The Lincoln Project has been getting a lot of attention here lately! They run a lot of ads that bash Trump and they really get under his skin! Their website header states that “The Lincoln Project is holding accountable those who would violate their oaths to the Constitution and would put others before Americans.” Sounds great, right? It also says their mission is to “Defeat President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box.” Cool. A little further down it does mention that “Our many policy differences with national Democrats remain.” Hmmmm….
Just who is in this Lincoln Project (LP from here on out)? Let’s take a look at the founders, and some of their past accomplishments, shall we?
GEORGE CONWAY — Kellyanne’s husband! He really hates Trump. He’s a lawyer. One of his past clients happens to have been Paula Jones, whom he represented in her suit against Bill Clinton. He has also argued in front of the Supreme Court in the case Morrison v. National Australia Bank. He argued for the bank and won the case in an opinion authored by Scalia. As late as mid-2017, he supported Trump after being considered for a position in the administration.
REED GALEN — Galen was a former Press Secretary to both Vice President Dan Quayle and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.
JENNIFER HORN — Horn ran twice for Congress in New Hampshire but lost both races. She was a founder of We the People, a non-profit dedicated to the promotion of personal responsibility and limited government. She has been the New Hampshire Republican state party chair, and has accused NH Democrats of voter fraud, pushing an idea that out-of-state Democratic volunteers are casting ballots in the state (and included the niece of Joe Biden in her accusations).
RICK WILSON - Wilson is a long-time Republican political strategist who was George H. W. Bush's Florida field director and was later a presidential appointee to the Department of Defense under then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. In 2002, while working for the Saxby Chambliss campaign he created an ad that tied triple-amputee war veteran Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. He defended this ad as late as 2015:
MIKE MADRID — Madrid is an expert in Latino politics and has served as the press secretary for the California Assembly Republican leader and as the political director for the California Republican Party.
RON STESLOW — Steslow served as digital director on Carly Fiorina’s 2016 presidential campaign.
STEVE SCHMIDT — Schmidt is a longtime Republican operative. In 2001 he served as spokesman for the NRCC and became Communications Director in 2002. He was a member of the George W. Bush administration as a Deputy Assistant to the President and Counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney. He has worked on several campaigns at various levels including those of President George W. Bush, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Arizona Senator John McCain, where he was a strong proponent of selecting Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate. He most recently worked on the short-lived campaign of Howard Schultz in 2020.
JOHN WEAVER — Weaver worked for Congressmen Phil Gramm, Tom Loeffler, and Bill Clements in Texas and was executive director of the state Republican Party. He was also state leader for George H. W. Bush's campaigns for president in 1988 and 1992; and worked on Gramm’s presidential campaign in 1996. He was an advisor to John McCain for ten years, and most recently worked on John Kasich’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Now that we have an idea of who is behind the organization, let’s take a look at the organization itself and how it operates. Many of us have seen the ads they have produced, all aimed squarely at Donald Trump. While many enjoy the trolling that LP does with Trump, there is still a question of whether or not there is any effectiveness of the ads from an electoral standpoint, which is really what matters this Fall. As a Politico article pointed out, the group’s ad buys have been almost exclusively in Washington DC and on occasion NJ, run when the President happens to be at his NJ golf club. There have been no ads run in swing states or anywhere else where it may help Biden with actual votes.
But though the PAC has successfully caught Trump’s attention — The Daily Beast reported the campaign spent $400,000 on ads in the D.C. market in part so Trump would feel less threatened by Lincoln Project ads — Trump’s critics worry that the ads, as well cut and as troll-effective as they are, may not actually work to “prosecute the case” against his reelection, as the group vowed to do back in December.
Then there is the issue of content. Again these ads are all cut to annoy Donald. We all get it. However, as Jeet Heer points out in The Nation, there is also an air of militarism that also permeates some of the ads, keeping with the conservative nature of the founders of the group. Just because some of these people are no longer Republicans doesn’t mean they are no longer conservatives. “Betrayed” was an ad by the group that ran after the Russia-bounty story broke that basically called Trump spineless when it came to defending soldiers against Putin and Russia. That really begs a broader question as Heer explains:
This suggests that these ads should be seen as an attempt to stake a claim in Joe Biden’s victory so that if he becomes president he’ll give hawkish Republicans a seat at the table. Biden already has a tropism toward bipartisanship, especially in foreign policy. He voted for the Iraq War and has been criticizing Trump from the right for not being sufficiently hard-line on Venezuela and China.
By creating ads like this, the Lincoln Project is creating an impression that will prove useful to foreign policy hawks if Biden wins: that Trump’s defeat was due in part to disaffected Republicans who didn’t like Trump’s questioning of national security orthodoxy.
One further objective might be to help the Republican Party rehabilitate if Trump goes down in defeat. The argument then will be that not every Republican went along with Trump, that many opposed him in their hearts, that he wasn’t a true Republican at all. Variations of these arguments were used to help the GOP refurbish its reputation after George W. Bush’s presidency ended in disaster.
It’s hardly a stretch to imagine the never-Trump LP crowd making that case as a part of its mission. Remember, many of the founders worked for a Bush. Remember the Bush campaign Swiftboating Kerry? Again, remember how Max Cleland, triple amputee veteran Max Cleland, was linked to bin Laden and Saddam Hussein? Many of the LP founders could care less about what it actually means to protect and defend soldiers. They only do it when it suits them.
Lastly, let’s look at how the group actually functions and where the money goes. Andrew Ferguson, himself a conservative writer but certainly no fan of Trump, questions not only the tactics but what the founders may actually get out of it, whether Trump wins or loses. Writing in The Atlantic, he argues that the LP is as much of a business venture as a political one:
The project’s board of advisers includes a few figures who might be described as “famous for Washington”—and famous for doing the things that all professional Washington operatives do. In a report last month, the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign-finance watchdog group, wrote that the Lincoln Project is engaging in practices similar to those of pro-Trump PACs.
“The Republican super PAC has amassed a substantial war chest,” the report said, “but it has come under scrutiny for funneling money to its advisory board members and spending relatively little airing political ads to influence voters. The group also hides some of its vendors by stealthily paying subcontractors, making it difficult to follow the money. The Lincoln Project reported spending nearly $1.4 million through March. Almost all of that money went to the group’s board members and firms run by them.” This is, indeed, similar to what all PACs have done from the day of their invention.
The bottom line here is that people of many political stripes are eager to get rid of Trump. What people need to ask themselves is whether a group of conservatives that have long pushed conservative policies are worth getting behind when there are so many other options at this point in the campaign, and groups that will be with us after the election. LP themselves state right up front that they don’t agree with many Democratic policies. If Trump does lose, there will be a myriad of reasons for his defeat. The LP will most likely have been a very small reason but they may be able to try to claim a far greater impact than they actually had, and subsequently translate that as support for a compromise in government. In the recent past, far too often a “compromise” with Republicans has meant the Republicans stay put and we move to the right. That is not what is needed at this point and not what the country supports. They support progressive policies, not a warmed over Republican agenda. Biden should also take note of that.