Trump conservative critics launch PAC to fight reelection

NEW YORK (AP) — A small group of President Donald Trump’s fiercest
conservative critics, 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 that 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.

“I think the more the merrier,”
George Conway told The Associated Press. “And I hope maybe he — he or
she, I don’t know who Anonymous is — will come out someday and join the
effort. Because everyone who believes as we do that Donald Trump is a
cancer on the presidency and on the Constitution needs to help and join
this effort.”

The inception of the Lincoln Project is significant,
but to say it represents a minority of Trump’s Republican Party would
be an understatement. Roughly 9 in 10 Republican voters approved of the
president’s job performance and have all year, according to Gallup. And
with very few exceptions, Trump has the public backing of virtually
every Republican member of Congress.

Yet recent elections suggest
that Trump’s party is losing ground with educated voters and women,
particularly in America’s suburbs, which have traditionally leaned
Republican. This new group hopes to push those voters further toward the
Democrats.

It is very much a work in progress, despite Tuesday’s
official launch. While the core players don’t yet have titles,
day-to-day operations will be led by Horn and Reed Galen, a veteran
Republican operative who worked for McCain but left the GOP after
Trump’s nomination in 2016.

The group begins as a super PAC, which means it can raise and spend unlimited sums of money and must disclose its donors.

“You’re
seeing a shift from talk into action,” said Galen, describing the
launch as “a big turning point for the political season and for the
president’s reelection.”

Specifically, the group plans to focus on
blocking Trump’s reelection and defeating Trump-allied Senate
candidates in a handful of key 2020 battlegrounds. To do so, it’s
targeting a narrow but important slice of the electorate: disaffected
Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.

While there is no
concrete road map, Weaver said the organizers plan to fight the
president’s reelection in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin along
with Arizona and North Carolina. Their Senate efforts likely would focus
on Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, Maine and possibly Kansas and
Kentucky.

Weaver said the group is already reviewing scripts for new ads, which are expected to begin running early next year.

“This
is organic, and we’re going to be flexible,” he said. “We have to go
out and prove ourselves and prove that we can be efficient and
effective.”

Meanwhile, George Conway, who formally left the GOP
last year, said he likely would serve in a “cheerleader” capacity for
the new organization because of his limited political experience.

“I’m
not a fundraiser or political consultant, but if I could help in that
way and learn how to do that — even to raise a nickel or two — I’ll do
it because it’s important,” he said. “For this, I think I can make an
exception.”

He suggested the Lincoln Project would pay particular attention to Congress’ impeachment proceedings.

“If
he’s not removed by the Senate, he needs to be removed at the ballot
box,” he said of Trump. “The people in Congress who are enabling him,
either actively or passively, they, too, are violating their oaths of
office. … And they need to be removed, too.”