Rick Wilson: Chris Christie is wasting time in a 'futile' effort to tell GOP voters the truth about Trump

One of the only Republican candidates for president who is actively taking on former President Donald Trump and detailing potential criminal behavior on his part is former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, even calling him a "one-man crime wave."

But as much as this stands out from other candidates, said former GOP strategist and Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson on X/Twitter Monday, it's all going to be in vain. The proof, he said, is in the newly released New York Times/Siena College poll showing Trump at 54 percent of the vote, blowing every other candidate combined out of the water.

"I'd just like to remind you one more time that spending money to defeat Trump in the primary is burning through donor resources that will be desperately needed in the general election," wrote Wilson. "In this, there are three schools of thought, all wrong."

The first idea, wrote Wilson, is that "Ron DeSantis can be magically elevated to surpass Trump. There's a LOT of Republican (and some Dem-leaning) donor money trying to make this point." This doesn't work because DeSantis is in "the lower quartile of warmth, connection, personality, humanity" and his gubernatorial record means "nothing" to GOP voters.

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The second idea is that a "bold truth-teller" like Christie, or like former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson or former Texas Congressman Will Hurd, will put Trump in his place. But as appealing as the idea is, said Wilson, "add up all the people telling the truth about the criminal master mind who runs the GOP and you get to 1/2 of a DeSantis. They're rounding error. Put a billion behind them, and they're still rounding error."

Besides, Wilson added, for all his tough talk now, Christie, who actually worked for Trump, can never "wash the stink off" of himself.

That leaves the third theory of defeating Trump, said Wilson: The ones trying to "weaken Trump by calling him a loser (he is), political poison (he is), a criminal (QED, everything), and a weak man who will lose to Joe Biden are hoping against hope that moral or political suasion will reform the GOP base." But that won't work either — those voters are "willing members of an authoritarian personality cult."

The only way to take on Trump, Wilson concluded, is to do so in the general election. Because he can't be stopped by Republicans themselves.