Weekly Wrap: Reporting from Ukraine’s Front Line, the Mediocrity Behind Racist GOP Group Chats & Peter Thiel’s Religious Obsession

Welcome back to the Weekly Wrap, where we compile highlights from Lincoln Square’s top interviews and shows from the last week.

SPECIAL REPORT: UKRAINE WILL WIN | Strategy Session with Special Guest Ken Harbaugh

Ken Harbaugh is a former United States Navy pilot and was the Democratic Party nominee for Ohio’s 7th congressional district in the 2018 election. Ken joined Rick Wilson and Joe Trippi for this week’s Strategy Session to expose the moral difference between fighting for power and fighting for freedom. From Kyiv to Washington, the fight against authoritarianism depends on people who still know what their Constitutional oath meant.

Rick Wilson: The drones, Ken. Tell us a little bit about how much they use drone warfare, because I think Americans think about it, they get it, but they don’t get it, how central it is to their victory.

Ken Harbaugh: Well, Americans don’t get it. I don’t think the American military gets it. Which is especially alarming because if we don’t learn from what Ukraine is doing right now, we’re going to get our asses kicked in our next war. Ukraine is defining the future of warfare. I was there during Operation Spiderweb several months ago, which was Ukraine’s masterstroke taking out a third, up to a third of Putin’s strategic surveillance aircraft by positioning these drones within striking distance of these airfields.

Obviously, none of us knew that that was going down, but in response, Putin unleashed a wave. At that point, the largest barrage ever in the war to date of attacks against cities and all along the front line. I was at the front line at the time in a bunker with a kamikaze drone team. And we got pinned down for 20 hours. It was supposed to be a three hour embed, a milk run. I was going in, taking some photos, interviewing some folks, and heading out.

Twenty hours into it, we’re like, “Is this ever going to end?” But the innovation cycle, this is how it’s described in DoD white papers: innovation cycles in the US take years sometimes decades. They take days in Ukraine. I went to a Willy Wonka-esque drone factory where they are printing parts for tomorrow’s warheads because the targets had changed. They were now prioritizing infantry, so they needed a new kind of warhead – and they were able to change them on the spot with 3D printers to force or to stall what they thought might be a massed infantry attack along the front. Their innovation cycle is stunningly fast.

The thing that left the biggest impression on me, I don’t know if it’s tactically significant, but you’ll appreciate why this kind of experience sticks with you – their SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) teams – their signal teams are able to intercept the electronic feed going from the drone back to the Russian operator. So we were able to see literally what the Russian pilot of this suicide drone is seeing. And every time that camera panned across our position, I’m like, “Holy Shit” I asked the commander next to me, “Is that our position?” And he’s like “Yes.”

Read more of the interview here.

The Racist Young Republican Group Chat | Rick Wilson & Molly Jong Fast LIVE

Recently relocated Substack regular and one of our favorite authors, Molly Jong-Fast, joined Rick Wilson to discuss the horrifying messages that leaked from a Young Republicans group chat. These bloviated bullies who claim to be the master race were caught praising Hitler, joking about rape, and using slurs like they were playground cannon fodder. Rick and Molly discuss this, Trump’s grifting, and more in their discussion.

Molly Jong-Fast: What I think we didn’t realize that – what they were describing wasn’t freedom, but was actually like a fraying of the social contract. What we’re seeing is people who said, “we want to live an a society and be respectful,” and then Donald Trump’s reelection was like “No no no – you don’t have to live in society and be respectful. You can do whatever the f*ck you want. And that’s how we got here.”

Rick Wilson: They built a separate political culture. They built a separate culture for MAGA. And I saw, it was as far back as 2015-2016. I saw this starting to sort of emerge where we needed to have some focus groups one time. And a guy was like, “well, I got fired because I had to train my replacement for the company to ship my job to Vietnam. But, I’m going to vote for trump because you know what, then i can say the n-word again,” and everybody else was like “hmmm.” And now (today) that would be like “haha, own the libs, triggered, LOL.”

…

Rick Wilson: But Trump is a gambler, Molly. He’s always been a gambler. Like, January 6th was a gamble. He thought, you know what? They may cause some trouble and the Senate will break and they’ll invalidate the election and they’ll say too much voter fraud in Philadelphia with all those black people. And that’ll be that. He’s a gambler.

