According to his page at The Lincoln Project, "Rick Wilson is a renowned political strategist, infamous ad-maker, writer, speaker and a political commentator. In December 2019, Rick co-founded the Lincoln Project, a political action committee whose goal is to hold accountable those who would violate their oaths to the Constitution and would place their loyalty to others before their loyalty to the American people and democracy."
In a Substack post dated yesterday, this is what he had to say about the currrent president:
Let me say what the White House press corps cannot bring itself to say, what the Sunday shows have agreed to murmur around rather than at:
Donald John Trump is dying.
He is dying in the ordinary biological sense, the sense in which you and I and every warm-blooded creature on this rolling flying through space and time are dying.
He is seventy-nine. He turns eighty next month. He went to Walter Reed today, his thrid visit in thirteen months ("Totally normal! Just a third checkup in a year!"), and the White House would like you to believe this is a wellness influencer's self-care routine rather than what it obviously is: the late-stage management of a long-abused body breaking down in public.
Sure, it's fun to speculate on what we'll all do when The Day arrives, but Trump's death isn't just physical.
But more importantly, more lastingly, he is dying as a force in our politics, as a presence in our culture, and as the dark gravitational center of the American right. The only people who can't see it are the ones whose paychecks depend on pretending the corpse is still doing pirouettes and burpees.
The man's own physician diagnosed him last summer with chronic venous insufficiency, the swollen-ankles, blood-pools-in-the-legs condition you generally see in your great-aunt who needs the recliner kicked up before Wheel of Fortune. He has been photographed repeatedly with hand bruises the size and color of rotten plums, slathered in concealer that doesn't quite take. The official explanation is "frequent handshaking and aspirin."
Of course. Every septuagenarian I know who shakes hands has a hand that looks like he caught it in the door of a Buick.
Then there's the gait. The slowing shuffle to Marine One. The right-handed lean. The drifting into associative word-salad that, on Biden, would have launched a thousand Fox News chyrons in sixty seconds.
He has become, there is no way to say this without saying it, MAGA... doddering. Unsteady. Tired. A man whose physical envelope is visibly insufficient for the job he claims to be doing.
Evil ages you. Sin rests as heavy as lead on the bones. Cruelty and malice corrupt and destroy their bearers. You can see it in him now, the way you could in Mobutu, in Mugabe, in the gangsters of history who used the state as a punishment and piggy bank for too long.
Compare this with the saturation coverage of Biden's decline to the lullaby around Trump's.
When Biden trailed off, it was a three-day national emergency: cable hits, op-eds, anonymous-source pieces about West Wing concern. The 25th Amendment got more name-checks in 2024 than the Bill of Rights got in a decade.
Trump goes to Walter Reed for the third time in a year, with bruises hand-painted out of existence and a diagnosed circulatory disorder, and the coverage is what? A polite CBS write-around. A Washington Post nothingburger story detailing the drive up to Bethesda. A few brave souls noting that "independent physicians say the White House hasn't answered keey questions." No Jake Tapper special. No glossy Original Sin book proposal. No "ten Republican senators speaking on background." Just the press doing what the press always does in the presence of an authoritarian project: flinching.
This is the most dishonest White House about the President's physical condition since Edith Wilson was forging her stricken husband's signature behind the curtains in 1919. The parallel is not casual. The memos, the "excellent health," the "sharpest president in American history," the careful staging... the cover-up of Trump's diminished physical and mental capacity isn't coming.
The cover-up is already running. Karoline Leavitt, Stephen Chung, and the rest of the White House noise machine have lied to the media for years about Trump's condition, and never once been held to account.
Here is where the second death becomes impossible to ignore.
Trump is winning nothing. Trump is holding nothing. He is narrowcasting to a withering, contracting MAGA base dying off at a rate that will soon reshape the political landscape again... and mistaking the cheers in ever-dwindling crowds, in ever-smaller halls for sound of a country still living in 2016.
Pew, last month: 34 percent. The lowest of his second term. Fox News... Fox News... has him down 24 points with Republicans since March 2025. Rural white voters, the base of the base of the base, have gone from +27 net approval to -6 in twelve months. Among his own 2024 voters, approval has slid from 95 percent to 78.
The MAGA coalition is not growing. It is not holding. It is shedding, paycheck by smaller paycheck, grocery receipt by grocery receipt, slowly creeping away from cultlike adoration with every trip to the gas pump.
The cable hosts and the Truth Social cheerleaders do not understand this, because they have marinated for a decade in a closed informational system: winning a MAGA primary is not winning the country. The cheers inside the tent get louder as the tent gets smaller. That's not strength. That's the acoustic property of a shrinking room.
Which brings us to the ballroom, the arch, the White House glitter bukkake redecoration, the urgent desire to slap his name on every flat surface. Add those out-of-touch moments to the pardons, the no-bid contracts, the crypto scams, the $1.7 billion slush fund, and the snake-pit of grift the second term has become.
The conventional read is that this is power... the dictator phase, the strongman unleashed.
I want to suggest the opposite. Strongmen at the at the height of their game don't need the ballroom. They don't need to rename the Kennedy Center after themselves. They don't need the gold leaf, the fake portraits, the rebranded monuments and memorials.
That's the behavior of a man who knows the clock is running and is grabbing what he can while the grabbing is good. That's Marcos in Manila in 1985. That's Ceausescu in 1988, before he and the missus were lined up against a wall.
Genuine power doesn't need to be advertised this loudly. The frantic escalating, almost pornographic self-celebration is the tell. It's a confession in plain sight. The man building his mausoleum while he's still alive is the man who knows he's running out of road.
