By Rex Huppke

Chicago Tribune

Under the rules of present-day political engagement — partisan orthodoxy or bust, us vs. them, my side is always right and your side is always wrong — I shouldn’t like Rick Wilson.

He’s a longtime Republican strategist and the architect of all manner of knives-out campaign ads, including one particularly vicious spot from the 2008 presidential campaign that hammered Barack Obama’s connection to Rev. Jeremiah Wright with the tag: “Barack Obama: Too Radical, Too Risky.”

I shouldn’t like Rick. But I do.

I got to know him through Twitter during the 2016 presidential campaign. He was one of the few Republicans who took a look at Donald Trump and said, “Nope. Never. Hell, no.”

He helped start the Never Trump movement. It cost him friends and all manner of potential political work. It subjected him to the threats and fury of Trump’s troll army. He was labeled a RINO (Republican in name only) and a GOP traitor.

And he didn’t care. Right is right, and Trump was clearly, transparently, unquestionably wrong.

At a time when honesty and integrity were as gone as the dodo in politics, Rick demonstrated both. And he and his band of Never Trumpers fought mightily to remind Americans what it actually means to be a conservative. (Hint: It doesn’t mean being a conspiracy-theory-bellowing liar hellbent on fomenting outrage and inflaming the misguided aggrievement of what Trump would call “the poorly educated.”)

With Trump in office and creating exactly the kind of chaos Rick predicted, he has done those of us who haven’t been lost to the cult of Trump a favor. He has written a book, a searingly honest, bitingly funny, comprehensive answer to the question we find ourselves asking most mornings: “What the hell is going on?”

The book is called “Everything Trump Touches Dies,” and, because it’s written by a 30-year veteran of conservative politics, it does what no squishy liberal newspaper columnist like myself can do: It pushes the modern-day Republican Party into the public square and roundly shames it for allowing an obvious con man like Trump to become its standard-bearer.

Rick writes: “Everything we Never Trump folks warned you of, including massive, decades-long downstream election losses, is coming. Alienating African Americans and Hispanics beyond redemption? Check. Raising a generation of young voters who are fleeing the GOP in droves? Check. Age-old beefs, juvenile complaints, and ego bruises taking center stage while the world burns? Check. Playing public footsie with white supremacists and neo-Nazis? Check. Blistering pig-ignorance about the economy and the world? Check. … Shredding the last iota of the GOP’s credibility as a party that cares about debt, deficits, and fiscal probity? Check.”

He goes on to absolutely clobber the voters who make up Trump’s base and devour his conspiratorial ramblings: “Honestly, at this point, it’s almost a moral imperative to slap the stupid out of them.”

Rick admits that he and others Republicans “didn’t see that there is a deep strain in American political life that isn’t seeking party rigor or ideological purity or even an independent iconoclast but the safe reinforcement of the pack of people just as pissed off as they are. We underestimated the deep human psychological need to be part of a movement based not on hope but on channeling the comments section of the nuttiest blogs. That’s what Trump gave them. He was an avatar for their anger, their impotence, and their blamestorming for everything wrong in their world.”

It’s harsh. And it will undoubtedly cause Trump’s core supporters to dig in even more, but at this point, what difference does that make? Those loyal to Trump — accepting all his obvious faults and unforced errors, incapable of acknowledging the slightest flaw —are not coming back to any form of traditional conservative thinking. At least not now, in the throes of Trump passion.

I asked Rick in an interview why he wrote the book. Liberals like me don’t need convincing and many in his own party have already bent the knee to Trump.

“I want people to be able to go back in a year and a half or so and say, ‘Oh, that’s how this happened,’” he said. “I wanted to lay down a marker and say, ‘It’s OK that you’ve been scammed. It’s OK that you’ve been conned. Here’s the evidence about how it happened and why you shouldn’t do it again.’”

He continued: “I also wanted to remind Republicans that you can be a party of decency and humanity and still be a conservative. I want people to have some reminder that you don’t have to live this way. Nothing’s forcing you to do this other than inertia and partisan policy reflex.”

The book doesn’t spare the liberal crowd, with Rick dissecting (quite accurately, I think) the Democratic Party’s political failings and highlighting politicians and political operatives every bit as calculating as him on the left.

He gives one of the most candid assessments of the cynicism of modern-day political tactics I’ve read, readily acknowledging the part he played in feeding and nurturing the more rabid elements of the Republican base that metastasized into Trump’s slavish supporters.

In our interview he said: “I had to do a kind of tough assessment on this thing, and I did. … Starting back with Sarah Palin, we built a system to turn on these people, to feed this endless stream that the liberals are trying to kill you, they’re coming for you. … We built a set of persuasion tools that persuaded these people, and the arrogance of our position was, ‘Well, we’re all responsible adults; we’ll motivate these people during the election’ and then calm things down after.

“What we never anticipated was that somebody else would grab that tool box. But the Russians and Trump sure did, and they ran wild with it.”

“Everything Trump Touches Dies” — which went on sale Tuesday — is a fascinating, fierce and fearless exposition of the political mess America finds itself in today.

It’s a reminder that, for the wide majority of us who aren’t too far gone, ideological disagreement should never be grounds for hatred. And love of country should rule the day.

Rex Huppke is a Chicago Tribune columnist. Readers may send him email at rhuppke@chicagotribune.com.