Lincoln Project

Friday

Cockburn

Where’s the nonbinary restroom at the Supreme Court?

Lincoln in the Bardo “The economy has never been better,” top Democrats and their surrogates told voters during the 2024 elections. It turns out that’s because the economy was doing just fine for a lot of the party’s top vendors. After all, Kamala Harris’s $1 billion of campaign expenditures had to wet some beaks, if not win votes. One series of outlays stood out in particular: the millions of dollars spent by the Lincoln Project, despite the Democratic Party’s top infrastructure rolling out focus groups showing that the group’s work had zero impact on the 2020 presidential election. “Tragic,” elections analyst Rob Pyers wrote on X. “After raising $15.5 million for the year and burning through $16.

Thursday

Ben Domenech

The end of NeverTrump

Donald Trump’s sweeping victory in the 2024 election saw the end of a host of political assumptions — about the country, the inevitability of the left’s generation-shifting agenda and the inability of the Republican Party to penetrate key demographics that have proven resistant to its message. But it also ends one of the most vile and corrupt strains of political activity in the past eight years: the professionalized NeverTrump movement, which raised scads of cash — “generational wealth,” in the phrasing of Steve Schmidt — selling an obviously failed product to Trump’s antagonists.

NeverTrump

Tuesday

Cockburn

The Lincoln Project tries to Bud Light Dr. Pepper

The Lincoln Project, a disgraced PAC launched in 2019 “to defeat Donald Trump at the ballot box” and “to ensure Trumpism failed alongside him,” has a new mission: take down Dr. Pepper for advertising on Fox News. Having seemingly taken inspiration from the Bud Light/Dylan Mulvaney boycott that’s seen conservatives abandon the beloved beer brand in droves, the Lincoln Project called out “Texas’s favorite soft drink” on Twitter, scolding: “Your motto is ‘Drink Well. Do Good.’ Your goal is to ‘make a positive impact with every drink.’ Yet you continue to advertise on Fox News, a network committed to telling lies and degrading our public discourse. Time to live up to your promise and drop Fox.

Dr. Pepper

Tuesday

Cockburn

Lincoln Project founder melts down, part 348913

For many years, Cockburn tried to become a board member at the Lincoln Project. Not because he wanted to sabotage them from within — though that would have been fun — but because he, too, can't get enough of the juicy gossip (though shaving and bleaching his head would have been a definite minus). Since then, the Lincoln Project has imploded several times over, while its most visible founder, Steve Schmidt, has gone on a Tarantino-cum-Elmer Fudd revenge tour against seemingly everyone in his life. The latest target in his (quivering) crosshairs is the McCain family, which even Cockburn can't help but find remarkable. It was John McCain, after all, who gave Schmidt his biggest break as his 2008 presidential campaign manager.