6 Months Out 26:10

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened. There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. The United States of America. Good night and good luck. Hey folks, it's Rick. Welcome back to The Lincoln Project. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about where we stand as the six-month mark has hove into view for this election.

I want to tell you some good news and some bad news. I want to talk to you a little bit about where I see and where the Lincoln Project sees the terrain of this election. And look, you've all heard over and over again, oh, a poll came out today that said Donald Trump is ahead here or there or that Joe Biden is ahead here or there. First, let me tell you to take a deep breath.

Right now, you're still seeing a lot of surveys, a lot of polls out there that are scaring you. Why are they scaring you? Because they do two things. One, they use either all the voters or registered voters, which is ridiculous. You need to be looking at likely voters right now drawn from the voter file. I don't want to go into the technical weeds on it, but a lot of the surveys you're seeing out there are pretty superficial.

They are not reflecting the state of the electorate in a lot of states. Now, I'm not telling you that it's all sunshine and roses that you can go and check out for the next six months because you can't. This is going to be a tight race. It is going to be a difficult race. But we're going to have a competition between two men right now that is exactly what you think it's going to be. You're going to have Joe Biden, who is old. Yes, you may have been reminded of that a time or two.

You're going to see Joe Biden out there doing the work, grinding away. He's going to be out there talking about the things he's accomplished. He shows up for the mission. He has managed to show up when it came to the infrastructure bill. Remember, Trump had 714 infrastructure weeks. They never happened. He showed up with the Inflation Reduction Act. It's working. Not as much as we'd like or as fast as we want, but it's working.

You've seen the Recovery Act. All these things that have come together under Joe Biden have been meaningful economic accomplishments. Are they enough? Is everybody happy? No, and no one's going to be happy. One thing that's important to recognize in these polls is that we used to be in a country where Americans' views of the economy shaped their politics. Now their views of politics shape their view of the economy. So it used to be, if you were a Republican or a Democrat—

And the economy was doing well. The president, whoever that was, got the benefit from it. Even Republicans would say, you know, Barack Obama's economy is not too bad. Bill Clinton's economy, not too bad. Sometimes when we're, there was a Republican boom, there were Democrats cheering Reagan, hey, Reagan's economy, not so bad. But now, since the country lives in kind of alternate reality bubble,

Since it lives in a kind of inverted world, we're going to see a lot of people who say, even though their personal economic situation is good, who say we live in a cannibal Mad Max hellscape. We're the living envy the dead. It's the worst economy in history. And it's all drama. It's all garbage.

But you're going to see Biden out making these points about the economy. You're going to see him out making points about his accomplishments. You're going to see him out making points about a lot of the things he's tried to do to rebuild America's credibility and leadership in the world, especially in Ukraine and the Pacific. And all those things are going to add up over time. Are they enough? They're not enough in and of themselves. They're good. They're necessary. But they're not, as they say, necessarily sufficient. Now, what are you going to see when it comes to Donald Trump? More of the same.

Sorry to tell you more lies more insanity more courtroom antics more More rally craziness more conspiracy theories the entire Trump show is coming at you and I know a lot of people Especially in the pro-democracy movement, especially on the center, especially on the center left and the center right they're exhausted and

They just want it to be over. They don't want to have this fight again. But folks, this is the fight of our lives. This is it. In 2020, America came together and decided that Donald Trump should not spend one more minute in the Oval Office. He fought it tooth and nail. He fought it violently in the end. He fought it in a way that almost destroyed this nation. I want you to prepare yourselves for a drumbeat that is going to start coming up this summer.

Trump is going to say over and over again, the election will be rigged. It will be crooked. I will be cheated. He is not doing this because he's confident of anything. He's doing it because he senses that we are at a moment where America may have had enough.

They don't want a criminal for a president. They don't want a guy who's in court for the billionth time under the 80th charge. They don't since they want it anymore. And Trump's going to use any excuse to try to BS his way through it, to try to pretend it's not happening, and to try to say that instead of a criminal, he's in fact a martyr.

And he's setting himself up to say, oh, I was kept off the campaign trail. I was forbidden from speaking. All of these things came because Trump is who he is. All these things happened because Trump did these things to himself. This is a guy who has done everything that's gone wrong for him, that's put him in court, whether it was the E. Jean Carroll case or the classified documents case or the Georgia voter fraud case or the New York case that's happening as I record this right now.

