John McCain labeled his 2008 presidential campaign the “Straight Talk Express.” (click here) But that was just a slogan. In reality, McCain’s campaign was a desperately disingenuous project that saw the candidate and a cabal of corrupt aides lie to reporters and the American people, foster false impressions of their rivals, give Sarah Palin a national platform, and set the stage for the degeneration of the Republican Party into the antidemocratic confederacy it has since become.
The GOP’s debasement has had a lot to do with Donald Trump, but it did not begin with the 45th president. It had deep roots that were entangled not only with unprincipled strategists on the domestic front but also with oligarchs who were aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin. And it continues to haunt the party, and the United States, at a moment when Putin’s military is waging a genocidal war against Ukraine.
That is the most important takeaway from the headline-grabbing pronouncements of McCain campaign aide turned “Never Trump” Republican Steve Schmidt, who is currently embattled in a Twitter war with the late senator’s self-dealing daughter, Meghan McCain....
A small group of President Donald Trump’s fiercest conservative critics, (click here) including the husband of the president’s own chief adviser, is launching a super PAC designed to fight Trump’s reelection and punish congressional Republicans deemed his “enablers.”
The new organization, known as the Lincoln Project, represents a formal step forward for the so-called Never Trump movement, which has been limited largely to social media commentary and cable news attacks through the first three years of Trump’s presidency. Organizers report fundraising commitments exceeding $1 million to begin, although they hope to raise and spend much more to fund a months-long advertising campaign in a handful of 2020 battleground states to persuade disaffected Republican voters to break from Trump’s GOP.
The mission, as outlined in a website that launched Tuesday coinciding with a New York Times opinion piece, is simple: “Defeat President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box.”
The group is led by a seven-person advisory council that features some of the GOP’s most vocal Trump critics. Most, but not all, have already left the Republican Party to protest Trump’s rise.
The principals include former John McCain adviser Steve Schmidt, former Ohio Gov. John Kasich adviser John Weaver, former New Hampshire GOP chair Jennifer Horn, veteran Republican operative Rick Wilson and George Conway, a conservative attorney and husband of Trump’s chief counselor Kellyanne Conway.
In an interview, George Conway said he encouraged the new super PAC to involve Anonymous, an unnamed Trump administration official who authored a recent book warning the public against Trump’s reelection. The rest of the group ultimately decided not to take Conway’s suggestion....
