With President Donald Trump’s formal acquittal by the Senate seemingly on the horizon, lots of attention has turned to the 2020 presidential election that’s just months away. Now, Republican activist Rick Wilson has revealed during an appearance on Bill Maher’s HBO show that his anti-Trump Republicans group The Lincoln Project is preparing a “nasty” deluge of ads going after the president and his Republican enablers.
The Lincoln Project just recently debuted their first ad, which zeroed in on the president’s conservative Christian backers. That piece rather memorably interspersed some of those evangelicals’ praise for Trump’s supposed goodness with footage of his public and often expletive-ridden meltdowns packed with belittling mockery of his opponents.
Now, Wilson says that the group is not planning on issuing a formal endorsement of a 2020 presidential candidate, but he explains:
‘The group of us that put it together; we’re going to target both Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s enablers… As an outside force that can do things that the Democrats have demonstrably failed on doing a lot of the time, like actually getting in people’s shit. We’re sort of a pirate ship in that regard… We’re going to do as much as we can to make sure that Donald Trump is not re-elected. We’ll be is using all the tools in our toolbox and some of them are pretty frigging nasty.’
Check it out below:
The Lincoln Project, which counts longtime Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s husband George among its backers, is not alone in terms of Republicans going after the president’s camp. A group called Republicans for the Rule of Law has done the same — ahead of the vote on whether or not to hear from witnesses in Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, they ran a deluge of television ads targeting perceived possible swing votes that could give Democrats a majority in favor of witnesses.
Although overwhelming majorities of Americans wanted witnesses according to polling, only two GOP Senators defected from the party line and voted with the Democrats. That gave them only 49 votes, and they needed 51.
Going forward, Wilson has actually been attracting ire from the president’s camp just in recent days. During an appearance on CNN, he mocked the president and his supporters as supposedly stupidly out of place when it comes to the issues that they’re trying to deal with. After suggesting that Trump could not find Ukraine on a map, he used a faked accent to mock the president’s supporters, and the soundbite went far and wide — although the president’s camp themselves are guilty of the exact same, at the very least. They belittle largely Democratic areas like California and New York like clockwork.
It’s unclear at present who might take Trump on in the general election, but there are really only a handful of viable Democratic presidential candidates left. That includes Joe Biden, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and — at the trail end — former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg and South Bend, Indiana’s Mayor Pete Buttigieg. By Buttigieg, levels of support are already in the only single digits.
