The Lincoln Project sold revenge rather than results

In a supposed effort to "stop Trump," the Lincoln Project sold ball caps that reminded people of Kamala Harris's most infamous brain fart. No wonder a Lincoln Project co-founder called it a grift.

Something’s wrong with Donald Trump. He’s shaky, weak, trouble speaking, trouble walking . . . so why aren’t we talking about this?

—Lincoln Project attack ad from June 2020

During her brief 2020 presidential campaign, Kamala Harris said there was “no question” that she would ban fracking if elected. This quote became a vulnerability in her 2024 campaign, and in late July 2024 she tried to claim she’d never said any such thing.

Harris wanted voters in energy-rich swing states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio to forget the serious difference between her and Donald Trump on energy. Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen. On October 21, 2024, one of many attack ads on the subject was released.

The two-minute video began with Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance telling a roaring crowd that America should “drill, baby, drill!” The scene shifted to Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) shouting that Republicans wanted to “keep our earth clean,” but asking: “do we want to destroy the oil and coal industry?” Greene answered her own question: “NO!”

That video wasn’t produced by Republicans—at least not current ones. It came from the Lincoln Project, a political action committee (PAC) that has raised at least $142 million since 2019 from donors who were told the loot would be used to “stop Trump, break MAGA, and save America.” The founding Lincoln projectors are former Republican political consultants who were the earliest members of the “Never Trump” movement.

A famous psychological trick involves telling someone not to think of a pink elephant, knowing that the cue forces the listener to do exactly the opposite. The “drill, baby, drill” video wasn’t supposed to make Trump look good on energy, but instead bad on carbon dioxide policy. It is but one of many examples of the Lincoln Project messaging working against their stated objectives.

When Lincoln launched in 2019, Democrats didn’t seem to need help from these erstwhile political opponents. The Russiagate hoax was still taken seriously, the 2018 mid-terms had cost Republicans the House, and Trump was impeached. It wasn’t at all clear the Make America Great Again (MAGA) experiment would survive four years, let alone get any more.

Today, Trump has won a second term. And unlike his first-term vice president, who never fit easily with the MAGA message, J.D. Vance is a clever and charismatic promoter of the brand.

Even if Trump had been reelected in 2020, MAGA may have exhausted itself by the time he departed in 2024. But now, a MAGA movement that outlives its creator is a plausible scenario. The Lincoln projectors have failed spectacularly to do what they said they would do with that $142 million: stop Trump and break MAGA.

A Lincoln Project “Stewardship Report” produced after the 2020 race boasted that they do no polling and no focus groups nor really anything to test their messaging. Instead, the strategy is to aim at “an audience of one,” “get inside Trump’s head,” and “under Trump’s skin like no one had done before.”

But the traditional attack ad, which is aimed at persuadable voters, is difficult to pull off because it needs to be nuanced, not merely nasty. While it’s necessary to test such messages to get the right ones, even the Lincoln team shouldn’t have needed a focus group to tell them fracking is very popular in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

The dumbest MSNBC anchor could have warned them off that messaging.

But the “audience of one” strategy concedes the Lincoln Project isn’t looking for the attention of an autoworker in Michigan or a natural gas rig operator in Pennsylvania. Their real audience is those who HATE “the one.”

Lincoln hasn’t been selling political persuasion. That’s hard and expensive. They’ve been selling revenge, which is much easier and clearly lucrative.

A cynic might wonder if these former Republicans deliberately set out to trade in their old ideology and clients for a new batch of suckers. That cynic said as much to reporter Robert Schmad in August 2024:

“Their whole shtick is ticking off Donald Trump, and that’s what they sell,” Capital Research Center senior investigative researcher Ken Braun told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “They’ve really come up with a unique way of weaponizing negative campaigning against their own donors, and that’s a lot easier of a thing to raise money [off of] than actually being effective. You can show your donors, ‘Look, we said this nasty thing about Donald Trump, don’t you like that? Here, give us more money!’ … I’ve got to hand it to them in a very cynical way, they’ve come up with a really effective way to raise money, without really being effective.” [emphasis added]

Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show the Lincoln Project received $23.8 million during the 2024 election cycle. At least $15.1 million of this is accounted for by individual receipts listed in the FEC database, and 90 percent of those records are from contributors who gave Lincoln $1,000 or less. Roughly 100 donors are recorded with cumulative donations of $20,000 or more, with the largest giving $1 million.

What You Get for Your Money

Who are those donors?

One of the most familiar of the larger 2024 donors was filmmaker Rob Reiner, who gave Lincoln $25,000. The man once known as “Meathead” also gave more than $180,000 to the Harris Victory Fund.