So he’ll be around long enough. And remember, the Trump family scam is the first time they’ve ever really made real money. And they’ve made billions in excess, in deal — making, in building, you know, getting these bribes from overseas hotel deals …

So this is the best scam they’ve ever had. The crypto scam is a great thing. They’ve never had a better scam. So they’re going to want this to continue. And I don’t know how you make this continue unless you put another Trump in office. Whether it’s Donald or Donald Jr. or Eric or Ivanka or somebody in that family. They recognize that the best business model they’ve ever had is the government. They’re going to come back and try this shit again. One way or another. And I think it’s funny because Vance really wants to be president.

Read more of the interview here.

From Hamilton to Trump: The ‘Revolving Door’ of American Power | First Draft with Susan Demas and Jeffrey Rosen

National Constitution Center CEO Jeffrey Rosen joined Lincoln Square Executive Editor Susan Demas, for this week’s episode of First Draft. For more than two decades, no president has dared to use the Insurrection Act against a state’s will. The founders drew that line which Trump is currently considering stepping over. Susan and Jeffrey discuss that and more:

Susan Demas: One of the big criticisms of the Democratic Party in the last several decades is that they have not focused as much on building a bench – concentrating on local elections and not just at the state level, but even developing a farm team and concentrating on very local elections.

Republicans have concentrated on school boards in the last couple of cycles, for instance. So, I wonder if that is part of the reason why it’s been so difficult for Democrats to kind of regain that states rights’ ethos because they’ve been so focused on just power at the federal level and even in terms of elections.

Jeff Rosen: Absolutely. All power, of course, is local and party leadership has always emerged throughout history at the local level. There also may be a disagreement among Democrats about the powers of the federal government versus the state. Of course, since the New Deal, Democrats had been attracted to the broad powers of the federal government, and there are also disagreements among different factions of the party about how limited local power should be. Progressives and moderates and so forth. But, what’s really striking is that the rhetoric of invoking Jefferson is now contested. I was struck that President Biden said that he decided to run for president in 2020 because Donald Trump had said there were good people on both sides in Charlottesville, the home of Thomas Jefferson.

Biden was invoking the tradition of the Declaration of Independence. Biden, as a senator and throughout his years on the Senate Judiciary Committee, always used to invoke Jefferson in the Declaration as the source of natural rights – including the right to choose abortion. So he was kind of in that tradition. President Trump, by contrast, said that he was fighting the election of 2020 to stop Democrats from tearing down the statues of Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville. And then he stood in front of Mount Rushmore and said the Democrats want to tear down the founders and we’re going to defend statues of Jefferson. A really striking reminder of the fact that rhetoric is contested.

There are, among strains on the progressive left and the Christian nationalist right, those who would break up with the founders entirely. And Democrats who say we’ve got to just reject all the founders because they were enslavers and are compromised and start afresh. Those in the Christian nationalist right who reject the American idea of liberty, equality, and government by consent and insist that blood and soil, rather than the Constitution and Declaration of Independence to find America.

So it’s the lesson of American History – you do not want to be on the sides of the extremists who break up with the Declaration and the Constitution. Those are the Southern secessionists who insist that slavery is a positive good. They’re the resistors to the civil rights movement. They’re the people who are resisting Martin Luther King.

The Declaration and the Constitution are our common creed. We disagree about what it means, but the ideals themselves unite us. And it’s really important for Democrats and Republicans to keep defending it.

Read more of the interview here.

Stop Blaming the Military during the Shutdown | Anchor Watch with Bobby Jones

Lincoln Square’s Bobby Jones was back this week with another episode of Anchor Watch. The government shutdown has entered its third week and Trump has claimed he has a billionaire willing to pay the salaries of the military. Bobby discusses this and much more with Sam Osterhout:

Bobby Jones: There are people who are looking beyond Trump. Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of them. She is a political animal. Here’s the thing, though. Her political shift that we’ve seen in the last two, three months, are buttressed by the fact that when she goes home, she sees people, including her own kids struggling.

That’s a stark reality. No matter how jaded we may get with politicians and this, that, and the other – it’s something when you go home to the district that you were raised in and you see people that you personally know, struggling, and now you have a decision to make. That does not mean that she is going to be every liberal or every leftist’s best friend – but there is an acknowledgement of what’s happening. She is not the only one – I’ve seen other Republican members who are sitting there saying, “what are we doing when it comes to the obscene files?”

So, there are just certain things that their logic will now allow them to discount. If you take all of that into account – you know they have a choice to make. Either they acknowledge reality or they hope and pray that this fever that has gripped the country for a decade stays.

