In Praise of the Lincoln Project

They kept Trump off-balance - and that was vital

It’s hard to fathom how close we came to disaster. And no, for once I’m not talking about the insurrection at the Capitol that saw Officer Goodman receive the Congressional Gold Medal, and nearly saw the Vice President or the Speaker lose their lives. In another scenario, quieter, but more deadly, the insurrection would never have happened, because Donald Trump would legitimately have won a second term in office. No rage at Brad Raffensberger; no spite to the Georgia GOP; no Senator Ossoff, no Senator Warnock. Just another female Vice Presidential candidate who failed, Trump and Pence for four more years, a 52-48 Republican Senate and a greatly diminished Democratic majority in the House.

Moscow Mitch in charge. An unbridled Donald Trump stacking SCOTUS and the rest of the courts. Sanctions probably lifted on Moscow. Who knows what hell inflicted on immigrants. Seven souls who died in the Capitol riots would be alive, but God alone knows how many more Americans would die as Javanka ran the vaccine program into the ground. Q Anon would have been proven ‘right’ and the cult would be growing, and thriving. America might leave NATO. The intelligence services would come under sustained attack. The pardons denied in his last days in office would have rained down upon anyone associated with Trump. The hell we as a nation might be living through now would be worse than the last four years. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

And don’t kid yourself. We came close. Uncomfortably close. A fatuous focus on the “popular vote margin”, which is stupid, flatters the Democrats. In a popular vote system, millions of suddenly-enfranchised Republican voters in NY and CA are going to head to the polls - we have absolutely no idea who would have won in a popular vote system, so the “margin” is irrelevant. The real margin for Biden was wafer thin. In Arizona, it was 0.4%. In Wisconsin, 0.6%. In Georgia, it was 0.3% - as Trump famously asked for, just 11,000 and something votes, against millions of cast ballots, would have made the difference. Even in Pennsylvania the difference was only 1.2% for Joe Biden.

After a brutal summer of rioting and violence, much of it decried by actual protestors for racial justice and fomented by obvious agitators, in Portland for example, ignoring the wishes of the local NAACP - Trump was well-placed to do the impossible, again, and triumph again. Truly, polls do not measure his voters well. Unlike their President they didn’t hang out on Twitter. They don’t care what the liberal outrage of the week is. And they were being fed a solid diet of propaganda by Fox News, OANN and other outlets, amplified by Facebook and You Tube algorithms that kept them locked in a bubble. Even a tiny “pivot” by Trump would have been enough - just a touch of normality, just a smidgeon of sense, just being the man MAGA Haberman wanted him to be, the man the New York Times kept normalizing him into.

Enter, thank God, the Lincoln Project.

Those articles that dwell on how many voters the LP’s brilliant ads “persuaded” are interesting, but, speaking as a former politician, they missed the point. The point was to unsettle Donald Trump, to get in his head, to keep him tweeting bad, sad, insane things. The loss in Arizona? Call that the McCain Factor. You don’t get to dump on an American hero and Arizona’s most beloved son and win the state. Joe Biden picked a phenomenal VP in Kamala Harris - and he could easily have taken a wrong turn and chosen Susan Rice, but that’s a topic for another day - but Joe Biden, and America’s, greatest ally in this narrowly-won victory wasn’t Kamala or political genius Ronald Klain. NOPE. It was Donald John Trump. For he, and he alone, could and did throw away a simmering victory that right-thinking Democrats secretly perceive when they look at their losses in the house. For all the Proud Boy MAGA racists, and there were many, there were plenty of others - those who went to Trump’s rally on the 6th but did not storm the Capitol, for example - who just like him for different reasons - annoying the libs, cutting taxes, stopping immigration, standing up to “Antifa”. And that crucial slice of Trump’s vote is very traditional. They like the CIA. They like kicking Taliban ass and they don’t care about “forever wars”, Russia’s propaganda phrase designed to get us to disarm. These voters hate Colin Kaepernick ‘taking a knee’ because they see it as rude, improper, an insult to the National Anthem. And for exactly the same reasons they really, REALLY, dislike, even detest, Trump’s endless tweets.

He was ‘ridiculous’, ‘embarrassing’, ‘needs to stop’. Trump supporters said this over and over again. But Trump did not stop. And the Lincoln Project made absolutely certain that he did not stop. They got him to fire Brad Parscale, and they caused chaos in Trump’s ranks. On Fauci, on Georgia, on treason, the Lincoln Project hit Trump and kept hitting him. In a narrow electorate, their brilliant ads kept Trump angry, rage-tweeting and throwing away the advantadges that chaos had brought him. They also kept Democrats engaged and focused, as with my personal favorite, the campaign ad filmed entirely in Russian.

There is no excuse whatsoever for sexual harassment, quid pro quo and dangling jobs-for-favors. The Lincoln Project know that, and it’s right that they bring in someone to independently review it. Any crimes committed should be investigated and prosecuted. But from my point of view, it’s also not right to demand, as reported, an enormous signing bonus and consulting contract when joining a good team in crisis. Factually, the Lincoln Project got results - so much so that 60 minutes featured their efforts. There are well-founded concerns, but there’s also more than a whiff of envy about the financial success of some of the founders. I think we should get it straight - men like Rick Wilson, who saw the Republican consulting business he’d set up over decades crumple into dust because of his principled opposition to Trump, entirely deserved to make money and be paid for the incredible, on point work he and his PAC did keeping Trump rage-tweeting - tweeting his way into a loss that so very, very nearly became a win, with incalculably large consequences for America, the Western Alliance, and the entire free world.