By
Roxanne Roberts
August 1, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. CDT
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Your house is on fire. Do you care who the firemen are?
That is a central question of the 2020 election. Donald Trump has managed to do one thing no other president has done: Bring Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives, boomers and millennials together in unprecedented numbers to try to defeat him in November. For Americans who believe the president is a raging threat to democracy, purity tests are out. Results are in.
Which explains the spectacular rise of the Lincoln Project, a group of Republican Never Trumpers who have moved rent free into the president’s head. Their viral videos and tweets mocking his leadership, his intelligence and his patriotism — aimed both at Republican voters who are wavering and Trump himself — have attracted millions of dollars, via donors from both parties. More than 10,000 people attended a virtual town hall last month and another 80,000 watched it on a live stream. Lifelong Democrats are organizing fundraisers for the project.
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The “Mourning in America” ad attacks Trump’s mismanagement of the coronavirus outbreak. “#TrumpIsNotWell” questions his mental and physical fitness. “Bounty” asks why Trump won’t confront Vladimir Putin about U.S. intelligence reports that Russia offered bounties for the killing of American soldiers in Afghanistan.
The ads are slick, scathing and more shocking than anything Joe Biden’s official campaign has produced. The newest release, “Wake Up,” is a dark comic satire about a coma victim hearing about Trump’s last three years. “Republicans, we need to wake up. This guy was in a coma. What’s your excuse?”
“Donald Trump is so completely at odds with every institution in America and so completely at odds with anything that the Republican Party allegedly stood for: the rule of law, constitutional fealty, institutions, norms, traditions, all of those things are out the window,” says Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the group. “So you’re either going to make a choice between Trump or this country. We made the choice for the country, even if it doesn’t immediately seem to fit with all of our ideological or political priors.”
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Pick your motto: Politics makes strange bedfellows. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
“I’ll be really honest with you: My time horizon is the election,” says Charlie Sykes, a conservative political commentator who is not part of the Lincoln Project but wants to see Trump voted out. “I feel like the house is burning. I want to put out the fire. I’m going to worry about the redecorating later.”
Three of the Lincoln Project founders — Wilson, Steve Schmidt and George T. Conway III — sat down this week to talk about their motives and their methodology. Wilson and Schmidt are longtime hired guns for Republican candidates (George W. Bush, John McCain and many more); Conway, a lawyer and spouse of presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway, has a long career representing Republican clients.
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Schmidt is the firebrand, furious and effusive. Wilson is shrewd and sly. And Conway is fiercely protective of the Constitution, which he feels Trump has repeatedly violated.
The three didn’t know each other well before December, when they founded the group — named after the president who “led the United States through its bloodiest, most divisive and most decisive period of our history” — but bonded over their disillusionment with Trump. Conway and Wilson were both deeply influenced by the book “Trump on the Couch” by psychiatrist Justin A. Frank.
“Trump is a narcissist and he cannot help but react to threats to his delicate psyche,” explains Conway. “He is a very sensitive, weak human being who cannot take criticism.” The other factor, he adds, is that “he can’t think ahead. He merely reacts to things. And what we do is take advantage of both of those psychological defects.”
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What that means in practical terms is that the Lincoln Project ads are specifically designed to trigger the president. Whenever Trump is reacting to a Lincoln Project ad, he’s talking about things he shouldn’t be talking about. He’s explaining why he inched down the ramp at the U.S. Military Academy, or drank water with two hands. He’s shooting off a tweet about the “Mourning in America” ad, thereby raising millions of dollars . . . for the Lincoln Project.
The group approaches its task with a military precision, with a few dozen staffers churning out new videos overnight. “We don’t mess around,” says Wilson. “It’s this concept of moving faster than your enemy’s ability to decide to act in a battle.”
You can call it trolling, and it is: The Lincoln Project buys ad time in Washington and Bedminster for an audience of one. “He is a creature who exists only on television, the Chauncey Gardiner of our time,” says Wilson, evoking the movie “Being There.” “The fact that we’re able to use his mental infirmity and addiction to television to freeze him and manipulate him serves a broader purpose for the overall campaign in terms of taking him off message, disorganizing and disorienting him.”
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All this is designed to help Biden, whom they endorsed in a Washington Post op-ed in April. Their unique skill is talking to conservatives in a way that Democrats can’t, with techniques that they’ve honed over many Republican campaigns. They’re also targeting “soft” Republicans who may be persuadable — such as those who voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016.
“The one thing you can’t get back in politics is time,” says Sykes. “Every day that goes by that Donald Trump is off his game or distracted is a win. He can’t fix that. He can’t go back and get it. What they found is that a single video can take the president of United States off track for a day or more and you see it play out.”
But you would be mistaken in believing the Lincoln Project was created to atone for past sins. Yes, there have been plenty of Republicans who have asked if their efforts over the past decades made a Trump presidency possible. What part did they play? What did they miss, ignore or tolerate? Republican consultant Stuart Stevens, author of the new book “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump,” believes the president is “a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party” over the past 50 years. “Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form.”
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But Schmidt, who it’s fair to say is disgusted by Trump, is unapologetic about his life’s work. Yes, he urged McCain to pick Sarah Palin as his running mate, a decision ultimately driven by politics. But no, he’s not renouncing the Republican Party as he knew it.
“I think a good sign of being an idiot in life is believing that all virtue is vested in one of these political parties and all evil in the other,” he says. He rejects those who say he should be ashamed of the past: “The necessity for an act of atonement against conviction is self-righteous and smug at a level that beggars my ability to describe it in the English language. And I would suggest that they’re part of the problem, not so much part of the solution.”
More at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...ies-2_lincolnproject-955am:homepage/story-ans
Roxanne Roberts
August 1, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. CDT
Add to list
Your house is on fire. Do you care who the firemen are?