It’s not staying. And when you sit there, and I literally have friends who have texted me while i’ve been on the air saying they have no money that is coming to them for payday as a military member – They check their accounts and it’s empty. When this happened in the past, banks like USAA have fronted that money knowing it’s going to come back. They’re not doing it from what I see this time around because they don’t know how long this is going to last. When Mike Johnson made the statement that this could be the longest government shutdown in American history, that pushes people away.

Read more of the interview here.

Introducing the Two Joes Podcast! (Don’t Expect Them to Agree)

Political campaign guru Joe Trippi and political columnist Joe Klein have teamed up for Lincoln Square’s latest show Two Joes – a brutally honest assessment of the American political landscape from a couple of veteran Joes. Their first debate: Will there be a free and fair midterm election in 2026?

Joe Klein: I think promoting the idea that the election, that they may put a thumb on the scale in this election (2026 midterms) is a double-edged sword.

Joe Trippi: That I agree with.

Joe Klein: I think that the more we spend time blowing Trumpian authoritarian possibilities into giant balloons, the less credibility we’re gonna have as observers, as media, as a public. The public is gonna lose faith if they’re constantly told that the election is gonna be fixed. And it’s just the same way as the public.

This is the most remarkable fact to me. This is the fact of the 21st century. Somehow, Americans have convinced themselves that this isn’t the greatest country in the history of the world and that we aren’t the luckiest people who have ever lived. You know, you see the polls starting in the 1970s. Up until then, a majority of Americans thought the next year would be better. Now they think next year will be worse. And we’ve kind of talked ourselves into a rut. That’s one side of the sword.

The other side, the upside of making a big deal about the legitimacy of a coming election is that we’re going to get to election day and all of the news media, including Fox, including Newsmax, everybody is going to be at polling places. And if there is the slightest rumor of people being stopped at the polling places – many, many more are going to turn out. “I wasn’t thinking about voting this time because it’s a choice of two jerks, but i’m sure going to vote if you’re going to try and stop me.”

Joe Trippi: So, I agree with you. I mean the interesting thing about this is I think the last three election cycles, there’s one loud voice out there screaming that it’s a hoax and it’s all fixed, even when he was president. Somehow we were fixing it. But I do agree with you that there is a downside to people losing faith, that the more they’re told games are going to get played – they already believe so little, lost so much faith in democracy that has failed them in many ways.

Read more of the interview here.

Can We Outdumb MAGA? | Punching Up with Maya May and Comedian Cliff Cash

The hostess with the mostest, the clear star of Lincoln Square, and the host of Punching Up, Maya May is back this week with comedian Cliff Cash to discuss if we can outdumb MAGA. We guess that depends on how you define “dumb.”

Maya May: The GOP will swear up and down that they’re not racist. And I’m sure you’ve seen the group chat. What are your thoughts? You have a little screenshot there, what are your thoughts on seeing that?

Cliff Cash: It looked like a calendar of incels. I mean, it was just these people that have never been touched by another person, you know? And i think that these below average white men that didn’t get enough attention from their parents and didn’t get enough hugs from dad, whatever it is – they’re so below average in every possible way that a human being can be. They’re dying for somebody to blame it on. Maybe it’s the Jews or the Muslims or the Latinos or Black people or gay people or trans people or whatever it is. That’s what they want – to continue to escape accountability for their own mediocrity. And the truth is, it’s nobody else’s fault.

It’s your fault that you didn’t do well in school and you’re not that bright and you didn’t try to be bright. But it’s also your fault for continuing to vote for the people who turned your towns into ghost towns and defunded your schools while they pumped disinformation into your thick empty skulls.

Maya May: Absolutely. And the thing is, we do have to share a country with them. There’s no escaping that. So we have to figure out how to beat them. And I like that you said in your special that we can’t outsmart them because you can’t have that kind of conversation with somebody who doesn’t follow logic. Can you talk about what it means to out-dumb them?

Cliff Cash: My favorite line in the special is, “You can’t have a real intellectual conversation with somebody that thinks Donald Trump is a Christian.” Like, what are you doing to convince that person of Donald Trump and Lee Greenwood, two men with nine marriages between them, are selling a USA bible made in China. That sums up the entire political ecosystem we are living in.

Read more of the interview here.

Billionaire Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Farce Is Dangerous | Sam Osterhout & Andra Watkins Welcome Ryan Wiggins

Lincoln Square executive producer Sam Osterhout and Andra Watkins, survivor of christian nationalism and Lincoln Square contributor, sat down with Ryan Wiggins, the Lincoln Project chief of staff, to discuss Palantir’s billionaire founder, Peter Thiel, and his obsession with the end times and the antichrist.

