The “knives are out” as fellow Republicans quietly plot against the president, according to conservative strategist Rick Wilson.
Wilson, a conservative anti-Trump activist who co-founded the Lincoln Project and hosts the group’s podcast, wrote on Friday about Trump’s potential political demise.
“It’s finally happening. No, not the sweet meteor of death, not the rapture, and not the long-delayed federal raid on the child-sex-trafficking and human-sacrifice dungeon in Mar-a-Lago’s catacombs. (See? Two can play at that game, MAGA.) But something that, for the first time in a long time, feels like political gravity is remembering to do its damn job,” Wilson wrote. “Donald Trump, the screeching orange parasite who first hollowed out and killed the old Republican Party and has been determined to wreck American constitutional government during his second term, is bleeding out in the polls.”
He goes on:
“And the cause? That festering political necrosis otherwise known as Jeffrey Umbermolestus, a name that’s long been whispered behind Trump’s gold-plated throne but has finally broken through the wall of MAGA denial like Juggernaut on bath salts.”
According to Wilson, “Since the cover-up of the Epstein files began a mere month ago (I know…it seems longer), the air has shifted” against the “wounded” president.
“You can read it in the data. You can smell it in the flop sweat of the White House’s comms operation. You can see it in the failed social posts, the pointless, ChatGPT-generated trolling responses Karoline Leavitt pukes out in the Brady Press Room every day. You can sense the tension on the Fox set every night as they desperately try to get back to the real issues, like Joe Biden’s autopen and the scourge of trans Wiccan pickleball players in the NCAA,” he wrote. “You can see it in the not-so-subtle political body language of GOP hopefuls who, after years of genuflecting before the Orange Idol, are starting to edge away like someone realizing they’re in line behind a guy in a soaked diaper at the DMV.”
After summarizing all the negative polls for Trump, Wilson asserts the Epstein “cover-up” is “costing him the thing he craves more than anything else: power.”
“Power is rarely lost all at once. It leaks. It drips. And when the dam breaks, everyone upstream suddenly remembers they never liked you in the first place. That moment has arrived. In Washington, the smart guys are whispering in quiet booths in expensive steakhouses, leaving no digital trail. They’re paranoid, but can no longer deny that they need a plan. They’re summoning their imaginations to the moment after Trump. As heretical as this would seem, it’s happening. They’re not just thinking of 2028, but wondering what happens if the end comes sooner, either from natural causes or political calamity,” he wrote. “Something broke a month ago, and as Trump’s flailing continues, so does the whispering, the plotting, the scenario planning. Washington politicians and lobbyists are fundamentally herd animals, ungulates in good suits, carefully drinking from the watering hole while watching for a shift in the wind, a subtle clue of the approach of predators.”
Wilson goes on to say that, “They’re nervous. They’re sniffing the wind, ambition and terror mixed in their minds.”
“The 2028 aspirants, from J.D. Vance on down, have suddenly realized that winning a 2028 primary isn’t simply about being ‘who’s the most like King Donald’ but also preparing a limited hang-out of elliptical criticism,” he added. “They’re on the phone with donors, pretending they’d never run but just wanted to catch up, dancing an elephantine Kabuki to be ready for either an immediate collapse of the dam or the slow misery of a long Trumpian goodbye.”