He was a Republican ad man but now he’s a bestselling author out to bring down a president. He says Democrats must listen

Democratic voters should read Rick Wilson’s new book, he says, and heed his advice about how to beat Donald Trump.

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Why? “Unless your candidate is a generational superstar like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton” – and it’s not a push to say there is no such Democrat this year – “we know all the tricks to beating them and we’ve used them over and over again.”

By “we” he means the Republican party. Wilson is a top Republican strategist with 30 years’ experience. He has made myriad attack ads, notorious among them efforts in support of Rudy Giuliani in New York in 1998 and against Obama 10 years later.

But Wilson’s first book, a bestseller released in 2018, was called Everything Trump Touches Dies. The sequel, out next week, is Running Against the Devil. The GOP enjoyed success after success but it has fallen under the sway of Trump. Wilson wants no more.

“We control 38 state legislatures right now and there’s a reason for that: it’s because of guys like me,” he says, on the phone from Florida. “I helped to build some of the tools in the toolbox for how you go out and exploit the cultural divisions in the country, and the political divisions, to win for Republicans in blue and purple areas. On paper it looks hard but we worked hard and recognised that the way to win is sometimes to not tell people who you really are.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rick Wilson. Photograph: Courtesy Rick Wilson

Wilson’s new book is a guide to how he thinks Trump can be beaten. The chief way to do it, he says, is to make the election a referendum on the president. He thinks impeachment and the Iran crisis, which happened after he went to press, only help prove Trump isn’t fit for office.

He thinks Democrats are making a huge mistake in the campaign so far – by telling voters who they really are. The main candidates are veering too far left, he thinks, away from the disaffected Trump voters they will have to turn. Among progressives, the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren is praised for her detailed policy plans. But to Wilson, Democratic “policy is the enemy”, whether it concerns Medicare for All, gun control or women’s right to choose.

“Guys like me who still work on the Trump side of the fence can always turn it into something that is a millstone around their neck. It’s not even that hard. Elizabeth Warren produces a 600-page healthcare plan and my research geeks can’t find, I don’t know, 30 things in there that I can’t demagogue the hell out of? Because I can. Or the guys that are me now can.”

Away from the coasts and the college towns, Wilson contends, America is still a conservative place. Accordingly, Running Against the Devil contains a lot of what its author calls “tough love”, telling harsh truths and demanding Democrats put party purity aside. After all, the general election against Trump is going to be dirty as hell.

“Democrats tend to believe the country is completely homogenous politically,” Wilson says. “No matter how meritorious their position may be on gun control, for example, or not, it just kills them in rural areas. It just destroys them.

“No matter how much they want to talk about choice and reproductive rights, when you go into Catholic communities it is still a burden on them and they don’t have this ability to say, ‘Maybe rural Michigan isn’t the same thing as San Jose, California.’”

Prodding a sore, Wilson insists Trump’s defeat in the popular vote in 2016 – by nearly 3 million votes to Hillary Clinton – didn’t matter. Nor will it matter if Trump wins in the electoral college again. Them’s the rules, they ain’t changing soon and if a state doesn’t help paint the college blue, no Democrat should visit it for anything other than dollars.

You’ve got to fight where the fight is, which is these 15 electoral college swing states

“You’ve got to run where the game is played and fight where the fight is, which is these 15 electoral college swing states, and those states are not as woke and liberal as other parts of the country.”

He means places like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump won, and Nevada and Colorado and his home state, Florida.

“This isn’t rocket science. How did we Republicans elect guys in Wisconsin and Vermont and other places in recent years? We did it because we weren’t running them as national Republican figures. We helped elect a Republican governor in Vermont, four times. And you’re thinking, ‘Wow, Vermont, super liberal, how did that happen?’ Well, our guy was out there saying the Bush administration was wrong on climate change.

“Try a Democrat in rural Pennsylvania, say, who comes out and says, ‘Yes, I want to seize all automatic weapons, I want to make third trimester abortions fully taxpayer funded. That may work, that may provoke hosannas in San Francisco or Los Angeles. But out there? Not as much. They’re like … ‘Wait, what?’”