Sam Osterhout: To those of us who didn’t grow up in your context (Christian nationalism), it feels like a bonkers, like those people are lunatics. They’re the people at the edge of town with their signs that say the sky is falling. But everyone of those people have formed a union and it’s national, right?

Seventy percent of adherents to white christian nationalism believe that, as a nation, we’re too feminine. Which, I don’t even know what that means. Trump was ordained by god to be president – that’s 67% of adherents. And a big chunk of sympathizers as well. And political violence is more widely supported by adherents.

This is an interesting thing. I thought adherents also believe pretty widely in the QAnon conspiracy theory. And this is your [Andra Watkins] piece from today which ties a lot of this, how white Christian nationalist men indoctrinate women.

Ryan Wiggins: I think that has a lot to do with the fact that my generation, Gen X – grew up with the Left Behind series – and they were best sellers. You were encouraged to read them if you were in church, but people who weren’t in church were reading them, too. And they were fully crazy. They were fully insane. They did a really good job of evangelicalizing an entire generation of people because the novels, and they were novels, they were all fiction.

They were full of fear. They were full of horror. They were full of these awful things that are gonna happen if you’re left behind. And we now know that the rapture itself is not a thing. It’s bad theology. It’s nowhere in the Bible, but this is what they believe in. This is kind of how we’ve gotten to where we are.

So what Peter Thiel’s actually doing is praying on a seed that was planted back in the early ‘90s with a huge population of the American public, a lot of whom are still in churches. And he’s plugging back into that exact same fear that was so prevalent that it started. Even where I live, there was a huge, huge revival around the time of the Left Behind series. The Brownsville Assembly of God revival. It was an international revival here, all sparked by this series. So, I think that is one of the things that Peter Thiel is actually trying to do here is tap into that generational trauma that those of us who read the series are having to deal with.

Andra Watkins: We have a Left Behind series in my house, too, because I grew up in South Carolina. So you and I grew up very similar and we’re both Gen X. We have a lot in common. But it also created this sense of nihilism amongst Christian nationalists who believe this – that, well, of course things are going to get bad and things are supposed to get bad at the end of the world. So the worse things get, the more happy we need to be about it because Jesus is coming. I think that’s another thing that Peter Thiel has used these lectures to tap into – is this group of people who are radicalized by this thought process to be able to say as things get worse in America, this is the bible coming true.

Read more of the interview here.

EXCLUSIVE Report on Ukraine from the Front Lines | Ken Harbaugh Joins Stuart Stevens

“Putin is targeting playgrounds and hospitals because he wants Ukrainians to suffer through the winter,” is what Ken Harbaugh told Stuart Stevens in this discussion. That cruelty is preparing to enter its fourth year after Putin invaded Ukraine. This is a discussion on the world’s largest battle for democracy in the 21st-century that you don’t want to miss.

Stuart Stevens: I’d really love for you to talk about how when you go out and do these things on the front lines, how do you begin to calculate just the personal risk – because it’s something that very few people are doing?

Ken Harbaugh: Well, let me frame it this way. The most dangerous thing I’ve done in my life, the guys I was with do every day. Right. I spent 20 hours pinned down with a kamikaze drone crew at the zero line in Kherson as wave after wave hit. This was the night of Operation Spiderweb.

…

It was a devastating blow to Russia’s strategic capability – but, as you can imagine, Putin was pretty mad that night. And it’s not like we were planning it, but I was at the front with the drone crew and wave after wave kept hitting our position. I stopped counting after the eighth drone landed nearby. And the guys just laughed through all of it.

That was one night. That was 20 hours of my life. The unit commander that I was with was on his third shift. He had been up for 40 hours – four, zero. They wanted to send him back out because he was their best guy and they didn’t want to get an American killed, right? The guy had been up for 40 hours and wasn’t going to take a break after this shift either.

They are doing this shift after shift after shift, with no breaks. So I don’t feel like I have a lot to complain about in terms of the risks I’m taking.

Read more of the interview here.

Danger for Dems in New Jersey Elections? | Behind the Numbers with Rick & Andrew Wilson

Elections are coming up quick, and the numbers are in – the N.J. governors race is tightening while Democrat Mikie Sherrill looks to pull off a victory. Everything from Congressional approval, to monthly household cost polling numbers – Rick and Andrew Wilson have it all here for you in this week’s Behind the Numbers.

