Fmr. Lincoln Project Adviser: The GOP Is “Broken”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, The Lincoln Project, the group of Republicans who campaigned against Donald Trump’s reelection and for Joe Biden clearly had a successfully year. But the organization is now fighting for its survival after allegations of sexual misconduct against its co-founder, John Weaver. This has led to a number of resignations from the group. One of whom is Kurt Bardella. He is the project’s former senior adviser. He left the Republican Party in 2017 and he became a Democrat. Here he is talking to our Hari Sreenivasan about the civil war within the GOP.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Kurt Bardella, thanks for joining us. In the very paper that you write a lot of op-eds for, you essayed (ph) that it recently had a (INAUDIBLE), you said 46 percent roughly of Republicans would go with the former president if Mr. Trump formed a party of his own? Are you surprised?

KURT BARDELLA, FORMER SENIOR ADVISER, THE LINCOLN PROJECT: No. I mean, I think that’s pretty much a continuation of what we’ve seen through the last four years that this party isn’t a political party that’s rooted in ideology anymore, it’s not rooted in things that have been part of the Republican orthodoxy for the last 20 years, things like national security, national defense, the spending of government dollars, the role of government people’s lives. Now, under Donald Trump, it’s cult personality, where the only ideology that matters, the only litmus test that matters to Republicans is whether or not you support Donald Trump. It does not matter that almost every way conceivable, Donald Trump has betrayed traditional conservative orthodoxy, that’s gone out the door. So, of course, now that the only thing that voters are caring about and the thing that Donald Trump is really seizing on is whether or not you are loyal to him. And as long as that’s the case, the Republican Party as we know it is broken. I think that they have reached the point of no return. When you are willing to put forward insurrection and inflaming the passions of white nationalists wanting to go to the capitol to perpetrate violence, murder the vice president, assassinating the speaker of the house, when that’s still someone that you want to stand by and when you want that to be the Republican Party, there is no going back.

SREENIVASAN: Just this past weekend we had Steve Scalise struggle to try and say that Joe Biden was the legitimate president, that it was a free and fair election, that it was not stolen. That’s shocking. But at the same time, you realize that he has got a lot of support, other members of Congress are going to do and say the same thing if asked that question. What do we do about that?

BARDELLA: When the leadership and one of the two political parties in America doesn’t want to admit that just fundamental basic concession, part of the system is broken in a way that may not be able to be prepared. That when one political party is radicalized to the point where they are actively undermining the electoral process and are propping up leaders who would further that lie, that’s an incredibly destabilizing and troubling the development. I mean, our entire system is predicated on the idea that there are winners and there are losers, and that the losers will acknowledge that and still put the process ahead of their own personal political ambitions while their own party has shattered that. That is not the case. Everything that has gone on in our country over the last couple of months since the election in November has been about trying undermine democracy, not counting black votes, limiting people’s participation in our democratic process, it’s incredibly undemocratic, and that’s part of the reason why the greatest existential threat to American democracy lies from within and it lies within the Republican Party.

SREENIVASAN: How much of this is a consequence of the kind of the previous Tea Party wave that we saw when the Republicans were kind of blindsided by not paying attention to what was happening on the ground, not seeing the signals that was clear to, you know, a select few, and then all of a sudden, here came the votes, and they were shocked?

BARDELLA: You know, the Tea Party — and this, I think, one of the more understated nuances of how we have gotten to where we have gotten to the rise of the Trumpism within the Republican Party, and all of this was previewed by what we saw beginning in 2010 with the Tea Party wave that swept Republicans into power in Congress and taking back Congress. And really effectively legislatively ending the Obama presidency two years in. And the characters that were a part of the wave that rose to prominence, people like Mike Pompeo, Mark Meadows, Trey Gowdy, Jason Chaffetz, (INAUDIBLE), Jim Jordan, these are all characters that would come into play very prominent roles in the Trump presidency in the Republican Party during that time of Trump. And what we saw then was a very agitate and angry base of Republican Party that was — their passions were inflamed around the issue almost exclusively of immigration, of the idea that people of color were coming into the country, invading the country and taking things from white America, this idea that there are givers and there are takers, and the takers are people of color, people with black and brown skin, that was fomented during this Tea Party era. It culminated really with the shocking defeat of then house majority leader, Eric Cantor, in the 2014 midterm by a guy named Dave Brat who nobody had ever heard of but ran exclusively on the issue of immigration and used platforms like Breitbart and people like Steve Bannon and entities like Fox News to coalesce this group of people within the Republican Party that felt this way, that felt that mainstream Washington and established Republicans had left them behind. For all of the talk that we have right now about there being a civil war in the Republican Party, that civil war really began back in 2010, 2012, 2014 when the base of the party started having direct conflict with the Republican Party leadership and it ended with people like Eric Cantor losing his job, John Boehner, the speaker, the Republican leader at the time, leaving his post voluntarily because pressure from the right. All those ingredients, and ended up becoming the kindling for the fire that would become Donald Trump.