So here we are. A 79-year-old man, swollen of extremity and bruised of hand, looking like the victim of a zombie bite by denying it until he turns, shuffling between Walter Reed and a half-built ballroom nobody asked for, with an approval rating in free fall, a base finally asking quiet questions about grocery prices, a press corps too cowed to say out loud what they all know, and a clock, biological, cultural, and political, that he cannot bully into stopping.
He is not coming back from this. There is no third act. There is only the long, undignified, makeup-smeared decline of a man and a movement whose moment has passed, narrating itself ever more loudly into an ever emptier hall, a frowzy barfly of a man, replaying past glories that never happened and hoping you won't notice the bad wig.
Trump is dying.
Say it out loud. It will feel strange the first time. Less strange the second. By the tenth, you'll wonder why it took the rest of the press corps so long to catch up.
And yes, when The Day comes, I promise you that my better angels will be taking PTO.
Update: Tina Brown weighs in. In a post on her own Substack, dated May 27, titled "Trump's Sweet Vengeance," and subtitled "Democrats are getting it wrong again," Tina presents an opposite view of the world:
Democrats are getting it wrong again. After Trump’s 11th-hour endorsement of Texas attorney general and all-in Trump sycophant Ken Paxton, who was impeached for multiple charges of abuse of office, investigated on felony security charges, and dogged by adulterous sexual imbroglios, the slippery MAGA sleazebag still went on to pulverize Senate old-timer John Cornyn in the Republican primary on Tuesday. And yet, liberal cableheads deconstructing the results keep recycling the point that, somehow this was good news. Millions of dollars, they chortled, will now have to be diverted from other imperiled Republicans to defend a Senate seat that, for four terms, had been occupied by the beloved party elder Cornyn and now will be in play against the Democrats’ latest Texan mirage and Colbert candidate James Talarico. When has Trump ever found it difficult to raise millions of dollars, especially against a Senate candidate who tweeted in 2021 that his office was “the first in the history of the (Texas) Capitol to put pronouns on their business cards?” Paxton was already on a roll in his victory speech, immediately branding his Presbyterian seminarian opponent “James Talafreako,” “Six-Gender Jimmy,” and “Tofu Talarico” (“Soy boy!” yelled out an inventive Paxton supporter in the crowd).
Of course, as all the pundits tell us, Trump’s base loves him but, in using that term, I suspect they still subliminally conjure dated images of a Viking-horned, bare-chested QAnon shaman storming the Capitol. Today, that same lawless horde is now not only pardoned, but about to have access to Trump’s new $1,776 billion “Anti-Weaponization” slush fund. The fact that the comatose turtle, former Senate leader Mitch McConnell, has finally emerged from political hiding to denounce the outrage of a cop-bashing mob getting a financial pay-out is no threat to Trump. McConnell can exhume some principles because he isn’t running again. Trump’s resident House weenie Speaker Mike Johnson, with his own re-election looming, was so fearful of losing the slush fund vote that he sent lawmakers home early for a week’s recess to avoid it.
Don’t expect House members to return emboldened when Trump has just gone four for four in the primaries, whacking, not just Cornyn, but his Epstein Files Transparency Act foe Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Georgia GOP gubernatorial candidate Brad Raffensperger, who committed the ultimate crime of failing to “find” 11,780 more Trump votes in Georgia in the 2020 election. Sorry, not sorry about Senator Bill Cassidy from Louisiana also hitting the bricks. He’s the physician who oversaw a nationally-recognized vaccine campaign in his home state, but later revealed his inner worm by casting the deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary. Trump punished him anyway for having voted in 2021 for his second impeachment. So long, mofo.
Every liberal commentator now bangs on about an assured mid-term shellacking for the POTUS party over rising gas prices, thanks to the Trump-created catastrophe of the Strait of Hormuz closure and the universally unpopular Iran war. I suspect they and the polls are wrong again. It’s not just the creeping success of Republican redistricting creating more seats than Democratic efforts to do the same. Trump has found a diabolical way to separate his personal charisma from the destruction he perpetrates and the corruption he normalizes. He’s the angel of sabotage, freed from the shackles of his own malign deeds by the Supreme Court, the GOP’s moral turpitude, and the universal glint of greed from the Wall Street honchos, Silicon Valley bros, and Palm Beach plutocrats who see that the presidency is open for business. As last week’s Brennan Center newsletter put it, “There is a zone of lawlessness around the Oval Office.” In Trump’s first term, he was restrained by the need for a second, and by advisers schooled in the now-quaint ethos of governing by accepted norms. But then, he learned something transformative. Speaking to the NYT in January about prohibiting his family from profiteering overseas from proximity to official business in his first term, Trump said that, “he got no credit for it.” He then added a killer kicker that made less news at the time but has stayed with me as a rare moment of truth: “I found out that nobody cared.”
If there is any message that crystalizes the 250th anniversary of the U.S., it is not that America has changed but that Trump has changed America. There will be no snapback when he’s gone. Even as his approval ratings tank and the country is hurting, it feels as if his base has become wider and deeper and represents a new national state of mind. Tuned out on our phones, mesmerized by money porn, high on the idolatry of the big flashy win, we are getting used to the erosion of the rule of law, the threats to free speech, the banishment of government watchdogs, and the chasm of inequality. After ten years of Trump bludgeoning the first principles of the American experiment (ten because I don’t count the disappearing ink of Biden’s lame tenure when every headline was a new Trump indictment, scandal, or toxic blast from exile in Mar-a-Lago), Trump has refashioned the country in his image.
In the comments below the post, Tina says several times that she hopes she's wrong. I do too.
