Friend,  

I’m a bit disappointed by some of the reactions I’ve seen to Trump’s arraignment on Tuesday. No, not the meat puppets who regurgitated Trump’s talking points. I mean the people on our side who want to beat him.

Listen, I loathe the orange baboon as much as every other sane person on this planet. Really, you can put me right behind Melania and Donald Trump Jr.’s therapist in terms of how much the man repulses me. 

But to think that this whole saga ends with Trump bargaining for boot-legged orange tanning lotion in prison is just simply false. All the legal peril is still unresolved, a whole bunch of externalities that may or may not hold him to real account. And most won’t do so until next year at the earliest. 

I’m seeing too much magical thinking out there that is distracting people from this truth: Donald Trump will be the GOP nominee for President. Sorry, Ron, Nikki, and every other pretender.

And there’s still a lot more work we need to do in order to make sure that we’re ready to take him on. Are you with us?

We can’t let a day pass without pushing the wedge deeper between the MAGA doom loop and America. It’s lawless insanity or America. It’s Trump or Biden. That’s the choice. The indictments are hilarious and I was praying for that mug shot like the rest of you. 

But they’re also making him and his supporters more unhinged and more aggressive in their pursuit to fundamentally rip the fabric of our democracy to shreds. GOP leaders are lining up even more rapidly than I predicted. And the Trump team didn’t wait for a mug shot. They’re fundraising - tens of millions now - off of a fake mugshot from an “arrest” that didn’t even happen! Remember: Trump wanted it this way. Don’t let magical thinking get in the way of that.

There’s no other GOP candidate or indictment that will defeat him. It’s up to us - and right now that means doing everything we can to make sure Joe Biden beats Donald Trump in 2024. No one else is coming around the corner.

What defeats Donald Trump is the same exact playbook that beat him in 2020, crushed his hand-selected MAGA stooges in 2022, and just catapulted a pro-democracy candidate to victory in Wisconsin by nearly 11 points. (Wisconsin, the state decided by less than one percent in 2020).

Peel back the Bannon-line voter and turn out the pro-democracy coalition en masse. We do that and we win. It works.

Simple, right? Not entirely. 

There’s still a whole web of MAGA money that’s being deployed to defeat us right now. Have you heard of No Labels? It’s a Trump-aligned Super PAC that’s dedicated to sandbagging Biden with tens of millions of dollars in key swing states.

That’s not what they say they are. But that is exactly what they are. And they are indicative of exactly how sophisticated MAGA Republicans are getting in pushing their movement. 

But the message wins out. That’s why we’re doing the work we’re doing here at The Lincoln Project - making killer ads and targeting them to the exact voters and people (our words live in Trump’s head) that need to hear it. 

So don’t think indictments alone will do the trick. Don’t think some third party solution is the answer. The only answer is the work we’re doing here together. And I’d appreciate it if you could donate today to help support it.

-Rick