SREENIVASAN: Look, you mentioned Breitbart, someone’s going to look back into your bio and say, Hey, if that was the kindling, how much of an arsonist is Kurt Bardella here? Wasn’t he part of the problem? What responsibility should he take?

BARDELLA: Well, I think that that’s an absolute valid criticism or observation. And I think that’s part of the reason why I think when you look at history too, it shows that I left Breitbart before Donald Trump even became the Republican nominee. I left the Republican party before it was trendy to do so. Before there was never Trump organizations ,before there were organizations like the Lincoln project that were doing the work that they did during the 2020 cycle. I left at a time when there was nothing waiting for me on the other side, but because it was the right thing to do. And I think that at the end of the day, when you see something going on, that you’re not comfortable with that, that you vehemently disagree with that that is contradictory to everything that you feel inside. You have a moral responsibility to not just leave, but this tell about, to talk about why you’re doing so, and to explain why you’re doing so, and that’s what I’ve done. And that’s what I’ve tried to do every day since then. I have not been shy about my feelings about the problem party. I wasn’t shy about why I left Breitbart, why I left Steve Bannon, why I thought that they were poisonous cancerous elements that were metastasizing inside the Republican party. And for anyone who questions, my motives, my sincerity, even my ideology right now, as I sit here as a, as a proud and, and pronounced Democrat, I invite them to look back and read all the things that I’ve written and, and see all the things that I’ve said about it.

SREENIVASAN: As an Asian-American in the conservative movement in America, were there ever concerns for you? Did you feel like you fit in more in the Republican party as you were growing up?

BARDELLA: You know, and I’ve written about this before that know someone who I’m Asian American, but I was also, I was adopted, I was adopted when I was three months old, uh, by, uh, by two Caucasian white parents. And so for me growing up and my, my brothers are, are, are, are, are white, I wasn’t raised in a minority home. And so I didn’t necessarily identify with being an Asian American or a minority the same way. And I think a lot of that kind of clouded my perceptions about politics or any of those things, because I didn’t have to navigate the same type of hurdles being in a white household than I would have being in an all immigrant, all minority household. And it wasn’t really until I left the Republican party that I really started coming to grips with my own, you know, background and my own race. And it wasn’t until, as I started speaking out the best saw the real ugliness Republican party, where people would write things, postings, messaged me, things like go back to China, you’re a chink, you know, things that I think all people of color, understand what that’s like when you speak out politically and have the social media kind of turn on you that way. Shocking as it may be to people, the Republican party doesn’t sit around and talk about race relations all day. It’s, it’s something that just never came up during my journey as a Republican. And so it was something that I never really had to confront until I left the party.

SREENIVASAN: Do you think that the actions and the words of the former administration, or even their willingness to look the other way when members of their party made racist comments, contributed or is contributing to the rise in hate crimes against Asian-Americans today?

BARDELLA: It absolutely is. When you have the highest power in the land, the person with the largest microphone in the land, referring to something as the China virus, referring to something as the Kung flu, anybody who looks like me knows exactly what that means. Anybody who looks like me knows what it’s like when people make fun of your physical appearances, when they make fun of the shape of your eyes, when they, when they make karate references at you, uh, that, that, that is 100% racism. And for the people who say it, and the people who will look past it, and the people who don’t immediately denounce it and denounce it every time that it’s said, you are a complicit actor in spreading racism that ultimately has manifested itself as violence and, and escalating and dangerous violence right now, going on where you have grandmothers walking in the streets and getting beat up, you have people walking the streets in San Francisco, being spit on. You have college students being attacked, people riding the subway, a mass transit being, being attacked. This is a significant problem in America right now. And it is 100% the fault of Donald Trump and the Republican party, the same forces that violently overran the Capitol on January 6th are the same people that are perpetrating these racist hate crimes against Asian Americans right now.

SREENIVASAN: How much of your personal identity was wrapped up in your political identity? I mean, how important was it for Kurt Bardella to be a Republican?

BARDELLA: You know, when you work at a place like Washington DC, and I came here in 2006, when I was in my, in my twenties, your professional and personal life are, are basically the same thing, your, your, your party labeled that, that’s your team. And you know, it’s almost like a sports type of atmosphere actually, where, you know, where you have an R or a D. And it’s less about what those things mean, but more about winning the day. It’s a competition. You’re trying to beat the other guy, and they’re trying to beat you. And in that, the people that you work around, you know, the staff and the team that you’re on, they, they become like your family and you, and you spend more time with them than anybody else on this planet. And that’s why when people, people on the outside asking, well, why don’t people just quit their party? Why don’t people make that change like you did? My answer is always the same. It’s not as easy as it sounds — because your entire personal professional life are wrapped around being a part of that party. If you leave that behind, if you walk away from that, you’ve just torched your entire professional network. You’ve just walked away from all of your friendships and relationships. You’ve just completely cut off any economic opportunity you might be striving for into bill, because it’s not like if you leave the Republican party, there’s a job with the democratic party waiting for you. There are people right now who I know and stay in contact with who, who bemoan, what is happening within their party, who can’t stand Donald, who probably didn’t even vote for Donald Trump, but they also have mortgages to make, they have kids’ tuitions to pay for. They have, you know, healthcare bills that that are they’re amounting. They have very real life human considerations that supersede in their mind the overall politics of the situation. And so that’s why most people, I think, have a hard time making that change, because when you do, it’s isolating.

