| | | Rick Wilson Goes Off on Trump & GOP Over Putin Support: ‘They Don’t Believe Their Own Bullsh*t, They Believe In Power’
By Tommy ChristopherFeb 26th, 2022
0 seconds of 2 minutes, 27 secondsVolume 90%
Republican strategist and Lincoln Project honcho Rick Wilson told Salon’s Dean Obeidallah that former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party are attracted to Vladimir Putin because they only “believe in power.”
On Friday, the host of The Dean Obeidallah Show, interviewed Wilson for his Salon interview series, and the outspoken political operative pulled no punches in his assessment of the current party’s apparent affinity for Putin:
Rick Wilson: Putin has this deep appeal to the modern Republican Party, because again, he believes in power, he believes in wealth, he believes in control. I tell my progressive and Democratic friends this all the time, I know some of you have this college dorm room desire to try true socialism somewhere, sometime, these people are not that. They are pure authoritarian kleptocrats.
The Republican Party, it appeals to them because what is Trump? He’s a pure authoritarian kleptocrat. He does what he wants, helps his friends, makes a lot of money, that’s the world they’re trying to build. So that’s why the Democrats need to fight the 2022 race, and thence 2024, with a pure understanding of who those people are and an understanding that they view the world in a very cold, clear-eyed, unequivocal way. They’re not ever fooled by their own bullshit, they don’t ever believe their own bullshit, believe, trust me. These guys don’t believe in any of this stuff, they believe in power…
The difference between America in this moment in time and America in the past is that no matter what political party they were in, Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Bush, Reagan, anybody would have said, “Hey, an authoritarian dictatorship invading a sovereign nation is a bad thing, especially in the heart of Europe. This is a terrible outcome and America will be safer if we reinforce our alliances and stand up against this kind of behavior.”
But now we have an entire political party that at best shrugs it off, at best goes, “Eh, it’s his business, it’s his backyard.” If Mexico invaded Arizona and said, “These people are more like us in Arizona than they are like the rest of America, we have a traditional historic relationship here.” That is the same exact argument Putin is using right now. I guarantee you there would be blood in the streets from those folks if that happened.
Watch above via Salon.
mediaite.com |
|
