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As POTUS' Administration Collapses, Lincoln Project Reveals It Will Shift Harassment from Trump to His Supporters

 By C. Douglas Golden  January 8, 2021 at 12:11pm
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The anti-Trump Lincoln Project — made up of purportedly conservative grifters — got what it wanted. On Jan. 20, barring some insane turn of events, Donald Trump will no longer be president of the United States.

Having accomplished their goal, the folks in the group, much like Cincinnatus, have gone home to plow their fields — actually, wait, no, just kidding. They’re targeting Trump supporters who were involved in the incursion at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

And it’s not just the people involved in the riot. That would be understandable. Rather, it’s those the Lincoln Project holds responsible — and that includes politicians such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, CEOs of major corporations and pretty much everyone who didn’t jump off the GOP ship when Steve Schmidt and his colleagues did.

In a series of tweets that began late Thursday morning, Schmidt said the Lincoln Project “will be running a brutal corporate pressure campaign targeting Companies, Trade Associations, CEO’s, Directors and senior leadership of organizations that serve as the financiers of the Authoritarian movement that attacked the US Capitol.”

“For example, Donations that are made to [McCarthy], any organization he controls or any committee he controls will draw an action,” Schmidt said at the beginning of a Wednesday tweetfest.

Just in case you’re not familiar with who we’re talking about here: Schmidt was the GOP adviser who suggested Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s running mate in 2008.

Sometime in the intervening years — he announced it in 2012, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” natch — he viewed the decision a bit like J. Robert Oppenheimer’s “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” assessment of inventing the atomic bomb. Actually, he did nothing quite as erudite as quoting the Bhagavad Gita, telling Joe Scarborough and Co., “I think the notion of Sarah Palin being president of the United States is something that frightens me, frankly. And I played a part in that. And I played a part in that because we were fueled by ambition to win.”

In 2018, he quit the Republican Party, saying “it is fully the party of Trump.”

Now what he does is berate people who didn’t have what he believes is the good sense to jump ship when he did — four years after he pushed McCain to nominate someone whose potential ensconcement in the Oval Office is “something that frightens me, frankly” — that they’re every bit as radioactive as Oppenheimer’s bomb.

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By the way, the days between when McCain announced Palin as his running mate and Schmidt’s Lady Macbeth performance on “Morning Joe” — where he tried to wash the invisible blood off his hands for his role in what he called “a process of vetting that was debilitated by secrecy, that was compartmentalized, that failed, that led to a result that was reckless for the country” — was 1,291 days.

The amount of time between DeVos’ confirmation as the head of the Department of Education on Feb. 7, 2017, and her resignation Thursday was 1,430 days.

Apparently, that 166 days makes all the difference.

Do you support the Lincoln Project?

By the way, DeVos didn’t pick someone she called “reckless for the country” and put that person one recurrence of cancer for McCain away from the presidency. Mind you, that was preposterous, but so is Schmidt now claiming a strange moral high road over this because of the old “enabler” feint when he was enabling Palin.

Oh, but of course — he believes Trump is worse than Palin ever could be and enabled American fascism. Except the president didn’t. But whatever, because this just got crazy.

Here is Schmidt saying everyone who worked in the West Wing under Trump is “absolutely unemployable”:

Here he is retweeting someone who essentially says Jeff Roe, a strategist for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, is guilty of sedition — a crime that involves “two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, [who] conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States” and is punishable by up to 20 years in prison — and saying he’s willing to discuss the fact that San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer employs him “in the public square.”

This is little more than mirror-image McCarthyism.

Oh, and don’t forget Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, the ultimate seditionist:

Here is Schmidt calling Hawley a “fascist” — not a crime in the United States, but an insult that’s the hallmark of the intellectually lazy:

This is all because, by the way, Hawley and Cruz used a legal and constitutional method to raise potential issues with the 2020 election and ask for the thorough investigation into it that Democrats are desperate to preclude. Neither was suggesting the vote be “overthrown” or even thrown out. Thanks for trying, Mr. Oppenheimer.

Oh, and here is Schmidt retweeting an article that begins with the ominous (and ridiculous) implication that FBI Director Christopher Wray — absolutely loathed by the Trump administration, by the way — and his silence during the Capitol riot Meant Something™ — “Biden’s aspiration to heal will not be fulfilled without an AG and FBI who hold past, present, and future seditionists accountable” — without a definition of what that means.

Interesting thought: Yes, I’m a very minor figure in all of this and I can’t be charged with sedition, but since I wrote that I thought that the vote should be challenged — even though I made it clear, as Cruz did, that I didn’t think this necessarily meant the Electoral College vote would be changed (and made it clear this was supremely unlikely) — does this mean I have to undergo a form of American denazification to get another job? Not asking for a friend.

Here’s Schmidt comparing former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly — a man who was widely seen as an establishment check on Trump and who was also detested by the president — to Field Marshal Philippe Petáin, the head of the Nazi collaborationist government in Vichy France during World War II, because why not:

And here’s him threatening literally every company that donated to a Republican who supported (or whose CEO even touched) the totally legal and constitutional challenge to the Electoral College in any way, even if they had no intention of overthrowing the vote:

He will become Death, destroyer of your world, because you did not come to the conclusion the Republican Party was evil at exactly the same moment he did.

The only comforting thing about Schmidt — who now stands atop dead bodies to paint his political enemies as Nazis, fascists and seditionists and expects the media to take him seriously — is that the Lincoln Project advertisements were, according to an analysis, wildly unsuccessful.

It was mostly an organization that celebrated itself and got the media to celebrate along with it. However, it’s one of the most respectable institutions that not only believes American politicians should be charged with sedition but implies that anyone who supported Trump should beg for forgiveness for thoughtcrime.

Thankfully, that means among the things that will likely fade into oblivion after Trump leaves office will be the Lincoln Project and Steve Schmidt.

Bon voyage, J. Robert.

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C. Douglas Golden
Contributor, Commentary
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014. Aside from politics, he enjoys spending time with his wife, literature (especially British comic novels and modern Japanese lit), indie rock, coffee, Formula One and football (of both American and world varieties).
Birthplace
Morristown, New Jersey
Education
Catholic University of America
Languages Spoken
English, Spanish
Topics of Expertise
American Politics, World Politics, Culture




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