The epitome of a shrill Hollywood liberal, Reiner responded to Trump’s 2016 election by claiming anti-Trumpers were “fighting the last big major battle of the Civil War.” Perhaps there was no easier mark for something promoting itself as “The Lincoln Project.” Reiner forked over $10,000 to Lincoln in June 2020, making him one of their first supporters.

What this Hollywood messaging professional has been willing to pay for demonstrates who the Lincoln Project is really trying to impress.

In July 2024, following President Joe Biden’s disastrous June debate performance, Reiner publicly called for Biden to withdraw from the race.

Our former president’s unfitness for the job was infamously and unethically hidden from the American people by his staff, allies, and the regime media. Nearly all of them wanted all of us to stop talking about mental decline.

The Lincoln Project was the exception.

In June 2020, the month Reiner sent his first check, the Lincoln projectors released the first drop in what became a flood of videos reminding Americans that we should think hard about the declining mental capacity of our politicians. It was titled: “#TRUMPISNOTWELL.”

“Something’s wrong with Donald Trump,” it began. “He’s shaky, weak, trouble speaking, trouble walking . . . so why aren’t we talking about this?”

The narrator asked why reporters couldn’t see “Trump’s decline.”

“Trump doesn’t have the strength to lead,” claimed the video. “Nor the character to admit it. We’re not doctors, but we’re not blind.”

Less than a year before Biden began falling off bikes, stages, the steps of Air Force One, and whatever else we never heard about, the Lincoln Project’s obtuse attack video showed Trump moving safely up steps and across stages.

A normal PAC would have trouble raising another nickel after dropping this turd. But as previously noted, the Lincoln Project business model isn’t persuading the persuadable but instead revenge for those obsessed with insulting Trump.

Understood on that basis, the video was a winner, and Lincoln kept raking in money. Their revenue haul for June 2020 was more than $10 million, more than double what they had taken in the month before.

As Biden’s speaking and steering systems continued to deteriorate, the Lincoln Project kept producing videos that implicitly drew attention to the problems.

On September 1, 2023, they released “Two Presidents.”

It showed Biden jogging and safely climbing the steps of Air Force One. This was two years after he had fallen multiple times trying to board the aircraft. And then just 25 days after “Two Presidents” was released, Biden slipped again trying to navigate those stairs.

The video also showed Biden riding his bike, an effective way to remind America that he had fallen off one while barely moving a little more than a year earlier.

Not content to let the stupidity simmer down, the Lincoln Project released “Senile” two weeks later on September 15, 2023. This one used video from Fox News hosts discussing the mental decline of Biden but replaced the video images with some that supposedly portrayed Trump having those troubles.

The main takeaway for a genuinely undecided voter who saw this was that Fox News was at least giving serious coverage to the Biden brain decline. It’s also easy to imagine a Fox-hating anti-Trumper eating up the message and sending Lincoln some more loot.

Success!

In late November 2023, the Lincoln projectors let loose with “Impaired,” which followed the predictable format. The star of this one was Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) saying “voters will be able to decide next year: do they want to vote for a vegetable for president, or someone who has energy and mental acuity?”

With friends like this, Biden didn’t need enemies.

“Feeble” dropped in early December 2023. “Face it, Donald,” says a woman narrator, “you’re just projecting when you call Joe Biden old.” She also asked: “Are you sure you don’t have dementia?” This followed her allegations that Trump needed “help getting around” because he was “weak” and “unsteady.”

And yet again, it showed Trump walking safely up the steps of Air Force One.

It’s almost comically difficult to tabulate how many times the Lincoln Project tried to remind us that stairs were the worst nightmare for the Biden Secret Service detail.

The Lincoln team must have thought they were really clever in January 2024 with “Mar-a-Lago Assisted Living.” The joke they were going for is obvious. Yet again, they used video of Trump walking off a stage without smashing into the ground or anything else.

The “#TRUMPISNOTWELL” hashtag was resurrected for a February 14, 2024, video. In one of several mashed together clips of Trump speaking, he is shown reminding people it would be “nice” if we had “an intelligent president.”

Less than a month later the special counsel looking into Biden’s classified documents case released a report saying the president had presented himself as an “elderly man” with a “poor memory.”

On May 1 Lincoln released “Trump Isn’t the Same,” which claimed he was “old,” “sleepy,” “confused,” “weak,” and “his energy is gone.”

Unburdened

At this point we were racing toward the June debate that would brutally expose Biden with every single one of those problems. When Biden was replaced, Democrats were hoping Americans would forget this problem and look ahead to Harris.

But the Lincoln Project wouldn’t let it go. On October 9 they let loose “Cognitive Test,” challenging Trump “the old man in the race” to take the test and prove he was “all there.”

It was a month before the election, and the Lincoln Project was reminding America that it had been eight years since Democrats had nominated a presidential candidate with the verbal competence to staff a McDonald’s drive-thru window.