Those are all on him. Don't accept the framework. Don't accept the narrative. Don't buy this idea that somehow Donald Trump is being put upon or that the deep state is conspiring against him. Listen, y'all, I think we all know this pretty well by now. In government, three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. If there was a deep state conspiracy against Donald Trump, believe me, you'd be hearing about it on the cover of the New York Times every day. If there was a deep state conspiracy against Donald Trump,

You would know it. You'd see it. It'd be a lot more effective than what you're seeing right now, which is just the regular course of justice playing out against a man who can't stop criming. He just can't. He can't stop himself from going out there and doing these things that keep putting him in court. He's going to be there all summer. It's going to grind on and on and on. The New York case will wrap up soon. He'll be convicted. He'll appeal. It'll be a loud and messy thing.

The other court cases, and I've told you this for a year and a half, and at Lincoln we've warned people over and over again, don't believe in miracles when it comes to getting rid of Donald Trump. You have to beat him at the ballot box over and over and over again. You have to whip his ass so hard that he screams like a rented mule. You have to beat him so that they can't pretend that somehow it's been stolen.

The numbers have to be so dramatic and crisp and clear that you cannot, even in the most fervid MAGA fever swamp insanity, believe it. Now, as we go into this fall race with these six months to go, you're going to hear him describe himself as a martyr, a political prisoner, just as he describes the terrorists from January 6th as martyrs and political prisoners.

Don't get too exercised about this. The world's full of innocent murderers on death row. The world's full of people who get to court after they've committed crimes and say, what? It wasn't me. But know in your hearts that millions of Americans will realize that Donald Trump's going to rack up actual convictions for some of these crimes. Don't freak out this summer when the court issues some limited immunity to Donald Trump. I don't think they're going to go all the way full-throated. I hope not.

I've talked to a lot of people about that who are very, very deeply concerned about the expansion of executive power. But, you know, if they do it, Joe Biden can, I don't know, seize Mar-a-Lago because the law apparently at that point doesn't matter. Anyway, I'm not suggesting that. I'm making an ironic point for you. But as the summer goes on, you're going to hear more of that murder rhetoric. You're going to hear more of the elections being stolen rhetoric. And you should understand that what they're feeding –

is a narrow and intensely smaller base all the time. Trump's not out there winning over the Nikki Haley voters who didn't support him. I mean, remember, folks, as I record this, Nikki Haley has been out of the race for two and a half months, and she's still popping up 22% in Pennsylvania. She's still showing that there's a massive pool of voters out there who desperately do not want to vote for Donald Trump and who are Republicans or conservatives.

This is an interesting and fascinating element in this campaign. I hope she doesn't break and endorse the guy, but it might happen. You should prepare yourself. It might happen. Support for the Lincoln Project podcast comes from Odoo. If you feel like you're wasting time and money with your current business software or just want to know what you could be missing, then you need to join the millions of other users who've switched to Odoo.

Odoo is the affordable, all-in-one management software with a library of fully integrated business applications that help you get more done in less time for a fraction of the price. To learn more, visit odoo.com slash Lincoln. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash Lincoln. Odoo. Modern management made simple. I want to talk a little bit about the VP contest right now.

Every traditional vice presidential contest in every side of the equation, Republican and Democrat, for 100 years or more, has been about making adjustments in the electoral college map, giving you an advantage in a state where you might not have had an advantage. There rarely have been selections that were made

by a presidential candidate to pick a VP who had some ideological or leadership qualities that were perceived to be lacking in the presidential candidate. Dick Cheney being selected as vice president, for instance. They thought George Bush was a little too young for the job, so Cheney was the stalwart, older, steadier character. But in this case,

As you can tell, Kristi Noem's VP candidacy has gone into the gravel pit and been shot several times. And she may continue to want to be VP, but that's over.

You're seeing this contest of all the wannabes now, the boys and girls who think that they're the one who is going to somehow seduce Donald Trump into this magical moment where Elise Stefanik or Vivek Ramaswamy or J.D. Vance or whomever becomes the candidate. Is it going to happen for any of them? It's going to happen for somebody.

There's a lot of money right now on Elise Stefanik. She's telling a lot of people she's got it in the bag, that she's the chosen one. I'm not sure I believe that. J.D. Vance has a lot of hot flavor from the Peter Thiel world, from the alt-right world, from the trying to gentrify white replacement theory world. And he's got a lot of support from the Russians right now because he's an overt Putin advocate when it comes to Ukraine.

