President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, May 5, 2020, before boarding Marine One for a short trip to Andrews Air Force Base, Md., and then on to Phoenix, Ariz. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Conservative group's ad garners angry Trump tweet
02:10 - Source: CNN
CNN  — 

The Lincoln Project, a small anti-Trump super PAC, says it has raised more than $1.4 million dollars since running an ad on Fox News this week that grabbed the attention and anger of President Donald Trump.

The group says the ad, which criticized the President’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, will be running next week on television in the swing states of Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida.

“We’re going to play where we think we can have an impact,” said Jennifer Horn, a Republican operative who advises the Lincoln Project. Other advisers include several prominent “NeverTrump” GOP and ex-GOP political operatives, as well as George Conway, the husband of Trump White House aide Kellyanne Conway.

Trump tweeted about the Lincoln Project and its ad early on Tuesday morning and continued to lambast what he called the “losers” behind it throughout the day. On Wednesday, the Trump campaign sent out an email calling the Lincoln Project “scam artists.”

The campaign has also charged that two claims in the ad, which ran a few times on Fox News in the Washington, DC, market and is now on air in Michigan and Wisconsin, are false. The first is the claim that Trump “ignored” the virus, and the other is that Trump “bailed out Wall Street, not Main Street” with the relief package passed by Congress.

“Dr. Anthony Fauci said President Trump did not delay at all in combating the virus,” said the campaign in its email. “In the initial round of the Paycheck Protection Program, the Trump Administration provided nearly $350 billion in support to more than 1.6 million small businesses, including 1 million businesses with 10 or fewer employees.”

In an interview with CNN, Horn pushed back on the campaign’s latest response.

“We’re very confident of the claims that we have made in that ad and every other ad that we’ve run,” she said.

The 60-second ad is titled “Mourning in America” and says the country is “weaker and sicker and poorer” under Trump’s leadership. Trump likely saw the spot during a re-airing of Tucker Carlson’s show in the midnight hour Tuesday morning. The President mentioned many of the advisers to the group by name in a Twitter rant at 12:46 am, calling them “LOSERS” and Republicans in name only.

Beyond Conway and Horn, others associated with the group include Steve Schmidt, John Weaver and Reed Galen – all veterans of the 2008 campaign of John McCain, with whom Trump feuded until the Arizona senator’s death in 2018. Others on the advisory board are campaign operatives Rick Wilson, Ron Steslow and Mike Madrid.

Each of the Lincoln Project principles aligned themselves with the “NeverTrump” movement in the 2016 election and have been outspoken critics of Trump and the Republican Party ever since. Weaver ran then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s 2016 bid for the GOP nomination, while Wilson advised anti-Trump independent candidate Evan McMullin.

Created late last year, the Lincoln Project had raised just over $2.5 million through the end of March, spending about $1.2 million of that through the same period. According to FEC filings the bulk of that – nearly $780,000 – has gone to a media-consulting company owned by Galen called Summit Strategic Communications, which produces the Lincoln Project’s ads and provides other services.

Trump and his allies have accused the Lincoln Project of being a “scam PAC” to draw attention to these business connections, although the President’s own operations are not immune from similar criticism. CNN has previously reported that the pro-Trump super PAC America First has paid thousands of dollars for services to companies owned by Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale.

Asked about the ad and a recent Washington Post op-ed by George Conway during a Thursday afternoon appearance on Fox News, Kellyanne Conway argued that the media ought to focus on the larger Democratic super PAC Priorities USA instead of the smaller Lincoln Project, whose founders she dismissed.

“They’ve all failed. They’ve never succeeded the way I did as campaign manager, and they never got their candidate where my candidate got. He’s President of the United States,” Conway told host Harris Faulkner.

When Faulkner noted that it was the President who had tweeted and spoken about the Lincoln Project, giving the group more attention, Conway said Trump has “mostly” ignored the group.

“Once in a while he doesn’t,” she admitted.

CNN’s Ryan Nobles contributed to this report.