Andrew Wilson: What I think is interesting, is that when you ask people who you trust more on the economy, Republicans still have a pretty strong edge on that question.

Rick Wilson: It is interesting. I think that is troubling, as well.

Andrew Wilson: I think that probably has to do with the Democratic Party’s approval rating – it’s at its lowest point right now. It’s not getting any better. Although, that is contrasted by the fact that Democrats are winning in the congressional ballot.

Rick Wilson: So let’s talk about that for a minute. Because one of the things that I think is really important is while Republicans have their number for what it is, the Democrats’ overall approval number sucks in part because Democrats are pissed at the leadership of their own part. And I think that is something that’s a sort of intractable moment. That’s not one you and I are going to solve today. But the generic ballot has been pretty consistently leaning toward the Democrats in the last few months now. And we’re getting into a pattern where I don’t think it’s, the lead is not an apocalyptic lead yet – but it fits with what we’re talking about – that the Democrats are consistently looking like they’re going to hold an advantage in that.

Andrew Wilson: We have this generic ballot metric. In the next month, we’ll have some real test cases for how Democrats will perform in statewide elections next year. And you know, I think that what’s not factored into a generic ballot is the fact that Trump is not on the ballot.

Rick Wilson: I think it’s a huge factor because what drove 2018 and what drove the Lincoln Project’s amazing success in 2022, where we won 17 out of the 21 races we targeted, is that with him off the ballot, Republicans have to own the crazy on their own. They have to own all this economic damage this time.

Read more of the interview here.

The ICE Extortion Racket | Protect & Serve with Michael Fanone & Maya May and Guest, Author Radley Balko

American streets have begun to look like occupied zones with lethality as a goal. ICE isn’t failing – they’re doing exactly what Trump built them to do, however as host Maya May pointed out – that hasn’t stopped ICE agents from “fucking up everywhere,” with assaults, civil rights violations, and outright cruelty being caught on camera every day. Maya and Michael Fanone are joined by author Radley Balko on this week’s Protect & Serve.

Radley Balko: The Supreme Court has made it so that local and state police have qualified immunity, which I have my problems with – but it is some form of accountability of civil liability. Federal level, there’s nothing. I mean, SCOTUS has obliterated that. In 2022, they got rid of Bivens entirely, so there’s no way to sue a federal police officer.

Now, they can be criminally charged – but that would have to come from the DOJ. And we know that’s not going to happen with this DOJ. So, we basically have a secret police who are completely unaccountable, right? Due process – that’s gone by the wayside. We’ve seen people get scooped up. They’re deliberately holding them in the worst possible conditions so that they will give up their due process rights and self-deport. We’ve seen people who are here legally, people who might have had legitimate humanitarian claims, just give up and leave because they’ve been held in such terrible conditions.

Collective punishment. Again, this idea that we’re going to punish entire neighborhoods because of a group of protesters. We’ve seen this in Chicago, a federal judge just got really pissed off about it and now is making ICE officers wear body cameras. We’ll see if that holds up on appeal, but, they are gassing entire neighborhoods because they don’t like the fact that people are looking out for one another – that people are starting Facebook groups where they’re coming to pick up their children and they’re warning one another about it and ICE doesn’t like that.

They’re taking it out on an entire neighborhood. All these basic, fundamental principles of a free society that we’ve always kind of taken for granted is that would never happen here. It’s happening here. One after another after another.

Maya May: Mike, I’m sure you’re probably even surprised by seeing how much people are resilient in the neighborhoods, fighting back, risking arrest. I’m seeing so many people who I go, wow, is this a person would take that risk?

There was like a trombone player in Portland in a band and she spent her weekend in jail away from her three-year-old. So when you’re hearing Radley talk about this collective punishment of neighborhoods – what are your thoughts? Are you thinking, is this something that you would expect people to resist in the way that they are despite all of these risks? Not just to themselves but to their whole community.

Michael Fanone: I’ll be honest with you – I’m actually quite disappointed that we haven’t seen larger efforts, millions of people taking to the streets because of how egregious this behavior is. I was talking with a friend of mine that works for DHS now, and she is really trying to stay away from media coverage and not watch anything – kind of putting her head in the sand.

She’s like: how bad is it? And I was like, you’re radicalizing everyday average Americans against your agency. That’s how bad it is. Everybody despises your agency and the way that it’s conducting itself from the top down.

Read more of the interview here.