Considering the looong disquisition about this at his rally last night, it’s pretty clear it’s gotten under his skin.
Jennifer Rubin on the Lincoln Project:
The ads are devastating for several reasons: They are produced with lightning speed, and thereby catch the public debate at just the right moment; they hammer Trump where he is personally most vulnerable (e.g., concerns about his vigor, concerns about foreign corruption); and they rely to a large extent on Trump himself — his words and actions. Put it all together, and they manage to “say the quiet part out loud” — that is, to make public what many Americans already think about Trump. As a result, they are creating some of the most devastating ads of this or any presidential election cycle.
Trump has felt compelled to respond to some the ads, as he did on Twitter during the week to make excuses for his feeble appearance at West Point. Plainly, the Lincoln Project has struck a nerve. He wound up devoting a good chunk of his meandering remarks at his Tulsa rally to explaining why he needed two hands to drink a glass of water. He bizarrely reenacted his baby-step descent on the ramp after his West Point speech. The group’s communications director Keith Edwards tells me the group “lives in Donald Trump’s head rent free.” And it is not like there is any shortage of material for the ad-makers. “We’ve only just begun to prosecute,” John Weaver told me. “We won’t let up until Joe Biden is sworn in at noon on January 20th.
I am on the wrong side of my progressive activist pals on this subject. Never Trumpers out there positively agitating for Joe Biden is a good thing in my opinion. I don’t know how many people they can persuade but it doesn’t take very many.
Moreover, judging from their twitter feeds and various writings, a good number of them have been seriously alienated from the GOP, and not just because of Trump. The supine cowardice of Republican officials and the grotesque opportunism of many of their erstwhile political allies in the Republican coalition have made them see their party a little bit more clearly. Some of them even seem to have been truly repulsed by the racism they can no longer ignore. Better late than never.
This is not to say they will be joining up with the progressives any time soon. Their antipathy toward some of the leftier reaches of the Democratic Party is pretty obvious. But they pretty closely mirror the mainstream center of the party which has problems but is still better than being part of the nihilist right. In any case, today there are a whole lot more progressives in the coalition than there used to be. So let the games begin.
And for the record, I know they have much to answer for. But I’m not one who requires hairshirts and self-flagellation for apostates who see the light. Life is short and there are bigger monsters to slay than people who have voluntarily moved in my direction. (But I don’t trust them either. ..)