'The Lincoln Project' co-directors talk rise and fall of Republican defectors that helped defeat Donald Trump

It was April 2020, and the United States was in lockdown mode as the coronavirus swept around the globe, killing tens of thousands — a total that would hit 375,000 by year’s end just in the U.S. Fisher Stevens lost three close friends in that first month alone.

“And I just couldn’t believe the president’s response,” Stevens said of Donald Trump, who infamously downplayed the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, repeatedly insisting the virus would “go away” as the death toll exploded. “It was just mind-blowing and shocking.”

So Stevens, 58, the actor long best known for his once beloved, now controversial, performances as the Indian character Ben Jabituya in the Short Circuit movies — who’s since become a celebrated director and Oscar-winning documentarian (The Cove) — began making some calls to fellow creatives. He wanted to pool resources to produce an ad holding the president accountable for his maddening inaction and blistering ambivalence.

That’s when Stevens discovered the Lincoln Project, the collective of defecting Republicans who made it their mission to defeat Trump in his November, 2020 bid for re-election — and likely ultimately played a significant role in his loss (more on that later).

They’re also the subject of The Lincoln Project, Stevens's and co-director Karim Amer’s captivating five-part series on Showtime that takes an intimate look at the band of political operatives and strategists best known for their furious and acerbic take-downs of Trump and Trumpism via web ads and social media posts in the lead-up to the election.

It was the Lincoln Project’s doleful “Mourning in America” spot that got Stevens’ attention. It was exactly the type of COVID alarm the filmmaker wanted to ring, leading him to partner with Amer, the Oscar-nominated documentarian Stevens had met in Tahrir Square while Amer was filming his 2013 Egyptian revolution film The Square.

“I started watching their ads, and they were amazing,” Stevens says. “They just kept getting me more and more excited. And going, ‘Wow, these are great. Why can’t do Democrats do this?’”

Therein lies the mystique of the Lincoln Project. These were largely old-school, fiscally conservative Republicans, raised on Reaganomics, who felt like Trump’s radical, dog-whistling rhetoric, volatility and unfitness for office was destroying their party. They were power players, too. The committee launched in late-2019 with a New York Times op-ed by high-profile, longtime Republican advisors and operatives George Conway, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver and Rick Wilson. Co-founders would include Jennifer Horn, Ron Steslow, Reed Galen and Mike Madrid. The rallying call was coming from inside the house, in the form of ubiquitous ads that rang up tens of millions of streams on YouTube and across social media and invoked the ire of Trump.

“These guys have been the king makers,” says Amer. “They’ve been shaping so much of the Republican party, of Republican politics. But I think it’s also important to live in a country where people change their political opinions… It’s a little bit of a political redemption story. These guys had once believed in one banner. And we’re in a time in American politics, in American history, where it's very rare to see people have the ability to move between different uniforms… Fisher and I really disagreed with a lot of their politics over the past 20 years. But you need everybody in this fight.”

Adds Stevens: “Some of them would view Dick Cheney as a good guy. See, that’s where we differ… But I love that these guys, [these men] and women, are sticking their necks out and I really got to like a lot of them.”

Instead of making ads with them, though, progressives Stevens and Amer began filming the Lincoln Project’s brain trust themselves – first for a feature-length doc, then eventually evolving into a five-part docu-series.

“We’d made a mistake in 2016, but to see that we're about to repeat the same mistake in 2020 just felt crazy,” says Amer, a Muslim American who previously explored the intersection of politics and social media with the 2019 Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal doc The Great Hack. “Despite it being COVID, we all had this feeling like, ‘We have to do something.’ And we make films, but our films take a long time to get made and finished. But these guys were using their skills to just capture the pulse of the country and just kept hitting back quickly. And it was so cool to see storytelling be effective this way.”

The Lincoln Project opens as the sharp-tongued Wilson and company descend on their headquarters in the ski resort town of Park City, Utah for strategy meetings and team-building, having spent much of their previous time on Zoom, and several members having never met one another face-to-face. Later episodes surround the election, naturally, but the series finale brings something of a twist, if you haven’t closely followed the organization’s story. It’s one of the reasons, along with the Jan. 6 insurrection, that the project was expanded from a feature film to a miniseries.

“The biggest shock was John Weaver,” says Stevens. In early 2021 it was revealed that Weaver – who had suffered a heart attack the previous year and left the project – was a sexual predator, having offered various young men professional favors in exchange for sex. He also had an inappropriate non-sexual online relationship with a 14-year-old boy. Weaver’s scandal lead to co-founder Horn leaving the group, while Conway, Madrid and Steslow followed shortly after.

“It all worked until the hubris got in the way, until lot of other factors came into place,” says Amer. With the bombshells dropping around Weaver, the series became a classic rise-and-fall story. “You could blame hubris, you could blame the sex scandal. You could blame the media for over-idolizing them… But there is a little bit of an Icarus [tale] to the story, right? They grew too fast. These guys started with a New York Times op-ed, and they thought maybe they'd raise a couple million bucks. They end up becoming the most successful super PAC in American history, with no client.”

In the end, though, the Lincoln Project achieved their primary objective in 2020: denying Trump four more years in office. Even if it’s impossible to quantify how much they affected the outcome. They’ve claimed to turn up to 4 percent of independents and Republicans they targeted against Trump.

“We don’t really know that for a fact,” says Stevens. “I can tell you where they were a hundred percent effective is they got into Trump's head. They got into Trump's family's head. They got into [Trump senior adviser] Brad Parscale’s head. And that took away from them focusing on the important thing for them, which was to get reelected. So in that sense, I think they were incredibly effective."

He adds, “We think that they definitely were effective and they got people out to vote. And that’s the goal [of the series], to get people out to vote in the midterms.”

The Lincoln Project is now airing on Showtime.