SREENIVASAN: You have a recently with the Lincoln project, which had targeted very specifically Donald Trump, but also targeted, you know, some Trump voters in key States and trying to keep them home. And you recently left the Lincoln Project after, it was revealed that one of the founders was sending inappropriate sexual texts to other young men. What, what did you know about that and when?

BARDELLA: But, luckily I can sit here and tell you, I didn’t know anything. I joined the Lincoln project in August, so this was long after a lot of the events are being reexamined and re-litigated actually went, you know, happened in trans, uh, trans. I never met the founder in question, I’ve never met most of these people actually, because this was all created during the time of COVID. And so everybody was working remotely. You know, I think one of the things that’s interesting to me that, that that should not get lost in all of this though, was the incredible effectiveness of the Lincoln project. People can say whatever they want about them now, and hindsight’s always 2020, and there’s kind of that Monday morning quarterbacking element. Well, let’s be clear. This was an entity that captivated the attention of the most powerful person in the world during the most consequential election, certainly of my lifetime. And that’s no small feat that this, that the president United States was obsessed with 30 second ads that the, that, that, that they were putting together, I think was instrumental in the success of the, of the Democrats in the 2020 election, because every second that Donald Trump and his family was obsessing over the Lincoln project was a second that they weren’t doing what they should be doing to get reelected. And that’s incredibly valuable, uh, in any context. But for me, you know, part of being a Democrat or the reason why I became Democrat has to do with being honest with yourself, having a certain level of integrity, holding people to a standard that you want to see, not the lowest common denominator standard, which we see so often in Washington, but a higher standard. And so the reason why I left the Lincoln project was because they fell short of those standards. And it would be hypocritical for me to talk about why Donald Trump, their problem party have failed, why they, why they need to be held accountable, why they need to be responsive to truth, uh, and not do the same to the organizations that I’ve been a part of.  If Democrats want to protect their majority, grow their majority and want to continue staying in power. They need to learn that the Republican party that they’re up against right now, this isn’t 2010, this isn’t 2001 even this is a very different Republican party and it’s a street fight. And I think Democrats, at times, there’s that appearance that they’re kind of weak. They’re indecisive. They’re not willing to go as far as Republicans are. And while some of that’s good because it means that they’re different. It also means that they don’t always show up to the fight with the ammunition that they need to. And I think from the Lincoln project, they can draw some good lessons. The impeachment presentation that we saw from the house and Patriot managers a couple of weeks ago was an incredibly powerful presentation and creatively, I thought muzzle, wow, that’s kind of like Lincoln Project like and that’s why it worked.

SREENIVASAN: What are the key things, one or two things that you think need to happen to change politics in DC? I mean, is it what campaign finance reform, gerrymandering, or where do you start?

BARDELLA: You know I’ve always felt and someone who’s witnessed this from the inside out that the most corruptive element of politics is the money. And one of the worst things to happen to democracy, uh, you know, was citizens United, uh, was allowing unnamed unfazed entities to raise unlimited amounts of money and do it at what they will have an outsized impact on our election process. The fact that people who, uh, you know, can raise money and give it to, to members of Congress can also lobby them. Uh, you know, we have monetized gridlock in Washington. The entire economy has been built on really nothing actually happening when you look at all the issues that our country faces even before COVID, but you look at rising healthcare costs, immigration reform, entitlement reform, and the situation of social security, none of those big issues we’ve made any progress on in two decades, I’m in Congress. It’s like the only institution where you can do nothing and still get rewarded with a promotion. And I think we all need to remember that the reason why Donald Trump happened in the first place was because there was a widespread feeling amongst American people that Washington had left. All of them behind that the interest being served in Washington was more about special interests, not about the average American in this country. And that feeling is still there because since 2016, it’s not like anything has gotten better. In fact, everything is pretty much gotten worse and it, and, and, and, and solving that has to begin with campaign finance reform. We’re trying to decorrupt the process, take the money out. If you cut a check for somebody, you shouldn’t be able to lobby them or their committee, if you are an entity that lobbies Congress, it’s insane that you should be able to take the best staffers that work in Congress, bring them into your backyard to work for you. Then they go lobby their former colleagues. How has that not as a conflict of interest. And so those are the things that we need to sort out if we want this process to actually start working again.

SREENIVASAN: Kurt Bardella. Thanks so much.

BARDELLA: Thanks for having me.