To the Republican members of the Lincoln Project, President Donald Trump was a mean, crass, vindictive race-baiting demagogue teetering on the sting of tyranny and poised to smash the American democratic project into Jeffersonian smithereens. They desperately wanted him to lose.
At a time when so many other Republicans rallied around Trump, this political motion committee brought together G.O.P. and former G.O.P. political consultants, campaign managers and media advisors for a multi-platform media effort to defeat each Trump and Republican candidates who supported Trump’s agenda within the 2020 election.
As featured on Showtime’s latest five-part documentary “The Lincoln Project,’’ a gaggle of mainly middle-aged white guys rolling up their sleeves to toss out the boor that had entered their social club and thrown it into shambles, may not seem that unusual.
”I can’t say it’s not my fault,” says Lincoln Project co-founder Stuart Stevens. Really? Someone in American politics actually said that?
But what was unusual and, well, form of stunning, was Lincoln Project co-founder Stuart Stevens’s comment in regards to the Trump phenomenon: “I can’t say it’s not my fault.”
I can’t say it’s not my fault. Really? Someone in American politics actually said that?
A longtime Republican operative, Stevens felt Trumpism was his fault due to all of the sneering, race-baiting Republican campaigns he himself had engineered for the previous 20-plus years of his political life. (Amongst others, he was an adviser on the Bob Dole 1996 presidential campaign that featured ads grimly warning us about “illegal aliens” taking up our country.) Looking back, he concluded that his work helped fuel the offended, suspicious, divisive movement that has grown over time into the even angrier, more suspicious and downright violent, Capitol-attacking political culture of today.
Within the film, we see Stevens in a navy polo with the collar popped, or leaning back against a porch deck in an off-the-cuff black sweater. He has faded, tousle-ish ginger hair. He mainly has the air of a yachtsman, or at the least a yachtsman’s regular weekend guest. On the surface anyway, Stuart Stevens isn’t a man who comes off as a daily visitor to the confession booth of public humility.
“I helped elect more candidates than anyone else,” he tells an interviewer in a condo within the Lincoln Project’s Parkland, Utah, headquarters. “Blame me.”
Blame me.
Blame me!
When have you ever heard that from any public figure currently? Blame me. My fault. And never just an apology at a press conference to quickly put to rest a political scandal. No, this was a taking of responsibility for a whole movement that, because the Lincoln Project’s Steve Schmidt has put it, “has done unspeakable damage to the American fabric.”
We’re hungry for somebody to come clean with anything, not only in politics, but anyplace in our society.
Blame me!
Call me sentimental, call me easily impressed, but I used to be moved to listen to it.
Says Stuart Stevens, “I feel in some ways we feel a way of private responsibility. Who desires to consider this party you worked in turned out to be, to a not insignificant degree, a force for evil?”
We’re hungry for somebody to come clean with anything, not only in politics, but anyplace in our society. To call what happened and the way they’re at fault. I began it. And, with regard to the Lincoln Project,I do know the right way to end it. I actually have the very dynamite to dynamite the dynamite I already planted.
The Lincoln Project is full of the form of men who, until 2020, frequently took Democratic candidates to the docks at midnight and, with the concrete boots of merciless political ads and withering debate comebacks, sank them into the oily harbor of political annihilation. They know what they’re doing. They know the right way to win.
As Michael Madrid, one other Lincoln Project founder, puts it within the documentary, “All the party is morally bankrupt. My highest and best use is in burning down something I’d help construct up my entire political profession.”
Stuart Stevens reflects in wonder on the turn of events they’ve found themselves in. “You never would have thought that consultants can be the one to save lots of the party,” he said. “Like, we’re the moral voice of the party? Really?”
The front-facing work of the Lincoln Project in 2020 was in quickly putting out creative, viral ads that seized on Trump’s words and deeds and turned them against him. One in every of their simplest ads was called “Mourning in America” and highlighted how Trump didn’t protect the country from the devastating effects of the Covid pandemic.
