'Right makes might': Lincoln Project takes aim at Trump from Cooper Union

On 27 February 1860, Abraham Lincoln spoke at Cooper Union in New York City. Concluding that “right makes might” and that slavery must not be allowed to expand, the little-known lawyer from Illinois took a giant leap to becoming the first Republican president.

Exactly 160 years later, members of the Lincoln Project came to the same venue, stood on the same stage and spoke from the very same lectern. Their aim: to bring a Republican president down.

Related: How to dump Trump: Rick Wilson on Running Against the Devil

In his book on Lincoln’s appearance at Cooper Union, the prize-winning historian Harold Holzer quotes Mayson Brayman, a Democrat from Lincoln’s home town who stood at the back of the hall.

“At each finished period” of his address, Brayman said, Lincoln cast “a timid, sidelong glance at the formidable array of reporters who surrounded the table at his elbow, as if conscious that after all the world was his audience”.

On Thursday night, the Lincoln Project sought to tell the world about its attempt to defeat Trump. The evening was broadcast on YouTube but a small and not particularly formidable array of reporters sat in the first two rows.

In front of a New York audience, had the floor been opened for questions, some members might have been asked about past work for Republican candidates and causes. But the man who might have had most reason to cast sidelong glances at the press, the lawyer George Conway – author of stinging Washington Post op-eds who happens to be married to the president’s chief White House counsellor, Kellyanne Conway – was absent.

So was John Weaver, aide to former White House hopeful John Kasich, and the evening was introduced by Rick Wilson. Citing “the great political philosopher Liam Neeson”, the ruthless ad man turned bestselling author said those on stage had “a particular set of skills. Skills that make us a nightmare for people like Donald Trump.” That brought applause. Five crack operatives followed.

Mike Madrid, from California, contrasted the 16th president’s address at Cooper Union with the notorious speech that launched the 45th in 2015, not far away uptown. Cooper Union and Trump Tower, the project’s Latino representative said, presented “two views that cannot exist in one party”. Madrid was interrupted by the only heckler of the night, a woman who shouted that his condemnation of Trump’s immigration policy was “racist bullshit”. She was escorted out.

Ron Steslow, a “token millennial” in the words of moderator Jennifer Horn, was first to suggest that in today’s GOP Lincoln’s great maxim has been turned on its head, that in a party pursuing power for its own sake, might makes right. Next, Reed Galen drew on another famous Lincoln speech, the House Divided of 1858.

“We must build a new political home,” he said, referring not just to Cooper Union speakers and political “builders” such as Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but to the Lincoln Project’s rejection of partisanship, its insistence on country over party.

“At present [our home] has two sides that don’t talk and one side is actually blatantly on fire.” Laughter. But once the flames are out, Galen said, this new home “must be big enough for anyone”. Inclusivity was another note of the evening.

Like Wilson, Steve Schmidt is a familiar presence on cable news, having run John McCain’s White House campaign in 2008 – and thereby had something to do with the choice of Sarah Palin for vice-president, a mistake he freely admits. He was the closest soundalike for a 19th-century orator, projecting like a slightly lugubrious preacher as he appealed to the spirit of 1776 and the Declaration of Independence, as Lincoln often did, in contrast to the current “despicable and vile chapter” in US history. He went so far as to ask the audience to “have faith”.

It seemed most did, as very Republican appeals to the idea of America as “the greatest nation on earth” and the legacy of Ronald Reagan, from Horn, a former New Hampshire GOP chair, met with nods and cheers. But as this was New York City, and the East Village at that, it wasn’t a stretch to think the audience leant Democratic. When conversation turned to the current primary, there was tough love on offer.

Warning that in a second term Trump would be “unrestrained and validated”, Schmidt said: “We talk a lot about the Republican party and the implications for it as an institution with its wholesale corruption and fealty as an agent of a cult of personality. But it’s really hard to ponder what happens to the Democratic party if it fails for a second time to deny the White House to Donald Trump.

“It will be an institutional failure of a magnitude that’s beyond my ability to describe. That the opposition party could be unable to offer the American people something better than what we have.”

That prompted applause.

“I sit and watch these debates,” Schmidt added, “and it’s not good at all and I tell you, I’m normally a happy person.”

That brought laughter.

Wilson compared Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed socialist and clear Democratic frontrunner after 10 debates, two caucuses and a primary, to Jeremy Corbyn, the British Labour leader who in Wilson’s telling won intra-party purity tests but lost two general elections. As in an interview with the Guardian in January, Wilson implored Democrats to choose a moderate and make the election, from primary to finishing post, nothing but a simple referendum on Trump.

Backstage, Schmidt stressed the point. Given “the orbital nature of US and UK politics, from Thatcher and Reagan to Bush and John Major, to Blair and Clinton and Cameron and Obama”, he told the Guardian, Corbyn’s final defeat might be seen as “a scary harbinger of what’s to come”.

Back to the Donald. Onstage, a discussion moderated by Horn saw Steslow cite Lincoln’s stand against slavery and say: “It’s not enough to know something is wrong, when it’s very wrong, and not do something.”

He left the Republican party in 2016 and says he will “vote blue no matter who” – even for Sanders. What the Lincoln Project wants people to do is donate, so it can produce ads against Trump and his Republican backers in key swing states.

Wilson has written Everything Trump Touches Dies and Running Against the Devil. His third book, he said, might be about the Senate Republicans who acquitted Trump in his impeachment trial, a spin on John F Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage: “Profiles in Chicken … you know what.” That would be “chickenshit”. With a description of the “kleptomaniac scumbag in the Oval Office”, Wilson duly brought the house down.

Related: Everything Trump Touches Dies review: a poison dart in the neck of the Republican monster

That put him in good company. According to Holzer, when Lincoln finished speaking in 1860 he “folded his manuscript, removed his spectacles and bathed in the applause that now engulfed him”.

Holzer also said Lincoln had “effectively drawn his own dividing line between right and wrong, between the past and the future – his country’s and his own”.

The members of the Lincoln Project hope to do the same. Their campaign will culminate on election day, 3 November.