Republicans will come crawling back to Trump after he 'eats Ron DeSantis alive': Rick Wilson

In an interview with the Guardian's David Smith, former Republican Party campaign consultant Rick Wilson cautioned foes of Donald Trump to contain their enthusiasm at the prospect that his political future is in rapid decline, explaining he fully expects the former president to turn his fortunes around.

Wilson, whose distaste for Trump and all he represents led him to co-found the virulently anti-Trump Lincoln Project with a group of like-minded conservatives, said it is only a matter of time before Trump once again regains the upper hand and that prominent Republicans who have taken shots at him since the midterms will once again "... bend the knee, they will break, they will fall, they will all come back into line."

Speaking with Smith, he explained, "The greatest danger in American politics is not recognising that there are great dangers. The same people in 2015 and 2016 were confidently asserting Donald Trump could never, ever under any circumstances win the Republican nomination, and there were never any circumstances where Donald Trump could beat Hillary Clinton, and then he could never have almost a million people die because of his mishandling of Covid and on and on and on and on."

According to Wilson, while conservatives appear to be coalescing around Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) as a Trump alternative, that will likely end quickly once Trump gets his 2024 presidential campaign in gear and focuses on cutting the Florida Republican off at the knees.

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"He [Trump] controls a quarter, at the minimum, of the Republican base. Even if it’s 15% and he goes into Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and he wins primaries because he has 15% going in, that’s the ballgame. It’s over. It’s done. Everybody else, it’s all over bar the crying,” Wilson predicted.

Continuing in that vein, he added, "Right now they’re all talking so much sh*t: ‘I’m not going to get with Trump. I’m going to be with the hot new number, DeSantis.’ When DeSantis gets his ass handed to him, when he gets his clock cleaned in a debate or forum or just by Trump grinding away at him, eating him alive mentally for weeks on end, and suddenly Donald Trump’s numbers start posting up again, all the conservative thinkers who are right now like, ‘We will never vote for Trump again, we have integrity!’ will find themselves some excuse. ‘Well, you know, we don’t like Trump’s tweets, but otherwise it’s pure communism!’"

Summing up, he added, "It’s all bullsh*t, it’s all a f*cking game, and that game is going to play out in a way that does not result in the outcome that the donor class thinks they’re going to get.”

You can read more from him here.