The Lincoln Project Sells Revenge Rather Than Results (full series)
What You Get for Your Money | Unburdened | Who Are These People?
Unforced Errors | Will Never Trump Survive Trump?
Will Never Trump Survive Trump?
Following the failure to defeat Trump in 2024, Rick Wilson went back to this theme.
In November 2024, the New York Times reported that a “new liberal dark-money group began prospecting for donors with a pitch that it would unearth unflattering revelations about the Murdoch family and Elon Musk.”
The group is called the Two Plus Two Coalition. The New York Times reported it was looking to raise $10 million to $15 million from donors able to make a minimum investment of a million bucks each.
“The group’s senior adviser, Rick Wilson, a former Republican operative who was a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, said in an interview on Thursday that his organization would operate as an opposition research firm but with a military-grade intelligence-gathering operation that went far beyond the document vetting typical of a political campaign,” reported the newspaper.
Those donors should probably ask how “military grade” the intelligence will be for a $15 million price tag, and how that will be deployed effectively against a guy with $350 billion, ownership of a major social media outlet, and actual military contracts.
Or maybe they’ll just swallow up the sales babble speak and write checks. A Lincoln Project co-founder has every reason to expect this could work, but why isn’t he doing it with his own group?
More than one Lincoln Project founder and advisor has responded to the serial scandals with a public call to close it all down. Co-founder George Conway made his first call for closing down Lincoln in February 2021, in response to the John Weaver scandal.
Conway said more in March 2021, after the New York Times did a deep dive into Lincoln’s curious financing and put some flesh on the accusations of internal self-dealing that later appeared in the Showtime documentary.
“@ProjectLincoln should shut down, absent full disclosure of its finances,” wrote Conway on Twitter/X. “As this detailed story shows, there’s simply too much money that hasn’t been accounted for, and, I fear, never will be.”
In November 2024, responding to a negative story about him written by reporter Ben Domenech, estranged Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt called his old group a “grift.”
“Tragically, Domenech is correct when he points out that the Lincoln Project of 2024 is a grift that was hijacked and led by resistance versions of MAGA chieftains,” wrote Schmidt.
After claiming the Lincoln Project was doing well while he was there during the 2020 election, Schmidt crunched numbers on what had happened since.
“When the entirety of the four-year presidential cycle is considered—meaning 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024—the Lincoln Project spent a total of $55,441,579.00,” claimed Schmidt. “Out of that number, a total of $6,406,459.00 was disclosed on FEC reports as being spent on voter contact or independent expenditures. That means that, out of a total of $55,441,579.00 reportedly spent by the Lincoln Project, only an appalling 12 per cent was spent on voter outreach during the presidential cycle.”
“It is disgusting,” Schmidt concluded, “and it is why I repudiated the group, which I left in 2021.”
In March, Rick Wilson found a new scandal gear and in so doing managed to get himself tossed off the X social media platform.
At the time, left-wing resistance warriors were showing their displeasure with Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency by vandalizing and lighting ablaze Tesla vehicles and charging stations. All this was less than a year removed from the two assassination attempts against Trump, the first of which got a spectator murdered.
Into this violently felonious environment, Wilson wrote a Substack essay, the body of which was a clumsy call for a Tesla boycott. But none of that was clear from the headline Wilson selected and the image he paired with it: “Kill Tesla, Save The Country: Elon has a weak spot. Attack.”
The image was of a flaming Tesla Cybertruck that had been used as a car bomb outside Trump Tower in Las Vegas on New Years Day 2025. Wilson’s essay posted on March 19, 2025, one day after an arsonist had set multiple cars ablaze at a Tesla dealership . . . in Las Vegas.
And then Wilson posted it all to X, which is majority-owned by Musk.
The X staff, citing their terms-of-service prohibition on promoting violence, suspended Wilson’s account for at least 30 days.
Rather than apologize, Wilson went on a counteroffensive and accused his critics of lying or being unable to read. In a video response to the controversy, Wilson claimed his essay was not a promotion of violence in any way, but instead merely “about the weakness in Elon Musk’s financial portfolio.”
Wilson’s video began with the supposedly nonviolent image of his headline and the freshly bombed Cybertruck burning outside Trump Tower. Self-aware, he is not.
Wilson is supposedly a political marketing expert. Leaving aside the obvious interpretation, who was this message aimed at convincing? Donors?
It’s possible his donors are finally fed up.
As the embarrassments have added up, the Lincoln Project’s fundraising has declined. The PAC raised $87.4 million for the 2020 election, but then $30.8 million for 2022, and $23.8 million for 2024.
After reporting minimal or zero debt during the first two election cycles, Lincoln closed the 2024 books with $209,866.92 cash on hand, but . . . $863,347.96 in bills or loans still outstanding.
Before the 2020 election schism occurred, eight people were identified as Lincoln Project co-founders. Today, only Wilson remains among the seven total people listed as “leadership” on the website.
If this trajectory continues, then odds are good this Never Trump group will never survive Trump, let alone whatever happens next for MAGA.
