Former Republican strategist Rick Wilson on MSNBC on August 28, 2025

One longtime Republican strategist is now warning that President Donald Trump may be contemplating deploying the U.S. military as a means of disrupting next year's pivotal midterm elections.

During a Thursday appearance on MSNBC, Rick Wilson — who is a co-founder of the anti-Trump Republican group The Lincoln Project — weighed in on California Governor Gavin Newsom's (D) comments that Trump may attempt to stay in power beyond 2028 in defiance of the U.S. Constitution and whether Newsom's concerns were legitimate. He said that while Trump has a history of "trolling," the president is also a "gambler" who has a pattern of taking big political risks for large payoffs.

"If it had gone just slightly differently on January 6th, 2021, and Congress refused to certify the election, Donald Trump would have returned to the White House," he said. "He is a guy who will gamble and push and use that that shamelessness and that transgression that's so that's so central to his character to try to get away with stuff ... If he could get away with it, he would make a shot at it."

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After Wilson's comments, New York Times reporter Peter Baker piled on, and suggested that Trump could feasibly use the National Guard as a means of depressing voter turnout in certain states, given that he's already given orders to deploy them to various red states. Wilson affirmed Baker's point, and said that while it was too early to tell what the president would do next year, he had exhibited patterns that should concern voters.

"Trump enjoys the outrage it generates when he mobilizes federal forces onto the streets who are armed, in environments where they're not trained to be, for law enforcement purposes or immigration purposes," he said. "He enjoys that reaction."

"He is also, you know, [borrowing] from the dictator's playbook," Wilson continued. "He wants to desensitize people to the presence. of those folks out there all the time. ICE now has a bigger budget than the Marine Corps, and he loves this gigantic force that is answerable only to him. And he is certainly putting it to to maximum effect. I would not be shocked if he did try to apply it as an intimidation tactic in the 2026 election season.

Watch the full segment below, or by clicking this link.

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