But that contest, I encourage you not to be too distracted by it. It's fun. It's going to be fun and funny. But I encourage you not to get too in the weeds on the VP contest. The VP contest is going to be what it's going to be, folks. It is going to be a reality show. It's the bachelor's bastard child with the apprentice. It doesn't matter who gets the rose. It doesn't matter who wins it.

At the end of the day, it's still going to be about Trump. This race is always going to be about Trump. It's the only issue in the race. And so as you watch that VP thing over the summer, again, I encourage you, enjoy it, but don't become obsessed about it. It's not going to change the fundamental outcomes in the fall. VPs rarely do. Good or bad, they rarely do. I've seen good VP candidates and I've seen less good VP candidates on both sides.

And at the end of the day, it really doesn't make a killer difference. They have a couple moments that matters. The day they're rolled out, the convention speech, and if the president dies. Those are the three days in a VP's life that matter. And those are low probability of changing the race in any circumstance. So as we go on, I'm sort of outlining the next few months for you. By the time we get to the fall, I want you to prepare yourselves for an absolute tidal wave.

of AI-generated fake content. We're starting to see it pop up now. It's becoming more prevalent as we go. And that content is going to put Joe Biden in a terrible light. You're going to see it shared on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and God knows where else. And a lot of it's going to be garbage. The majority of it will be garbage. You're going to hear Joe Biden say things that make him look ancient and demented and crazy and racist and every other thing under the sun.

I encourage you to please be extraordinarily careful as we go into the fall of sharing good or bad content, things you love or hate. Truth is getting very attenuated now in the age of AI. It's very difficult to understand what's real, to be able to determine quickly what's real. I encourage you to put the brakes on when you see this stuff, even if it's bad for Trump, even if it's crazy for Trump. Like, I will tell you, two weeks ago, the story popped up about Trump supporters wearing diapers.

And I saw it and I didn't believe it was real for about a week. And I was like, I'm not putting this out there. I'm not putting this out there. I'm not putting this out there. It turned out it was real.

But there will be a lot of things in this election that are fake. There will be a lot of things that are not real, that are made-up content, that are AI-generated. And there'll be some made up here in this country. There'll be some of it by foreign actors. But remember, you're going to see a lot of crazy. You're going to see a lot of weird. You're going to see a lot of things you think may win or lose the election for one side or the other. Take a deep breath. Validate. Verify. Think it through. I also want to talk to you about

unifying behind Joe Biden. Now, God love my Democratic friends, but the one thing they love to do is to complain for too long. I get it. He's not liberal enough for you in some parts of the country. He's not conservative enough in others. He doesn't do this the way you exactly want it or that the way you exactly want it. God, y'all, I get it, okay? I understand it. But please understand we are in the summer of 2024.

You may not love his policies on Israel or Gaza or trade or anything. There may be any number of things you disagree with the president on, but I beg of you to consider one thing. I beg of you to consider this. If Donald Trump takes office, absolutely nothing you want or believe in ever again will matter. There will never be action on any of the things you care about.

And I can agree with you or disagree with you on these matters, but if you care about climate or guns or abortion or trade policy or Gaza or anything else, no matter what you think your disagreements with Joe Biden are, the steps that Donald Trump will take will be an order of magnitude more dangerous for the country and the world

It will set this country back 100 years or more in so many social and economic and developmental areas. I can't even begin to express it. Why do we know this? We know this because the bad guys always tell you what they're going to do. It's a classic supervillain failing. They always say, now, Mr. Bond, I will drop you into the pit of shocks. They're telling you what they're going to do.

Project 2025 is not just a preview. It's not just a talking point. It's not a slide deck with 10 slides in it. It's tens of thousands of pages of actual developed policies and plans and programs and decisions about personnel that they will take immediately. They will take steps the day he is sworn in. By the time he leaves the west front of the Capitol, there will be 1,000 executive orders ready for his signature.

and they will go. This is because they understand power far better than the Democrats ever have. This is because they don't care about the rule of law. This is because they don't care about the Constitution. This last part of the podcast today, folks, I want to just talk about the stakes because the stakes are existential. They're cataclysmic. This is why I want to encourage you. If you're a progressive Democrat and you don't like Joe Biden, take a deep breath and get on board.

