We understood Trump’s psychology better than anybody else and were willing to go all the way in on it. He is a horrifyingly broken narcissist who is wrecked by whatever fucked-up upbringing he had with his mother and father and his need for adulation and financial security.” “And I don’t think you could assemble a group of people who, when sitting around a table for 15 minutes, could better figure out exactly where a story was going to go, how Trump would react to it, how we could jump in the way of it, distract him, and pull him off of his message. I only half jokingly referred to myself as the anthropologist of the shittiest human being in the world,” Wilson tells me. “Before 2020, I had written two books about Donald Trump. #Digital warroom skinThe apostate Republicans were gifted at getting underneath Trump’s thin orange skin with dozens of clever, scorching digital and TV ads. Bush’s 1988 campaign, among others) Stuart Stevens ( Mitt Romney, 2012) Jennifer Horn (former head of the New Hampshire Republican Party) Ron Steslow (Stand Up Republic super PAC Uber) Reed Galen (a second-generation GOP insider) and Mike Madrid (a California-based expert in Latino politics and data). Indeed: Schmidt, as John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign manager, was the one who first suggested considering Sarah Palin as a running mate.īesides Schmidt, the Lincoln Project’s leadership included the gleefully profane Rick Wilson (a veteran of George H.W. “It looked as if there would be a bit of a Frankenstein aspect to the Lincoln Project story,” Amer says. In late 2019, a group of high-powered Republican political strategists-including people who had helped manufacture the modern right-wing, Fox News–ified version of the party-came together to try to deny Trump a second term in the White House. The Lincoln Project was an irresistible subject even before the controversy. “Little did we know the story would turn.” Fisher and his directing partner, Karim Amer, ended up capturing two brutal wars: the external, intended one against Trump’s reelection, and the internal, unexpected one among Schmidt and the other Lincoln Project principals, when ego, tens of millions of dollars, and a sex scandal set off bitter infighting. #Digital warroom movie“We thought we were going to be telling a story like The War Room,” says Fisher Stevens, a codirector of the new five-part series, referencing the classic 1993 film that chronicled the strategists running Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, a movie that helped turn George Stephanopoulos and James Carville into political cult heroes. “The idea that the Lincoln Project story is a story of the good people against the bad people is a very naive take on this.”įive hours of behind-the-scenes backstabbing, big-money hardball, and the creation of piercing attacks on then president Donald Trump-all of which unspools in Showtime’s The Lincoln Project documentary series, which premiered October 7-make Schmidt’s words come across as an epic understatement. “Make no mistake,” the former top Republican strategist says. Steve Schmidt stares straight into the camera, his eyes cold.
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