Former Republican strategist Rick Wilson thinks Democrats should forget about impeaching Donald Trump if they take back Congress this November.
Not because he thinks Trump doesn’t deserve it.
Wilson says Trump “absolutely deserves to be impeached and removed from office.” He just doesn’t think Democrats will have enough Senate votes to actually remove him.
So Wilson has a different idea. A much better and more aggressive one that, he says, would unleash a “delicious” and “palpable” fear inside the White House.
On the latest episode of The Lincoln Project podcast, Wilson laid out what he described as a “better way to torture Donald Trump’s White House” if Democrats win control of both chambers of Congress in the 2026 midterms.
His strategy?
Don’t start with Trump. Start with the people around him.
Wilson said Democrats should treat congressional investigations “like a mob prosecution,” going after lower-level administration officials first and working their way up the chain.
“You want to start rolling these small ball people up first,” Wilson said.
His reasoning is blunt: Many of those officials, he argued, are less politically powerful than Trump, may not be able to afford expensive legal defenses and may not believe the White House will protect them if congressional investigations begin.
“Is this lawfare? Yes. Yes, it is,” Wilson said. “But they will start to unravel.”
The Lincoln Project’s episode description similarly characterizes the strategy as taking down Trump’s inner circle “one staffer at a time,” naming figures including Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Susie Wiles and Jared Kushner.
Wilson believes the pressure could eventually move upward, potentially weakening Trump’s broader network of political allies and administration officials.
He said the goal would be to “break the back of the MAGA enabler class in D.C.”
And there’s another political calculation.
Wilson argued that the strategy could force Republicans who may be considering presidential runs in 2028 to spend their time defending Trump and his administration instead of building their own political brands.
That, he said, could “put a stink on them politically” heading into the next presidential election.
Wilson also appeared delighted by what he described as growing anxiety inside the White House.
He called the atmosphere of fear “delicious,” “palpable” and “growing by the minute.”
“I’m so here for it and you should be too,” Wilson said.
Wilson expects Trump’s allies to respond by invoking executive privilege and attempting to block congressional investigations.
His advice to Democrats?
“Steamroll it, Democrats. Just steamroll it.”
He said investigations should begin immediately after the election if Democrats know they have won a majority.
“Start the investigations the minute the polls close and we know we’ve got a majority because all of them need to be held to account,” Wilson said.
And Wilson wasn’t finished.
“The fear is ‘delicious,’” he said. “That fear needs to build. It needs to grow into raging terror.”
It’s a strikingly different vision from another impeachment campaign.
Wilson’s argument is that Democrats wouldn’t need to remove Trump from office to make his presidency—and the political operation surrounding it—considerably more difficult.
Instead, they could use congressional oversight to systematically investigate the people around him and work their way toward the top.
Whether Democrats would actually pursue that strategy is another question.
For now, it’s Wilson’s blueprint for what he believes could hurt Trump more than another impeachment fight: start with the inner circle, turn up the pressure and keep climbing.
Watch the full podcast below:
