The Lincoln Project, a group founded by disenchanted Republicans who oppose President Trump’s reelection, plans to expand its media brand into a potential new network after the Nov. 3 contest.
The group recently signed with United Talent Agency to build Lincoln Media, eyeing offers from television studios, book publishers, and podcast networks, according to a report from Axios. Thus far, the project’s media ventures have been limited to podcasts, streaming, and experimenting with newsletters. The group has also had financial success selling merchandise.
“As a media business, we’re putting a pretty big bet on the idea that they know how to get audiences,” Ra Kumar, a UTA agent representing Lincoln Project, told the outlet. He added that the level of requests UTA has received from Hollywood firms looking to work with the project has been “unprecedented.”
Anti-Trump commentator Rick Wilson, one of the group’s co-founders who came under fire earlier this year for mocking Trump supporters as uneducated and illiterate, said the Lincoln Project’s research into voter outreach “inadvertently” led them to becoming “a content creation machine.”
“We discovered in doing research that voters are getting lots of information from streaming and podcasts,” Wilson said. “We decided to build those things as advocacy vectors. We didn’t set out to become a media company, but we’ve inadvertently become a content creation machine.”
According to Axios, UTA has already signed the Lincoln Project with Fletcher and Co., a literary management and production company, and has attracted interest from television studios to produce a House of Cards themed show, a Netflix original production that tells a fictional story of corrupt U.S. politicians seeking to control all apparatuses of the government. The company is also working to put together a nonfiction film after the election with a motion picture producer and documentarian.
The anti-Trump group has fallen under significant scrutiny this year, varying from accusations of stealing meme content to its co-founders reportedly having checkered financial histories. In July, the New York Post reported that John Weaver and Wilson had hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal tax liens on personal properties. The newspaper reported on documents that also showed Wilson was sued by American Express for failing to pay a nearly $26,000, 1-year-old credit card bill.
“It’s very clear that this isn’t about Trump and Republicans,” a Republican source said of the Never Trump leaders to the New York Post. “It’s about making money to help pay off their massive personal debts.”
For now, with the election just one week away, the anti-Trump project remains focused on helping ousting Trump and helping Democrats be elected to the Congress.
