Former Republican strategist Rick Wilson wants Democrats to stop saving Republicans from themselves. I know Rick Wilson is not our friend, but I think he's right here when it comes to what it's going to take to get through to a bunch of Trump's base on the damage the Republican Party is doing to all of us.

Here's the back and forth with Wilson and MSNBC's Ali Velshi, discussing how Democrats should be handling this impasse with Trump right now:

VELSHI: In a Substack post this week, you published it right before the shutdown, you wrote, "The consultants, pollsters, and focus group whisperers have told Democratic leadership they need to fight for the Obamacare ACA insurance benefit because it polls well. I'm sure it does. Happens to be right thing to do, but not the right thing to do right now. Why? Because pain is the only teacher in politics."

Tell me what you mean by this, pain is the only teacher in politics.

WILSON: The dirty secret of the pull yourself up by your bootstraps tough guy MAGAs is that about 65% of the people who are getting that ACA benefit are MAGA voters in red states.

I want them to understand that Donald Trump is in one more way screwing them over. He has screwed them over on the tariffs. He has screwed them over on tax cuts for people like Elon Musk, our struggling billionaire class, and now he's going to screw them over on their insurance benefits.

The other part of this is that no matter what Schumer and Speaker Jeffries got in the room with Donald Trump, as the Speaker correctly pointed out, they just do things unilaterally. Anyone who believes Donald Trump would keep a deal with the Democratic leadership is making a fool's bet.

These are not people with honor or integrity who you can trust in a negotiation. They will turn around and bite you. They're the scorpion that's in their nature to bite you.

So my argument against making ACA the only centerpiece of this is that you have a lot of other ways to bring pressure on Trump. My argument is, bring that pressure, but also go in that room and say, the tariffs right now, so that Democrats could walk out of that negotiation and say, hey folks, we tried to save the country, because the tariffs are killing our economy. They're hurting our farmers, our working class manufacturing jobs. They're hurting construction jobs. They are causing enormous economic damage.

And so far the Democrats are basically silent on the thing that people are now associating with Trump's worst economic instincts and plans.

VELSHI: Okay, so this is interesting. In some way you're arguing, let people have the government they vote for, they voted for and feel the consequences. The other issue here is that Democrats will blame Republicans for the shutdown, Republicans are blaming Democrats for the shutdown. At some point, this does become an issue of who blinks first.

WILSON: Sure. And look, Trump is Trump has a pair of twos right now. He's bluffing.

Trump is bluffing. They are under pressure from their people. You'll notice that the twenty five or twenty six Republicans in the swing seats, they're not out posting the sassy sombrero memes.

They're not out bragging that Trump's going to cut the government down to nothing. They're not out there saying this is a great idea, Mr. President. They're scared to death right now.

The state of Virginia is going to have a blowout this year if they don't if they're not careful, because the message is not, oh, the Democrats are cutting government jobs in Virginia. It's quite clear who cut the government jobs in Virginia. No one is buying that Doge was a Democratic operation.

No one is buying that this shutdown and the early polling has all been running about one point five to one against Donald Trump on people who blame Trump and the Republicans for the shutdown. There's going to be a political consequence to this that the Republicans will have to eat. And all the Democrats have to do is wait at this point.

I know it's hard. I know they don't want to have people lose their health care coverage, but they should want to teach the Republican base a lesson. They should want to teach them a painful lesson.

They should want those farmers to not get a bailout because if the Democrats go along with giving the farmers a bailout right now, you know what the farmers do? Hey, Trump was right. He got us a bailout.

VELSHI: And then Zoran Mamdani should call him a socialist.

Why I wanted to set up the whole... I mean right? You could just let the farmers make their money properly or you can give a bailout, right? But like if you didn't cause the problem, you wouldn't need the bailout, which is exactly what happened in 2018. I think we bailed farmers out to almost $25 billion.

There is no good way to deal with Trump because he's a demented fascistic fool. One can't negotiate with someone who will never negotiate in good faith. He's also right about the fact that more people are going to have to experience real pain themselves before they care about the damage Trump is doing to the entire country.