'If the jackboot fits, wear it': Ex-GOP strategist slams demands to stop criticizing Trump

Former President Donald Trump and his supporters are coalescing around a narrative that Vice President Kamala Harris and her supporters are at fault for two assassination plots against him, by criticizing his character and saying he's dangerous for democracy. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) even demanded that Harris take down all references to Project 2025 from ads in swing states for Trump's safety.

This is complete nonsense, Lincoln Project co-founder and former Republican strategist Rick Wilson wrote on his Substack — and Democrats should ignore the demands.

"The emerging MAGA conflation that every criticism of Donald Trump is a call for his assassination is a logical, moral, and political fallacy of the most sublimely stupid nature, a false equivalence so profoundly wrong in every dimension that only the people with a political death wish (and, perhaps, the American media) could buy it," wrote Wilson. "They say calling Trump what he is — a pedant authoritarian, a convicted criminal, an enabler of the worst and most dangerous elements of our body politic — constitutes a death threat, not a description. Sorry, MAGA, but if the jackboot fits, wear it: he is an authoritarian, a statist, a racist, an aspiring fascist, a hateful, mendacious, corrupt traitor, a fool, mentally ill, and frankly evil."

The fact is, Wilson wrote, Harris has not at any point called for violence against Trump. The former president, on the other hand, frequently does precisely that with people he disagrees.

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Trump has regularly called for using state and supporter power against critics, Wilson said, "from his yokelspringa rallies to the Oval Office." That includes Trump's call to shoot peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square Park and his comments about "Second Amendment people" taking out Hillary Clinton.

"Trump, J.D. Vance, and their allies are engaged in the rhetorical precursors to violence as I write this with their baseless attacks on legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio," said Wilson.

"You claim that talking about Trump, Project 2025, his debate loss, his grotesque, sweaty relationship with 9/11 truther and madwoman Laura Loomer, his dementia, infirmity, and word-salad glossolalia are like shouting 'fire' in the proverbial crowded theater," wrote Wilson. He then proceeded to enumerate other GOP demands about how to handle Trump — and rejected them one by one.

"You demand our silence. I refuse," he wrote, repeatedly.

Meanwhile, said Wilson, "You threaten us, dox us, SWAT us, call us criminals, communists, pedophiles, and murderers, and demand we meekly accept your lies and slanders. You threaten our families and loved ones and demand we accept your terms. And at that, and once more with feeling, I absolutely refuse."