The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group led by formerly Republican consultants, has become an affront to its namesake. The group is working to destroy the political party Abraham Lincoln built.
If the group contented itself with trying to defeat President Trump, its founders could at least claim that they were interested in opposing an individual they viewed as a norm-destroying threat to conservatism. But the Lincoln Project is not stopping there. It is now fighting a political holy war to defeat Republicans up and down the ballot, with a particular focus on transferring the Senate majority from Republicans to Democrats.
These consultants trade on their Republican pasts and claim to be “broadly conservative … in our politics and outlooks,” yet they are scorching the political earth against even the most thoughtful and moderate of Republican senators in favor of liberals and even hard-left opponents. And beyond that, not content with merely opposing Republicans, the Lincoln Project resorts to harsh name-calling and smears.
The most egregious example came this week in the group’s malicious advertisement against Maine’s Sen. Susan Collins, a centrist Republican of renowned personal decency and diligence. The ad calls Collins “a fraud” who “makes excuses for corruption, for criminality, for cruelty,” and it portrays her as a “Trump stooge.”
This is the same Collins who was one of only two Senate Republicans with the courage to vote to hear additional witnesses (presumably against Trump) in the president’s impeachment trial — the same Collins who is the least likely Republican to support Trump’s stated position on any issue. (Collins’s 67.5% “with Trump” rating is approached only by quirky libertarian Rand Paul’s 69.9%, with 48 of her 52 GOP colleagues voting with Trump more than 80% of the time — most above 90%.)
One would think Collins, always an independent voice and voter in Congress, would be precisely the sort of senator who meets the Lincoln Project’s approbation. It claims to support officeholders who “transcend partisanship,” after all. Yet the group is opposing her in pursuit of the nakedly partisan goal of defeating any Republican who stands in the way of a Democratic Senate majority.
In the face of this extreme tilt in favor of liberal Democrats, the Lincoln Project’s big-money consultants should not be able to describe themselves with straight faces as Republicans or conservatives. They want to hand all levers of federal power to a more extreme-left Democratic Party than ever before, and they would fail in their stated goal of reforming the Republican Party into a non-Trumpian one by defeating its most endangered centrist members.
As for leftism, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer have both indicated an openness to eliminating the Senate filibuster so that they can strong-arm a full-spectrum left-wing agenda into law. Biden on July 28 said his agenda would make him the “most progressive president in history.” Lincoln Project veterans surely know there are few things in this world more likely to prove immortal than leftist government programs. Yet to punish Trumpism or, perhaps more accurately, to raise money from Democratic donors they never had access to before, they work to promote policies they spent their entire careers opposing.
The project’s principals say they hope that by eliminating Trumpism from power, they can reconstitute a reformed, post-Trump Republican Party more to their liking. This is their most palpable nonsense and the clearest proof of their insincerity. The vulnerable Republican incumbents they are attacking are the least Trumpian Republicans in office. If the Lincoln Project and Democrats succeed in taking down those such as Collins, whose less conservative constituencies make them more vulnerable to defeat, then the only Republicans remaining in office will be staunch Trumpian hard-liners in safe states and districts.
It’s hard to reconstitute a party into something less Trumpian when only the Trumpians remain in office.
Moreover, with the Democrats able to push through their extremely progressive agenda, the fervor on the Right will be even angrier, more bitterly reactive, and less open to the consensus-building Republicanism that the Lincoln Project pretends to desire. There is no way the Republican electorate will embrace a Romney-Kasich-McCain desire for responsible bipartisanship when the Schumer-Pelosi Democrats are, in the words of Biden (and Barack Obama before him), working to “transform” the nation.
Even in its own stated aims, the Lincoln Project will fail either to reform or rebuild anything. Its fruits will be destruction for the sake of destruction, which is decidedly un-Lincoln-esque.
