The Lincoln Project has had a bunch of scandals happening lately where their board members are resigning over illicit behavior with young boys, and others who may be caught up in knowing/not knowing about it, and others who profited off the fund raising for it. Needless to say, it has had a lot of dirty laundry out for grabs.
I liked to read one of the employees who stood firmly and praised the work they did. Some polls say they did not sway Republicans very much, but I am certain they helped ignite the entire voting body of the US to get out the vote.
Here’s some commentary.
A major pile up of bad news for TheLincolnProject
In case you hadn’t noticed, the Lincoln Project — an organization as pointedly anti-Trump as any other, its rise and political relevance symbiotically tied to his — is unraveling.
It’s unraveling because one of its founders, John Weaver, was using his position to proposition young men. It’s unraveling because peers of his in the organization apparently sat on complaints about that, too pumped up by their currency as Trump slayers to let accusations against Weaver impede their mission and kill their buzz.
It’s unraveling because it can no longer hide what a financial boondoggle it was for some of its central players, who spoke of principle while lining their pockets. Yes, they made dynamite ads and an eloquent case about Trump’s betrayal of America. Their firms also made money from the hero status that they were accorded by Trump haters the world over.
But the Lincoln Project is unraveling for an additional reason. It’s unraveling because Trump is out of office, and that not only deprives the organization of its fiercest mission and tight focus. His departure also opens the political actors there — and political actors everywhere — to more scrutiny and more reproach than they received when he was still around. Trump urgently demanded and rightly sopped up so much of the public’s contempt and the media’s attention that there was limited space left over for other scandals. In that way he was like a concealer slathered over pox and warts beyond his own.
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He was also in instances a get-out-of-jail-free card. If you raged against him, your past was wiped clean. Your own preening and avarice were laundered by your denunciations of his.
The Lincoln Project isn’t the only example of this, but it may be the best one, and I say that as someone who had his own hand in celebrating it. I wrote a column in July about the Lincoln Project’s founders as the quintessential NeverTrumpers, which was the designation for Republicans who had broken with their party, permanently or temporarily, because of Trump. My take on them was flattering.
I expressed some skepticism, noting that they possibly had a mix of motives, that they had found themselves “in high demand as commentators and book authors” and that “through some of their anti-Trump organizations, funded by donors, some of them have arranged employment no longer available to them in conventional Republican circles.”