Scandals involving the anti-Trump Lincoln Project PAC, which was backed by some of the entertainment industry’s most powerful figures, has thrust donors and activists into a quandary in the post-Donald Trump era. At stake is the durability of the big-tent coalition that was just barely able to remove Trump from office last November.
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The Lincoln Project was established by a group of Republican operatives and consultants whose goal was the removal of Trump at any cost. Their viral ads attacking Trump were widely credited in helping Joe Biden. But after a report surfaced in January that founding member John Weaver had sent unsolicited, explicitly sexual messages to at least 20 men (and later stories said that Lincoln Project members knew about the allegations and failed to act), the group has been attacked on two flanks: by Trump supporters, who are still furious with the group’s apostasy, and by progressives, many of whom were never quite comfortable with a group of Republicans joining their cause.
“From the very start, there was blowback,” says screenwriter Gregg Hurwitz, who along with writer Billy Ray collaborated with The Lincoln Project in creating some of the group’s ads. “People were concerned about their backgrounds and were applying a purity test and were sharpening knives even before the scandal hit.”
Hurwitz says his main point of contact at the group was Rick Wilson and that he’d never heard Weaver’s name until the stories about his texts started to appear. Other founding members included former John McCain adviser and MSNBC contributor Steve Schmidt (who since has resigned); Jennifer Horn (also resigned); Reed Galen; and George Conway (who left the organization last year and recently said the group should be disbanded). “
Their job was to run psyops [psychological operations] on the president of the United States. And I heard they were an action line on the president’s report every morning — they knew how to get into the head of the most powerful man in the world and had him playing defense. That takes backbone and balls and should not be undervalued when we’re building a coalition,” says Hurwitz, who condemns Weaver’s actions but defends The Lincoln Project, noting how close Trump came to winning a second term and how, with the 2022 midterms ahead, this is no time to jettison alliances.