The private enclave outside Park City where Steve Schmidt calls home boasts an impressive list of residents. There are CEOs, a managing director of Goldman Sachs and a successful pharmacotherapy entrepreneur. And then there’s Schmidt — a college dropout-turned-political strategist extraordinaire.
Before Donald Trump’s rise to the White House, and long before Schmidt moved into a luxury home in the Wasatch Mountains, Schmidt’s reputation was clamped to his role resurrecting Sen. John McCain’s flagging 2008 presidential campaign, winning him the GOP nomination. But today, Schmidt has become synonymous with his controversial second act: The Lincoln Project — a “conservative” never-Trump outfit that raised tens of millions of dollars in a headstrong quest to take down President Trump.
A year into Trump’s presidency, Schmidt formally renounced his membership in the Republican Party, calling it “fully the party of Trump.” Eighteen months later, he and three other longtime Republicans — John Weaver, Rick Wilson and George Conway III — became the principal co-founders of a political action committee that would become one of the nation’s largest money-haulers in the run-up to 2020.
Fueled by internet-era social media savvy, the PAC quickly distinguished itself, in the words of one Politico writer, “as a squatter in Trump’s mental space,” and Democrat donors and never-Trump Republicans alike opened their wallets. But now, The Lincoln Project and those trying to capture the future of the Republican Party are trying to overcome financial questions, the sexual misconduct of one of the founders and a strategy that mimicked the very man they were trying to prevent from winning a second term: Donald Trump.
In a Melvillian obsession over their White Whale in the White House, Schmidt’s fate and that of the Lincoln Project have become increasingly enmeshed in the persona and tactics of their intended target.
Schmidt’s highly publicized exit from the GOP in 2018 put him in unfamiliar territory. A longtime Republican, he was suddenly at odds with the party he’d championed for decades. He ran President George W. Bush’s reelection rapid-response team in 2004 and later headed Vice President Dick Cheney’s press shop. He orchestrated the confirmations of Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito Jr. and John Roberts on Capitol Hill. And, most recognizably, he was the senior adviser on McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, capturing the GOP nomination in what was then called “one of the biggest comebacks in history.”
But Schmidt — who insisted I call him “Steve,” rather than Mr. Schmidt, during an otherwise fruitless and brief phone call in June — came back into national consciousness after Trump’s surprising 2016 victory. From conversations and email exchanges with Lincoln Project insiders and observers, a picture of Schmidt emerged as a man whose opposition to Trump was deeply personal — but also deeply…
Read More: How The Lincoln Project’s Steve Schmidt became Donald Trump’s protégé