If you're a moderate Democrat and you think he's too progressive, take a deep breath and get on board. The alternative is not if you're a progressive getting AOC or Bernie or anyone else in the White House. The alternative, if you're a moderate, is not getting a moderate in the White House. Any lack of unity on the part of the Democratic Party at this point and of well-meaning and well-intentioned independent voters means Donald Trump is reelected. And what we were talking about with Project 2025,

I will tell you honestly, I don't scare easy. I don't. I've had plenty of death threats. I've had plenty of trouble in my life. I've had plenty of people that, you know,

were very determined to end things badly. You know, Project 2025, even in the hands of a guy you think is clownish, and Trump is clownish, there is no doubt he's a clownish figure. He has a short attention span. He is increasingly wracked with dementia and God knows, maybe tertiary syphilis. I don't know. There is a character and affect to this guy that is silly and goofy and dumb. But do not mistake this. He will not be surrounded by

by silly and goofy and dumb people. And Project 2025 will not be implemented by silly and goofy and dumb people. The people that will put it to work have a very dark vision of this future, of this country. They have a very dark vision. This is not going to be something that you get to wake up in the morning and go, yeah, no, I'm not going to do that. Because they're going to break the way the country works. They're going to use the power of the state to punish their enemies.

They're going to use the power of government to control your behavior. If you think Katie Britt last week, just dropping it out there casually, that we should have a national database of all pregnant women, came out of nowhere, it didn't. It came out of Project 2025. If you think that the fact that they want to monitor every woman's birth control and her buying habits to make sure she's not buying Plan B,

monitoring her credit cards, her ovulation cycles, all these things. If you think those things are just coincidences, you're mistaken. This is a plan. It is an enormously comprehensive plan. And again, I want to unify you behind the idea that no matter what small disagreements you have with Joe Biden at this point,

Donald Trump and Project 2025 are on the ballot. And if you can't make yourself leave your encampment or make yourself less angry about something Joe Biden did or didn't do, and you're willing to put Donald Trump in office, believe me, you will not like the outcome. It will not go well for any of us. So a lot of people have asked me, what are we doing at Lincoln Project about Project 2025, about Donald Trump?

Let me run it down for you. Here's what we do. And a lot of folks don't understand what we do at the Lincoln Project. You think, oh, they make those great viral ads. We do. They're great. We do those viral ads in part to mess with Donald Trump's head. Why do we do that? It's useful. It makes him do stupid things. It distracts his campaign. It makes him spend money. It takes days and weeks and hours out of his brain. And we don't have any day that we don't like to cause Donald Trump some distress.

The second thing we do are big narrative ads, big communication pieces that talk about how we feel that the issues need to be framed in the country to move the maximum number of voters. Now, a lot of those ads appeal to Democrats. You know why? There's a lot of Democratic voters. Some of those ads appeal to Republicans. You know why? A lot of Republican voters. But what we do that you don't see as much of is the targeted work we do out in the states. Now, this year we are focused on four states that you've all heard of and that you know are important.

They are, of course, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Those are some of the few remaining swing states. Those are, in our minds, the states where we have a large enough pool of persuadable voters to help Joe Biden win. We've done this in 2020. We did it in 2022. We're going to do it again this year. We may expand the map a little bit as time goes on. We may end up in Nevada. We may end up in North Carolina. We may end up in Georgia. Those things are down the line a bit.

But we've built out a program. We were already operating the program in Arizona and Wisconsin right now. We've been up on the air for weeks in those states delivering digital ads to a highly selected set of audiences, and they're working. They are moving Republican voters away from Trump. They are moving conservative-leading independents away from Trump. They are moving a group of voters we call Dobbs Dads, a group of voters we call Red Dawn Conservatives, and the bigger group of voters we call the Bannon line away from Trump.

This is the work we're good at. This is the work we're going to continue to pursue. This is the work we're going to deliver on every day. And I wanted to thank everybody for tuning in. I'm happy to sit down with you guys and look forward to answering some questions on the next Lincoln Project podcast. Thanks so much. Support for the Lincoln Project podcast comes from Odoo. If you feel like you're wasting time and money with your current business software or just want to know what you could be missing, then you need to join the millions of other users who've switched to Odoo.

Odoo is the affordable, all-in-one management software with a library of fully integrated business applications that help you get more done in less time for a fraction of the price. To learn more, visit odoo.com slash Lincoln. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash Lincoln. Odoo. Modern management made simple.