‘They will bend the knee’: Lincoln project cofounder cautions against dismissing Trump

Donald Trump, the former US president, is all washed up. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is poised to dethrone him. This is the view currently in vogue among many in Washington.

Not so fast, argues Rick Wilson, a veteran Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group that shot to prominence with go-for-the-jugular advertisements before becoming mired in scandals of its own.

"The greatest danger in American politics is not recognising that there are great dangers," Wilson, who lives in Florida, says in a phone interview. "The same people in 2015 and 2016 were confidently asserting Donald Trump could never, ever under any circumstances win the Republican nomination, and there were never any circumstances where Donald Trump could beat Hillary Clinton, and then he could never have almost a million people die because of his mishandling of Covid and on and on and on and on.

"I know that the Republicans who right now are acting very bold and the donors who are acting very frisky - as Trump starts winning primaries, they will bend the knee, they will break, they will fall, they will all come back into line."

When Trump scheduled his announcement of a third run for the White House this month, he had hoped to ride a "red wave" of midterm election successes and sweep aside potential rivals within the Republican party. But the red wave ebbed and his anticlimactic campaign launch had the opposite effect.

With Trump at arguably his weakest point since last year's January 6 insurrection, senior Republicans are criticising his losing habit, Rupert Murdoch's media empire is ridiculing him and big money donors such as Ken Griffin and Stephen Schwarzman are deserting what they perceive as a sinking ship.

The new conventional wisdom - or wishful thinking - among numerous pundits is that, after surviving crisis after crisis, Trump has finally met his Waterloo. A slew of federal, state and congressional investigations and opinion polls showing DeSantis ahead or level lend credence to this view.