“If there was no Lincoln Project,” said Steve Schmidt, “Donald Trump would have won by a narrow margin.”
Rick Wilson, who began in 1987 as a consultant to Republican politicians, said the group’s work is in psychological warfare. They’re using it to combat the present Republican Party message, which he characterizes as “Unless you might be with us, every little thing shall be destroyed.”
In some ways, Wilson and the Lincoln Project’s stance mirrors that of the G.O.P.’s: If Trump wins, every little thing shall be destroyed, so let’s take the gloves off.
When the election was won by Biden, the Lincoln Project claimed that, given their ad buys and voter targeting in plenty of swing states, they’d made a decisive impact. “If there was no Lincoln Project,” said Steve Schmidt, “Donald Trump would have won by a narrow margin.” Whether or not they actually did make that form of impact I leave to political insiders to evaluate. But that they’d an effect is evident. Their public profile had led them to being publicly heckled even by Trump himself. Being vilified by their goal was almost a holy grail for the group. The eye immediately helped them raise hundreds of thousands. They’d won the psychological war, after which the electoral war.
After which the Lincoln Project narrative modified. It began to not fit neatly into the “bad guys ’fessing up and doing good” category. In actual fact, it got ugly. A story in Axios said that a number of of the Lincoln Project founders were planning to take their PAC and switch it right into a media company after the campaign. The move, it said, would make all of them very wealthy. The group’s supporters (and enemies) questioned whether these political advisers had been “grifting” all along. They were doing this noble work to defeat Trump all within the service of more lucrative payoffs simmering beneath the surface.
The leaders denied this was their initial motivation for starting the Lincoln Project. They did acknowledge they were occupied with transforming the Lincoln Project right into a media company that, post-election, could do battle for democratic values inside the wider American culture.
Eventually things got here to a head with accusations of major financial improprieties, all topped off by a sex scandal.
Eventually things got here to a head with accusations of major financial improprieties; bitter public recriminations about leadership roles and compensation packages; all topped off by (almost unsurprisingly, given a gaggle of high-powered men accountable to nobody but their very own egos) a sex scandal.
It was “discovered” by the group’s leaders (or really, The Recent York Times made public what the leaders already knew) that one among their founders, John Weaver, had for years been grooming young men. He promised them profession advancement within the Republican party in exchange for sex. (One in every of these correspondences began when one among the males was 14 years old. The Lincoln Project roundly condemned Weaver’s behavior and said they’d not known about it.)
The group in some ways may very well be seen as devolving into the identical toxic mess that it accused Republicans of making. As one Lincoln Project member put it, “The cornerstone of Trumpism is about abuse of power. I feel like I’ve change into a victim of the very thing I’ve been fighting against.”
After a leadership shake-up and financial overhaul, the Lincoln Project also continued its work. It rolled out ads and made TV appearances defending Biden’s victory and condemning the Jan. 6 rioters. This 12 months it assisted other Democratic campaigns for the 2022 midterms. (The Lincoln Project appears to have abandoned the Republican party altogether as completely “MAGA” influenced and is endorsing only Democrats.)
Toward the tip of the documentary, we hear Reed Galen give a soliloquy in regards to the events that almost brought down the group entirely.
“We stepped on a landmine after which said, ‘that was fun, let’s do this three or 4 more times.’…Persons are saying, ‘What’s the Lincoln Project, what’s fallacious with us?’ We didn’t hold ourselves as much as the standards we held everybody else as much as. That’s fair. That’s totally fair.”
The ultimate scenes of the film shows the Lincoln Project starting anew, with its leadership right down to Galen, Rick Wilson and Stuart Stevens. They might be the primary to confess, they usually do, that they aren’t noble and heroic men. But nevertheless, they’re shown attempting to make some form of amends and a latest start.
On the private level, confession and penance not only helps save our souls, it could actually open up a channel inside for the nice to freely flow out. Fans of the Lincoln Project hope that the nice that flows out of their confession is a renewed ability to fight for the common good itself.