The Lincoln Project and the Friends They Made Along The Way

You may remember Lincoln Project co-founders Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson from their near-constant presence in the American political media during the Trump administration.  They, along with a number of other career-Republican-button-men-turned-Never-Trumpers like Charlie Sykes, Tom Nichols, Stuart Stevens and Michael Steele were suddenly everywhere.  Their voices and faces filled the cable teevee political panels.  Their words graced major op-ed pages.  Their books were NYT best-sellers.

And all of that made a certain kind of sense.

Remember, right up until Trump won the Republican nomination, while certain disreputable Liberals were warning that Trump was the GOP and should be taken very seriously as such ("The Premium Leads") --

As I wrote a few years ago,the brain-caste of the GOP spent a 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.  

In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.

-- the lords and ladies of the American political media were laughing themselves stupid at the notion that anyone would take Trump seriously --

-- and confidently announcing that it was definitely gonna be Rubio.

And when Trump easily mowed down every other GOP candidate and became the Republican Party's nominee, the same lords and ladies of the American political media simply shifted their focal length of myopic disbelief: sure, OK, maybe Trump won the nomination, but there was no way on Earth he was going to be elected president.  And since Trump's defeat was inevitable, these same lords and ladies of the American political media felt no compunction about cranking up the Both Siderism to 120 decibels and relentlessly bashing Hillary Clinton to advance their careers.

And so when Trump lost the popular vote by +3M but won the electoral college, was elected president, and began his reign of unfettering lying, racism, looting and treason, the lords and ladies of the American political media had no idea what to do.  

Obviously they were never going to admit to their own utter, craven incompetence, and they were never, ever going to admit that the Left had been right about the Right all along.  So, what they needed was a small group of people with a very specific skill set.  They needed talking heads who could bash Trump and his acolytes in the most scalding terms allowable on basic cable and in family newspapers but who could also be relied on not to mention the GOP's decades of escalating racism and madness that led to the rise of Trump or the America political media's complicity in it.  

For this role, the Never Trumpers were a perfect fit, because now that they had been drummed out of the GOP, they needed access to huge media platforms on which they could:

1. Talk shit about Trump and his acolytes.
2. Rewrite the modern history of the Republican Party in a way that made them out to be blameless at worst, and at best, selfless heroes.
3. Pretend that the we on the Left and our critique of the Right didn't exist at all even as they plagiarized it wholesale, and...
4. Could also be assured that no one would ask them about the key roles they played in the GOP's decades of escalating racism and madness that led to the rise of Trump.

It was perfect, transactional arrangement, and an extremely lucrative one.  I mean, just imagine what kind of hammer your favorite Liberal bloggers and podcasters could swing if they regularly and prominently appeared in the New York Time or The Washington Post and on CNN and MSNBC several times a day, every day, year after year after year.  No more tip jars, that's for sure.

And thanks to those hundreds of million of dollars worth of free, glowing publicity that Never Trumpers and their various writings and projects received from the American political media, Rick Wilson, Steve Schmidt and a few other were able to launch their Lincoln Project political marketing company and get it into orbit faster than any other such enterprise ever.  

Then a couple of things happened.

Trump lost, and despite the many victory laps the Lincoln Lads took, post election data showed that their actual effect on the 2020 elections was somewhere between negligible and nil.  Then, almost before the their "We pretty much single-handedly beat Trump!" champagne had gone flat, they were hit with a number of self-inflicted scandals relating to the toxicity of their work environment, the enormous amount of the cash they had collected from well-intentioned donors that had been shunted into the pockets of their founders, the credible and deeply disturbing charges of sexual predation by their co-founder, John Weaver, and the apparent coverup of that behavior by some of the principles.

At this point the American political media collectively decided it needed a little space to think over their relationships with the Lincoln Lads, and from that point on you may have noticed that you've not seen Rick Wilson or Steve Schmidt shooting the shit on CNN or MSNBC with Don Lemon or Joe Scarborough or Jon Avlon or Nicole Wallace or Brian Williams.  

However, if you look, you can still find Messers Schmidt and Wilson on own their Lincoln Project podcast, which is where they were today.  And the reason I 'm writing about it today is the dark and twisted humor I found in hearing Rick Wilson -- whose owes his entire post-Republican-button-man career to the purely transactional arrangement he struck with the American political media -- talking   smack about that same American political media now that they've stopped returning his calls.

Wilson:  The Washington D.C. media ecosystem isn't liberal or conservative.  It's transactional.  It's functional.  And so see you a lot of very, very bad actors in our politics who are protected because they're good sources.  They're good access journalists.  And they will hand over to a journalist answers from Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell or Donald Trump.  And the only reason that these people are let in the door is because Washington is essentially a town full of toll booths.  And some of the dirties players in this have great access to the most important people.  And so you see Jason Miller -- a guy you wouldn't let drive your kids to school --  these kinda people have access, and that's part of the problem in D.C. right now.  When we've been attacked at the Lincoln Project in the press a few times, part of it's because we don't have anything we're selling.  We're not trying to sell access.  We're not saying, "Hey buddy, y'know, give us this and that and we'll get you in front of Mitch McConnell so you bill gets heard." None of that is part of our purview.  But these people in this culture are all about this transactional access to power, whether it's media or lobbying or money. 

So a few of things.

First, there is nothing in Mr. Wilson's description of the "Washington D.C. media ecosystem" with which I fundamentally disagree.  Quite the opposite -- the reason I'd did a weekly breakdown of the terrible, terrible Sunday Shows for over a decade was   precisely because the mainstream political media is so deeply corrupt and complicit.  

Which (second) is why I found Mr. Wilson's fiery indictment of the "Washington D.C. media ecosystem" so damn hilarious.  Because while he was riding that dragon, he loved that dragon and that dragon loved him because the both of them were getting something of value out of that transaction.  But once the stank from the Lincoln Project shenanigans began offending the dragon's nostrils, it bucked Wilson off and found new riders.  And only then did Mr. Wilson discover what a corrupt form of transportation dragons can be.  

And finally, Rick, you weren't attacked in the press because you "don't have anything [you're] selling."  What a weird, stupid, Gingrichian thing to say.  The press backed away from the Lincoln Project and began writing critical stories about it because one of your co-founders is a credibly and multiply accused sexual predator, because your organization tried to cover it up, because of how much donor money ended up enriching a few of your co-founders, and because, in the end, your Lincoln Project pretty spectacularly failed to meet any of the objective performance measures it set for itself.

But take heart, Rick.  You'll always have your memories.

Burn The Lifeboats