President Trump and the Lincoln Project founders agree on one thing: This is the most important election of our lifetimes.
Of course, they agree — they are trying to marshal votes! The higher the stakes, the stronger your case, right?
That’s why the project’s founders penned an op-ed for the Washington Post, directed toward their kindred career Washingtonians in government and the “consultant and lobbying class,” and tried putting the fear of God in them. “The time for choosing is at hand. Will you choose a republic or an autocracy?” they implore.
Autocracy? You mean like Cuba, Russia, and China, where dissenters are poisoned and imprisoned? Where there are no perceivable checks on executive power? There is no intellectually honest way to look at Trump’s first term, ridiculous behavior, executive actions, erratic governance and all, and walk away thinking that Trump has propagated and thrived in that kind of environment.
Is there really no case to be made against Trump that does not require the generation of false choices and daft characterizations? But, of course, the false choice helps raise the money, and the Lincoln Project is in the business of raising money.
Perhaps the project’s founders took their analysis from the Washington Post itself, which editorialized in August that Trump’s “assaults on the U.S. media and courts” are among the things that “threaten to degrade what has been the world’s strongest democracy while offering a model for budding authoritarians around the world.”
Trump hates the media, but he loves them too. They duel and call each other names and always come back for more. Trump says the media are an “enemy” as he invites them into the White House. During a one-month period over the summer, he took 700% more questions than Joe Biden. If that is an authoritarian assault, what language is left to describe the arrest and imprisonment of journalists or something like the murder of Jamal Khashoggi?
For liberals, filling federal judgeships is an authoritarian “assault on the courts.” Putting Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court is an assault on the court. Trump, who was duly elected, can achieve neither without the Senate, whose members were duly elected. What is authoritarian about that?
These will be seen as glowing defenses of Trump. They are really a rejection of a strategy that, in order to inflate the stakes artificially, suggests the president is something he isn’t and that he can’t be in this country. It’s a strategy that disregards the institutions that have checked Trump for four years, and would continue to do so were he re-elected, and disregards the reasons why people support the president altogether. The Lincoln Project’s founders just turn their heads on those questions.
Or rather, they offer another false choice. “As Republicans, will you stand with Trump, or will you stand with, and stand up for, America?” they write in the op-ed. “Will you protect democracy or protect a single person and his family?” A great deal of Republicans find that Trump actually serves their interests. To be sure, many of them are voting for Trump in spite of their complete distaste for him and precisely because Joe Biden does not serve their policy interests at all.
The Lincoln Project has found no way to encourage a vote for Biden on the grounds of conservative policy interests. It hardly tries, not even mentioning the Democratic candidate’s name in the op-ed. Instead, it’s Trump or “the country.” That’s not convincing.
