The Lincoln Project Sells Revenge Rather Than Results (full series)
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Unforced Errors | Will Never Trump Survive Trump?
Unforced Errors
There has been no shortage of Lincoln Project scandals.
One was the decision to allow Showtime to film their work during the 2020 campaign, and in the process preserving for posterity the abysmal failure of the Black and Latino outreach. But that wasn’t all.
The five-part documentary also ended up covering the infighting between the supposed co-founders over who really was a co-founder and thus entitled to whatever extra loot the Lincoln Project might rake in. Rick Wilson is on the seemingly victorious side of this dispute, and Mike Madrid on the losing side.
Part of this was triggered by the decision by Wilson and some of the other co-founders to add a for-profit media arm to Lincoln. Wilson thought so highly of this opportunity that he mocked Madrid for selling his Lincoln Project board seat for less than a million dollars.
“Mike could have sustained a role in something that grew enormously,” Wilson said to Showtime, “but it turned out that he wasn’t really built for the big game.”
“If I wanted money,” Madrid retorted, “I would have kept the damn thing and beat the damn email list—like they’re gonna—like a rented [expletive deleted] mule and made millions of dollars just by grifting in the way that they did and I would have made fifty times more money.”
Jennifer Horn, another alleged co-founder who ended up on the outs in the power struggle, told Showtime she couldn’t properly account for huge bills the Lincoln Project paid to a firm owned by Reed Galen.
“Summit Strategies did not serve a function to the campaign,” she concluded. “Was that just the four of them splitting up the money?”
Summit was Galen’s firm. It was paid $27 million of the $87.4 million raised by Lincoln for the 2020 cycle.
Long after the leadership schism, hints of Madrid’s “grifting” allegation continued to surface. An August 2024 report from the Daily Caller News Foundation revealed roughly a third of the money raised by Lincoln after January 2023 had already gone to firms owned by Lincoln Project “senior operatives.” The report also added that Rick Wilson’s son had been paid $105,750 for “corporate campaign management.”
John Weaver, another co-founder, was accused of “grooming”—sexual harassment—of several young men affiliated with the Lincoln Project. This scandal led to a separation between Weaver and Lincoln, but not before the Showtime cameras captured incriminating reactions in real time as the Weaver scandal unfolded.
In an early episode, Lenti jokes about the large number of interns Weaver keeps adding: “I keep telling him to stop with the interns.” After the scandal erupts, she told Showtime that Weaver “had a reputation around this stuff.”
The official Lincoln Project response was to say that they didn’t know Weaver was “a predator, a liar, and an abuser” and that they too were victims: “Like so many, we have been betrayed and deceived by John Weaver.”
Um… maybe not.
Showtime captured a phone call from Lenti to senior advisor Stuart Stevens, in which she says co-founders Reed Galen and Steve Schmidt had been warned about Weaver in the spring of 2020. Her claim is backed up young man who worked for Lincoln and said in the documentary that he too had been one of Weaver’s targets.
“The Lincoln Project knew that John Weaver was doing this in June 2020,” said the young employee to Showtime. “They continued to put him in contact—and hire his interns—into October 2020. I warned them about this in a three-page email detailing 15 instances of sexual harassment by John Weaver.”
Whatever the truth is, the Showtime statements fit a familiar pattern. Some of the best evidence we have for the ugliest interpretations of the 2020 Lincoln Project controversies is available because these supposedly savvy messaging professionals invited independent filmmakers to document their serial disasters.
Who thought this was a good idea?
Apparently in need of new scandals in late 2021, the Lincoln Project decided to “help” the reelection campaign of Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic governor of Virginia.
So, they paid some guys to appear with tiki torches at a rally for Republican challenger Glenn Youngkin, claiming to be authentic Youngkin supporters. This stunt was falsely reported in the media as a demonstration by real white supremacists supporting Youngkin, and the false flag message was later amplified by the presumably innocent McAuliffe campaign.
After the hoax was exposed, McAuliffe’s campaign manager tried to do damage control: “What happened today is disgusting and distasteful and we condemn it in the strongest terms.”
Youngkin beat McAuliffe by 2 percentage points, in a state Biden had won by 10 one year earlier. Obviously, the Lincoln Project didn’t help McAuliffe win. But as with so many of their messaging fails, it’s not hard to make the case that they helped him lose.
The Lincoln Project main page claims the PAC is “a leading pro-democracy organization in the United States—dedicated to the preservation, protection, and defense of democracy.”
But for all that democracy talk, the Lincoln projectors also have a habit of channeling the Watergate burglars.
In January 2021, even before Biden was sworn in, Lincoln Project senior advisor Stuart Stevens announced an enemies list.
“At @ProjectLincoln we are constructing a database of Trump officials & staff that will detail their roles in the Trump administration & track where they are now,” wrote Stevens on Twitter/X. “No personal info, only professional. But they will be held accountable & not allowed to pretend they were not involved.”
There has been no apparent follow up on this, but Stevens is still one of the seven people listed on the website as part of the Lincoln Project leadership.
In the next installment, given that opposing President Trump is the Lincoln Project’s reason for existence, it may not survive the second Trump administration.
