trump: I'm worried about 'more competent' version

The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson offers a very bleak outlook into the future for Republicans after four years of Donald Trump. In an interview with DW's Ines Pohl, he predicts the emergence of a third party in the US.

Rick Wilson, how did Donald Trump happen?

This is a country that has become largely addicted to and mediated by reality television. Many saw Donald Trump on "The Apprentice" for 14 years on television. He looked competent and smart, like a great dealmaker and a great businessman. Of course, we all know, in the real world that was never even close to Donald Trump's actual character. When Donald Trump reached the Republican presidential stage, Republican voters had become increasingly isolated from reality of any kind, and then became increasingly addicted to the kind of defiant oppositional nature of Fox News and of their own Facebook groups and their own online communities.

How will the millions of Trump supporters in uence the future of the Republican Party?

They are going to be driving the party further and further into the Trumpist space, which is authoritarian, which is nationalist, which is highly regimented around the obedience to the Dear Leader. As you know, it has frightening historical precedents. I am worried about the more competent, smart, presentable version of Trump, that's going to come down the pike in a few years. That to me is an enormously concerning impact of Trumpism.

How did he change the Republican Party?

I'm afraid that Trump has conditioned a generation of Republicans to believe that if they don't get their way they don't need to work within the constitution of the United States. They can go an extrajudicial, extrapolitical route, which may involve violence, which may involve the generation of enormous risks for the future of one of the world's longest running and robust democracies.

With Donald Trump leaving o ce, what happens to the Republican Party and the Trumpism movement?

They're going to lose a meaningful number of their own voters, those voters have become members of a Trumpist movement, and that's not going to go away. His son will pick up the mantle when Donald Trump dies, or his daughter, or, people that imitate him very closely will pick up that mantle, and there's nothing that can be done about that, because the Republican Party has sold itself to Trump. There is no institutional Republican Party left to push back against Trumpism.

With the potential of the Republican Party fracturing, is it possible we will see a new political party?

The emergence of a third party in the US is upon us, and that party is not an American party. That party is dedicated to authoritarianism, that party is dedicated to the worship of a single family, that party is oppositional to anything that gets in their political way. That opposition manifests itself in ways that are not traditionally seen in the American political space.

The American political spaces have long had a center left and center right, and the edges of both parties were not terribly influential and there was always a tug of war between those center-left and centerright voices. Now, we have a voice on the extreme right of Trumpism, which is driven by that oppositional defiance of traditional norms.

What about the Republicans who have opposed Trump and his policies? What happens with them?

There are guys like Mitt Romney and Adam Kinzinger and some of the folks in Georgia, who have said no to the president, but that courage is very rare. When you've only got 27 members of Congress on the Republican side that acknowledged that Joe Biden won the election, you've got a much smaller party than you once had.

As the conservative side splits, the Trumpist party will be two-thirds to five-eighths of what was the GOP. It'll be a smaller Romney sort of Republican Party. That's not an effective political party at the national scale.

Rick Wilson is a political strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a political action committee set up by former Republicans to prevent Donald Trump being reelected. Wilson is the author ofEve

rything Trump Touches Dies. He lives in Florida.