Eleven days after “Cognitive Test” posted, Trump worked his iconic shift at a McDonald’s.

While Kamala Harris can walk more than 30 feet without staring down danger, she has her own communications difficulties.

“What can be, unburdened by what has been,” was her most iconic and damaging babble-speak phrase. She said this a lot, at least until the Trumpy types began using it to remind people she and words were a challenge.

While Harris surely wanted to forget she ever said that line, the Lincoln Project just as surely did not. In a development that should surprise nobody who has read this far, they tried to turn it into a profit center!

They began selling $30 t-shirts, and three different versions of $35 ball caps that featured the slogan.

Even during the election campaign, it wouldn’t have been shocking to see Trump and his supporters sarcastically wearing the Lincoln Project’s camouflage hats with the word “Unburdened” emblazoned across the front. More difficult to explain is how all that stuff was still for sale on the Lincoln Project merchandise page in March 2025—45 days after the Trump inaugural.

The Lincoln Project’s lack of effectiveness in 2024 is self-evident. The 2020 race also turned out far weaker than the hype they sold to donors.

After the 2020 race, Priorities USA, a conventional Democratic Party super PAC, set out to measure the effectiveness of their own advertising. In the process, they looked at the relationship between the virality of Lincoln Project videos on social media versus the effectiveness of the messages.

“They took five ads produced by a fellow occupant in the Super PAC domain—the Lincoln Project—and attempted to measure their persuasiveness among persuadable swing state voters; i.e. the ability of an ad to move Trump voters towards Joe Biden,” reported the Daily Beast of the Priorities USA research.

It didn’t go well: “The most viral of the Lincoln Project’s ads—a spot called Bounty, which was RTed [retweeted] 116,000 times and liked more than 210,000 times—turned out to be the least persuasive of those Priorities tested.”

The Priorities USA analytics director claimed there was even a slight negative correlation between the social media popularity of Lincoln videos and their effectiveness. He told the Daily Beast that “the better the ad did on Twitter, the less it persuaded battleground state voters.”

Lincoln Project co-founder Reed Galen didn’t even dispute the report and claimed instead that Lincoln had a two-track strategy. He said Lincoln’s “audience of one” videos that “made the most noise” were meant to get into the head of Trump and family, while lower-key work in swing states was aimed at persuasion of actual voters.

According to a Showtime documentary shot during the campaign, a major target of the Lincoln Project’s battleground state work in 2020 was Latino voters in Arizona and Black voters in Georgia. Co-founder Mike Madrid claimed Lincoln was deploying a “New Southern Strategy,” using the supposed “racial dog whistling” of Trump to snag more of those voters for Biden.

Exit polls showed Trump won 31 percent of Arizona’s “Hispanic/Latino” voters in 2016, the last race without Lincoln Project involvement. Exit polls for Arizona in 2020 showed Trump’s Latino support had jumped to 37 percent. In Georgia, Trump’s 9 percent among Black voters in 2016 crept up to 11 percent in 2020.

“Everyone has been noticing this long-term trend of Black and Latino voters just skyrocketing in the South and that’s going to have a transformational effect for the next . . . forever,” Madrid predicted to Showtime.

In the previously referenced “Stewardship Report,” the Lincoln Project’s after-action report on the 2020 race, they brazenly claimed: “No Super PAC in US history was attacked like The Lincoln Project for one simple reason: no Super PAC had been as effective.”

“…the Lincoln Project of 2024 is a grift that was hijacked and led by resistance versions of MAGA chieftains” — Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt

Tellingly, the report didn’t mention how Madrid’s Arizona and Georgia work had coincided with exactly the opposite of what he told Showtime they were trying to accomplish. In fact, it doesn’t even mention Georgia as one of the states they targeted and doesn’t mention Latinos or Blacks as the target audience for any of their work in the six states they did claim to be working.

Similarly, the Lincoln Project spent a combined total of $9.5 million in 2024 trying to knock out four Republican senators: Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Steve Daines of Montana. All three won by margins of at least 10 percentage points.

“We didn’t get Alaska. We didn’t get Montana. We didn’t get South Carolina—all of them,” griped a Lincoln Project digital strategist in the Showtime documentary.

“That’s uncomfortable to sit with,” he said. “It’s not what we tell ourselves about ourselves.”

If “stop Trump, break MAGA, and save America” is really the Lincoln Project brand, then by their own standards they’re executing as if they’re O.J. Simpson trying to sell steak knives.

…THESE WERE THE FIRST TWO ENTRIES IN A FIVE-PART REPORT: PLEASE CONTINUE READING AT THE CAPITAL RESEARCH CENTER (free, no sign up)…

Part 3: Who Are These People?

Part 4: Unforced Errors

Part 5: Will Never Trump Survive Trump?