Vocal Trump critic and Republican strategist Rick Wilson takes aim at the president in his new book, but when asked for specifics by Fox News Host Martha MacCallum, he came up short.
Mr. Wilson sat for an interview Monday night on McCallum’s The Story where the two discussed his new book Everything Trump Touches Dies. Martha had one glaring question that Rick was unable to fully answer: “What has died?”
Wilson struggled to answer a question that is the central theme in his book. At first, he said that the people around Trump are doomed and used Omarosa Manigault as an example.
“One moment Omarosa is the best friend in the world, and she’s wonderful,” Wilson exclaimed. “And the next minute, she’s wacky Omarosa.”
MacCallum correctly pointed out that Omarosa’s departure and recent anti-Trump statements don’t really matter to voters, working families or much of anyone else. Well, perhaps it serves as some short-term entertainment – kind of like a dumpster fire.
Martha then touted the red-hot Trump economy and highlighted statistics that Americans feel are important. Wilson’s response? It started under Obama and it’s not going to last.
“Look, we are still sitting on a gigantic ocean of quantitative easing, cheap money from the Fed, that started during Obama,” he said. “That has a large economic impact.”
Wilson then shot down Trump’s tax cuts saying that they are “going to come with a price tag.”
MacCallum talked about the sky-high consumer confidence numbers and asked Wilson, as good as things are looking for the economy, “what died?”
Wilson tried to push the “people around Trump” answer again and was quickly cut off as Martha asked again, more forcefully this time, “what died?” Wilson meandered through an answer that never really pointed anything out that Trump has touched and/or killed.
“The fact that the Republican Party used to stand for the rule of law,” he replied. “This is a president that is at war with the FBI, at war with the justice department, who believes he operates in an extra-judicial fashion in a lot of different ways, and you see him frequently acting as if he is not a person who works for the people.”
Ultimately, Mr. Wilson comes back around to his one and only answer to Martha’s pointed question: the people around Trump are doomed.
“The people that have worked for him have come to grief – almost all of them,” he said, repeating his earlier assertion.
Some of what Wilson says is true of people who have left the administration, but not due to the president. Power-struggles and character clashes between administration members in the early days led to most departures. Those in legal trouble, like Manafort and Gates, are facing those issues because of things they did before working with Trump. Omarosa? She was a disaster before he gave her a second chance. Perhaps that was an error on his part, but it wasn’t what made her a terrible person.
Now, to help Mr. Wilson answer Martha’s question, here are some things that Trump has actually touched and killed:
- The individual mandate
- high income taxes
- NAFTA
- TPP
- U.S. involvement with the Paris accord
- the decline in manufacturing jobs
- the incredible power of federal government employee unions
The catalog of things that Trump is in the process of building is even longer, but this should be enough if Mr. Wilson intends to re-write his book after some honest reflection.
