The Rise and Fall of the Lincoln Project

There have been plenty of grifters in the political world. But what made the Lincoln Project grift unique was that much of it played out on television.

There was nothing special about the Lincoln Project. Its ads were coarse, but this is a coarse age, and its efforts were neither creative nor particularly offensive. Its opacity and self-dealing, its unwieldy coterie of advisers and hangers-on, have all been mainstays of the #Resistance. Far from the only anti-Trump Super PAC run by former Republican consultants, the Lincoln Project lacked originality even in its ambitions. When, post-election, its founders sought to break into the media business, they were angling to become little more than a slightly older, slightly lower-end version of Crooked Media, the podcast and events network created by several Obama-administration alumni.

Despite this unoriginality, this utter bog-standard-ness, the Lincoln Project raised roughly $100 million from its announcement in December 2019 to its effective implosion this February. That eye-popping sum came from a flood of small donors. But the Lincoln Project also won over large and long-standing Democratic players. David Geffen gave the group half-a-million dollars. Chuck Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC forked over almost $2 million, and the dark-money network Sixteen Thirty Fund coughed up more than a quarter million.

In short, the Lincoln Project managed to extract money from not only the emotionally unstable and congenitally irate but also the institutionally liberal. Why did blue America shower a group of washed-up former Republicans with money? And why choose these ones?

Cut through the Lincoln Project’s onion rings of advisers, staffers, and volunteers, and one finds a small network of men at the heart: Steve Schmidt, Reed Galen, John Weaver, and Rick Wilson. Schmidt, Weaver, and Wilson announced the group along with erstwhile Wachtell Lipton partner George Conway, husband to pollster-turned-Trump-White-House-adviser Kellyanne Conway. Their December 17 New York Times op-ed, full of self-seriousness and high dudgeon, made public the existence of a super PAC, initially incorporated by Galen on November 5 as “Rough Riders for America,” but renamed “the Lincoln Project” on December 9.