That is a central question of the 2020 election. Donald Trump has managed to do one thing no other president has done: Bring Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives, boomers and millennials together in unprecedented numbers to try to defeat him in November. For Americans who believe the president is a raging threat to democracy, purity tests are out. Results are in.
Which explains the spectacular rise of the Lincoln Project, a group of Republican Never Trumpers who have moved rent free into the president’s head. Their viral videos and tweets mocking his leadership, his intelligence and his patriotism — aimed both at Republican voters who are wavering and Trump himself — have attracted millions of dollars, via donors from both parties. More than 10,000 people attended a virtual town hall last month and another 80,000 watched it on a live stream. Lifelong Democrats are organizing fundraisers for the project.
AD
ADVERTISING
The “Mourning in America” ad attacks Trump’s mismanagement of the coronavirus outbreak. “#TrumpIsNotWell” questions his mental and physical fitness. “Bounty” asks why Trump won’t confront Vladimir Putin about U.S. intelligence reports that Russia offered bounties for the killing of American soldiers in Afghanistan.
The ads are slick, scathing and more shocking than anything Joe Biden’s official campaign has produced. The newest release, “Wake Up,” is a dark comic satire about a coma victim hearing about Trump’s last three years. “Republicans, we need to wake up. This guy was in a coma. What’s your excuse?”
“Donald Trump is so completely at odds with every institution in America and so completely at odds with anything that the Republican Party allegedly stood for: the rule of law, constitutional fealty, institutions, norms, traditions, all of those things are out the window,” says Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the group. “So you’re either going to make a choice between Trump or this country. We made the choice for the country, even if it doesn’t immediately seem to fit with all of our ideological or political priors.”
AD
Pick your motto: Politics makes strange bedfellows. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
“I’ll be really honest with you: My time horizon is the election,” says Charlie Sykes, a conservative political commentator who is not part of the Lincoln Project but wants to see Trump voted out. “I feel like the house is burning. I want to put out the fire. I’m going to worry about the redecorating later.”
Three of the Lincoln Project founders — Wilson, Steve Schmidt and George T. Conway III — sat down this week to talk about their motives and their methodology. Wilson and Schmidt are longtime hired guns for Republican candidates (George W. Bush, John McCain and many more); Conway, a lawyer and spouse of presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway, has a long career representing Republican clients.
AD
Schmidt is the firebrand, furious and effusive. Wilson is shrewd and sly. And Conway is fiercely protective of the Constitution, which he feels Trump has repeatedly violated.
The three didn’t know each other well before December, when they founded the group — named after the president who “led the United States through its bloodiest, most divisive and most decisive period of our history” — but bonded over their disillusionment with Trump. Conway and Wilson were both deeply influenced by the book “Trump on the Couch” by psychiatrist Justin A. Frank.
“Trump is a narcissist and he cannot help but react to threats to his delicate psyche,” explains Conway. “He is a very sensitive, weak human being who cannot take criticism.” The other factor, he adds, is that “he can’t think ahead. He merely reacts to things. And what we do is take advantage of both of those psychological defects.”
AD
What that means in practical terms is that the Lincoln Project ads are specifically designed to trigger the president. Whenever Trump is reacting to a Lincoln Project ad, he’s talking about things he shouldn’t be talking about. He’s explaining why he inched down the ramp at the U.S. Military Academy, or drank water with two hands. He’s shooting off a tweet about the “Mourning in America” ad, thereby raising millions of dollars . . . for the Lincoln Project.
The group approaches its task with a military precision, with a few dozen staffers churning out new videos overnight. “We don’t mess around,” says Wilson. “It’s this concept of moving faster than your enemy’s ability to decide to act in a battle.”
You can call it trolling, and it is: The Lincoln Project buys ad time in Washington and Bedminster for an audience of one. “He is a creature who exists only on television, the Chauncey Gardiner of our time,” says Wilson, evoking the movie “Being There.” “The fact that we’re able to use his mental infirmity and addiction to television to freeze him and manipulate him serves a broader purpose for the overall campaign in terms of taking him off message, disorganizing and disorienting him.”
AD
All this is designed to help Biden, whom they endorsed in a Washington Post op-ed in April. Their unique skill is talking to conservatives in a way that Democrats can’t, with techniques that they’ve honed over many Republican campaigns. They’re also targeting “soft” Republicans who may be persuadable — such as those who voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016.
“The one thing you can’t get back in politics is time,” says Sykes. “Every day that goes by that Donald Trump is off his game or distracted is a win. He can’t fix that. He can’t go back and get it. What they found is that a single video can take the president of United States off track for a day or more and you see it play out.”
But you would be mistaken in believing the Lincoln Project was created to atone for past sins. Yes, there have been plenty of Republicans who have asked if their efforts over the past decades made a Trump presidency possible. What part did they play? What did they miss, ignore or tolerate? Republican consultant Stuart Stevens, author of the new book “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump,” believes the president is “a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party” over the past 50 years. “Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form.”
AD
But Schmidt, who it’s fair to say is disgusted by Trump, is unapologetic about his life’s work. Yes, he urged McCain to pick Sarah Palin as his running mate, a decision ultimately driven by politics. But no, he’s not renouncing the Republican Party as he knew it.
“I think a good sign of being an idiot in life is believing that all virtue is vested in one of these political parties and all evil in the other,” he says. He rejects those who say he should be ashamed of the past: “The necessity for an act of atonement against conviction is self-righteous and smug at a level that beggars my ability to describe it in the English language. And I would suggest that they’re part of the problem, not so much part of the solution.”
More at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...ies-2_lincolnproject-955am:homepage/story-ans
