The Lincoln Project: the Republican attack ads taking on the Trump Presidency
“As long as Nixon was politically alive – and he was, all the way to the end – we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds.”
Whenever Hunter S. Thompson spoke or wrote about Richard Nixon, it was usually accompanied by some barely concealed acknowledgement that his relationship with the 37th President of the United States was symbiotic. Nixon was enhanced by Thompson, but Thompson could also not do what he did without the man once described by Harry S. Truman as “a no-good, lying bastard”. Exceptional or outrageous politics produces exceptional or outrageous art, and this is precisely why the Donald Trump presidency was expected to be a gift to satirists. Trump, like Nixon, arouses strong feelings and both of these controversial presidents, to borrow another phrase from Thompson, “broke the heart of the American dream”.
Yet the real surprise in all this is how Trumpian satire has failed to find its feet. The great boom in Nixonian satire was, like Nixon himself, as much a product of the Sixties as it was a consequence of Watergate. We simply do not share the same sensibilities. “Who you gonna make fun of now, late-night comics?!” asked Homer Simpson recently at the thought of the end of the Trump presidency, but the truth is that late-night comics haven’t been that effective.
Partly because of the caution of networks worried about being drawn into the divisive culture war and partly because Trump is almost beyond satire, the likes of Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and Trevor Noah have been significantly less effective than Thompson or Kurt Vonnegut or Philip Roth, who Nixon himself once described as “a horrible moral leper.”
Instead, what has been exceptional this time is the political attack ads and those drawing the most blood have been made by former Republicans. Strategists opposed to this notionally Republican president have been the most scathing in their criticisms of the Trump project. Indeed, it’s arguable whether there has been anybody working in the media who have been so effective as The Lincoln Project at undercutting this President’s very singular message.
The Lincoln Project first appeared in an op-ed in The New York Times in late 2019 in which its founders declared “This effort transcends partisanship and is dedicated to nothing less than preservation of the principles that so many have fought for, on battlefields far from home and within their own communities.”
It was signed by four high profile Republicans – George Conway, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver, and Rick Wilson – who brought a broken bottle barroom mentality to the media game. They could speak the language of conservative voters who didn’t buy into the glib moralising of Democratic campaign ads. They would make the kind of attack ads that liberals rarely make or, certainly, only make with one arm tied behind their backs. “We were providing something for the Biden campaign that they couldn’t buy,” said Wilson.
They certainly had a point. Democrats hadn’t just played it clean in 2016 (Obama’s refusal to interfere in an already compromised election remains indicative of that naivety) but they were showing all the signs of playing it clean in 2020. After all, it wasn’t Democrats who were appalled when Joe Biden recently took down his attack ads after Donald Trump contracted the coronavirus. It was former Republicans who detected in the Democrats the lack of the killer instinct, the willingness to play a little dirty in order to win. (The Trump campaign still attacked Biden and Obama even on the days when Biden and Kamala Harris sent messages wishing the President a speedy recovery.)
When The Lincoln Project went to work, the effects were a cut above the ads coming from DNC channels. “Mourning in America” was their riff on the famous Ronald Reagan campaign ad (“Morning in America”) from his 1984 re-election bid. Where Reagan promising a brighter future, the Lincoln Project offered a hellish present where “our country is weaker, and sicker, and poorer”.
The ad made their name, especially with their effective use of social media, though they have arguably gone on to produce better ads that have been more psychological, designed for an audience of one, and only broadcast in the Washington D.C. area. These ads were aimed at a single TIVO inside the White House. “It’s not trolling when there’s fish on the hook,” says Lincoln founder Rick Wilson in a recent profile in The Circus, the Showtime TV series. It is Trump himself, he says, who “put us in the role of being his antagonists”.
Perhaps that’s what makes Trump so suited to this kind of one-on-one attack. Media obsessed and a product of his own media, Trump consumes any and all things about himself, including that aired by his opponents. Lincoln Project ads are a distillation of every technique to get inside the mind of one man. They often employ the same actress (unnamed on purpose) whose voiceovers, they know, irritate the President thanks to her deliberately condescending manner.
In one ad titled “Whispers”, she addresses the President directly. “Why do you think you’re losing Donald? It’s because you’ve got a loyalty problem.”
It’s a not-too-subtle way of sowing doubt in the mind of a man who already suspects everybody around him but calling him “Donald” doubly provokes a president who often boasts about how people call him “Sir” and “Mr President”. It certainly provokes his defenders, with the Conservative super PAC, Club for Growth Action, recently launching attack ads on the Lincoln Project, which they describe as “a Democrat PAC, a get rich quick scheme pushing Joe Biden for president”.
Attack ads generating their own attacks ads are an indicator that The Lincoln Project has been effective. They also appear to have caused damage inside the Trump White House. Perhaps no ad distils the essence of The Lincoln Project as much as their takedown of Brad Parscale, Trump’s six-foot eight-inch campaign manager. Their ad “GOP Cribs” is a small masterpiece of paranoid filmmaking. It addresses Trump in his own language, boasting of all the material riches that Parscale had amassed off the back of Trump’s success.
It turns the mental screws by describing him as “the man Trump can’t win without”. Trump, the real estate mogul, would have noted the attention to detail, including the politically incorrect shots of young models in bikinis (something you’d never see in a Democrat ad). “Don’t tell Donald!” warns the voiceover. “He’d wonder how Brad can afford so much! A $2.4 million waterfront house in Ft. Lauderdale. Two Florida condos worth almost a million each! He even has his very own yacht.”
It’s not entirely reasonable to attribute Parscale’s subsequent fall to the work of the Lincoln Project but there did appear to be some causality, even if they were merely undermining an already unstable relationship. Parscale would take the blame for a disastrous Oklahoma rally where a 19,000-seat arena was left largely empty. In July, this year, he was replaced by Bill Stepien and demoted to an advisory role. In September, he was taken to hospital after threatening to kill himself during an incident at his home involving guns and claims of domestic abuse.
It was a cruel fall but indicative of the cruel reality of power politics. To end with another quote from the always quotable Thompson, again talking about Nixon: “Badgers don’t fight fair, bubba. That’s why God made dachshunds.”