What you should know about The Lincoln Project
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
Regular viewers of cable news will likely be familiar with a cadre of boomers known as Never-Trumpers, a group or Republicans supposedly aghast at what Donald Trump represents for the party they’ve worked their entire adult lives to empower. A number of that group have come together to form something called The Lincoln Project, which is a non-profit that is supposedly devoted to making sure Trump loses in November. You’ve probably seen some of their more viral videos on your Facebook feed.
It’s a cute story and all. It also seems to be a load of crap.
The folks at The Lincoln Project were all prominent members of the party at one point or another within the last twenty years. Stuart Stevens was a mainstay on Republican campaigns, including both of George W. Bush’s runs for the Presidency and Mitt Romney’s failed bid to unseat Barack Obama. George Conway, Kellyanne Conway’s husband, was a prominent attorney and was nearly appointed to a position by Trump. Rick Wilson was a media consultant for conservative candidates like Rudy Giuliani.
Stevens has recently been making the rounds to promote his book, and Wilson and Conway have spent the last few years being angry at the President on Twitter and in various columns.
Let me pause for a moment and say that it’s totally possible for these folks to genuinely detest Donald Trump, as detesting Donald Trump is a rather easy thing to do. But why do they detest the President? Is it the causes he fights for, or the way in which he fights for them?
I’m inclined to believe that it’s the latter. It’s also possible that some or all of the Lincoln Project leadership have realized that the things that the Trumpist GOP stands for are detestable, but also fail to see that Trumpism is the natural result of the path Republican politics and culture have walked on for the last 40+ years.
Stevens, as I said, has been promoting his new book It Was All A Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. One of the ways Stevens has done so is by publishing a column in The New York Times. Adapted from the book, the column astutely points out that so-called thoughtful conservatives like William Buckley were pretty damn racist, and describes the origins of Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips’ Southern Strategy that helped make the GOP the bigoted juggernaut it is today.
In the very same column, Stevens longs for the “compassion” shown by Goerge W. Bush. It’s not clear if that compassion was what led Bush to start a war in Iraq that has killed millions, gut the American educational system, allow corporate greed to run rampant and eventually tank the economy, leave the predominantly Black New Orleans to rot after Hurricane Katrina, and flex political muscle against women and the LGBTQ community.
Pining for the days of Bush is not just a Never-Trump refrain. It’s one you’ve probably heard from your moderate and liberal friends. Bush may have been a Republican, the logic goes, but at least he was Presidential! He wasn’t embarrassing! That of course ignores that Bush’s idiocy was an eight-year running joke, but the larger message is that the infliction of suffering on a mass scale is palatable if it’s done by someone who can speak in complete sentences.
Stevens also did an interview with New York Magazine’s Isaac Chotiner, and his answers about the Bush campaign are illuminating. He claims that they “played too much on the dark side.” But they did it anyway, and it’s hard to imagine that these adults with years of experience in professional politics didn’t know exactly what they were doing. They were okay with using gay marriage as a wedge issue to drive people to Bush. It’s possible that Stevens has realized that the politics of hatred are inexcusable.
I don’t know that he’s earned the benefit of the doubt.
Conway hasn’t spent his life working to elect bigots. He’s just married to someone who works in the most bigoted White House of the modern era. Somewhere along the way, after having Anne Coulter set him up with Kellyanne (no, seriously), George seemingly realized that the man his wife works for is a lunatic. But yet again, it seems that Conway’s objections are more stylistic and legalistic than about content. After all, he’s still married to Kellyanne.
He’s tweeted about Trump’s racism and his columns in the Washington Post make passing references to it, but Conway is still the sort of guy who went to Anne Coulter for dating aid, and who angled for a job in the Trump DOJ at the onset of the administration.
He’s also the kind of guy who pals around with Rick Wilson. Wilson is currently a frequent-flier on cable news panels and co-hosts a podcast at The Daily Beast. He once got in trouble for posting a picture of a stars-and-bars themed cooler emblazoned with “The South Shall Rise Again” on Instagram. Here are some of his old tweets.
Seems awfully Trumpy!
These tweets are frequently dug up by critics of WIlson’s. He does not delete them. He’ll just block you. Oh, those viral videos that The Lincoln Project puts out? Many of them were put together by Ben Howe, who had to resign after being outed as an enormous racist and misogynist.
Is it possible that these people genuinely view Trump as a threat to the fabric of Democracy? Absolutely. Should they be trusted and accepted as allies? Absolutely not. While it’s nice that they want to unseat a blatant fascist, the pre-Trump GOP pursued largely the same goals in subtler manners. Preserving the fabric of American democratic norms just so that you can use those norms to further harmful goals isn’t exactly a noble cause.
Frankly, this whole thing feels like ass-covering. It feels like these people might be realizing what their life’s work has led to, or that the views they’ve held aren’t currently acceptable in polite society.
If you’re looking for a group to publicize and give your money to, you can do a hell of a lot better than The Lincoln Project.