From Buchanan to Bernie

Wilson is as blunt and funny as he is on the page or Twitter, relentlessly irreverent and breathtakingly brutal.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bernie Sanders endorses Hillary Clinton at an event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in July 2016. Photograph: Justin Saglio/AFP via Getty Images

Take Bernie Sanders. Wilson doesn’t just say he thinks the democratic socialist from Vermont would be the opponent of Trump’s dreams, “the easiest person in the world to turn into the comic opera villain Republicans love to hate, the Castro sympathiser, the socialist, the Marxist, the guy who wants to put the aristos in the tumbril as they cart them off to the guillotine”.

He also hits Sanders for echoing Trump in harking back to an America that never was – “only with more unions” – and pillories him for his reaction to defeat in 2016. In Wilson’s view, Sanders damaged Clinton at the polls and then, after she “beat him fair and square, he took his ball and went home”, failing to support her in November. Wilson contrasts that starkly with Republican support for Trump.

The president has the “awesome” advantage of incumbency and money but also “a completely unified party apparatus. There’s no sniping in the background; there’s no Bernie out there after the nomination is done, like in the old days with George HW Bush and Pat Buchanan.”

It’s provocative to compare Sanders the socialist to the paleo-conservative proto-Trump who played spoiler in 92. But there’s always the happy distraction of listening to Wilson turn his guns on Trump.

Running Against the Devil is pugnacious and profane. Before a break so Wilson can take a call from a “tech billionaire” he’s sadly reluctant to name, he calls the president “a liar and a corrupt asshole and a scumbag”. He marvels at Trump’s graft, at the way a billionaire who claimed to be un-buyable turned out to be so cheap. He does seem to think Trump is the devil. But then, the devil gets the best lines and “plenty of smart, evil guys” are working on his re-election push.

If Obama campaigns as only he can do in American political life, that would be a meaningful lift for the Democrats

Asked which Democrat is best suited for the fight, Wilson admits to being impressed by Warren’s willingness to work hard and how she champions the little guy. But he still goes for Joe Biden.

“I think it will be Biden because name ID is very powerful,” he says of the former senator and vice-president. “He is the one candidate who has shown the most ability to contrast with Trump in terms of a broader, bigger picture that isn’t just locked into what’s the hot flavor of Democratic messaging this year.

“He’s talking about that big American sense of unity and reconciliation and saying we’ve got to work with Republicans too.”

It’s true you don’t get much policy detail at a Biden rally, but you do see plenty of slightly hokey appeals to the better angels of America’s nature.

“There’s nothing in Joe Biden that scans as evil or dark or weird or out of touch,” Wilson says. “He can be a little goofy but that’s not bad, not the worst thing in the world right now.

“I think neither Warren nor Sanders and certainly not Pete Buttigieg have ever had a breakthrough with African American voters sufficient to eliminate Biden’s advantage. And also, Biden’s got the secret weapon.

“If Barack Obama is free to get out there and do the campaigning that only he can do in American political life, I think that would be a meaningful lift for the Democrats.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barack Obama waves to the crowd during a rally for Wisconsin Democratic candidates in Milwaukee in October 2018. Photograph: Sara Stathas/Reuters

‘You sometimes need hard men’

Wilson may not favor Obama ideologically but Obama beat his man twice and his respect for the 44th president is clear. Even more so, No 16.

Wilson is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a Super Pac named for the party’s greatest leader and meant to persuade loyalists away from a man many consider its worst. Steve Bannon, the Trump whisperer, has noted that if the project achieves even slight success in key electoral college states, it could prove fatal. Wilson, the proudly ruthless ad man, cheerfully admits turning the lethal amorality of his craft to a distinctly moral end.

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“You sometimes need hard men and hard women to do tough things,” he says. In that sense, the name of his project is fitting. Lincoln saved the union and ended slavery with all the guile and will of the most ruthless, when necessary the most dirty politician.

“That’s where we’re at. We are people who unsentimentally love this country and who recognise that it is fabulously resilient and powerful as an idea and a nation but that it is also fragile, and can be taken away if we are not very careful.”

Given that, what would Wilson say to a Guardian reader who asked why she should listen to the guy who attacked Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor, or shamelessly but successfully linked Max Cleland, a popular senator who lost three limbs in Vietnam, to Osama bin Laden.

“You don’t have to like me. You don’t have to think I’m the guy you want to have over for a beer. But when it comes to being somebody who will tell you where to go, how to do it, even if you have to hold your nose to do it, I’ll tell you how to get there.”

He means it, his tone growing stern, the words rapped out.

“And this time I am putting my ideological priors and my preferences aside, because I think that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Republic. I’ll do anything I can to help ensure that he is not president for another four years.”