Conway for Congress

The Fighter This Moment Demands

Let me tell you what I have learned in thirty-plus years of building campaigns, burning bridges, and watching men I once admired discover their spines were optional equipment. The fight against Donald Trump does not need more people who are good on television or who have long policy binders full of thoughtful programs that won’t see the light of day.

It needs people who do not break. It needs people who will fight the fight that matters most, and for the next two years, that fight is against Donald J. Trump and his corrupt, vile criminal enterprise.

That is why I am endorsing George Conway for Congress in New York’s Twelfth.

I know George. George is a friend. Hell, the origin story of the Lincoln Project is a long lunch at Quality Meats with George, myself, and Molly Jong Fast in 2018. Even then, he knew that Trump would be the target of the biggest fight of our lives.

I have watched him take fire that would have sent lesser men into witness protection. When Trump aimed the full firehose of his rage at George, the nicknames, the threats, the late-night unhinged posting, George never flinched. He did not issue a clarifying statement. He did not call his consultants to ask whether the polling supported having a backbone. He laughed, and then he hit back harder, and he did it with a litigator’s precision that left marks Trump still can’t shake.

I wish all Democratic leaders had his spine, his legal brain, and his determination.

That matters now more than it has ever mattered. Because here is the ugly truth about the next two years. The fight is going to get hot, and a lot of Democrats are going to get weak.

You have seen it before. The press release courage. The strongly-worded letter caucus. The members who talk like Churchill in the green room and vote like Chamberlain on the floor.

When the pressure comes, and it is coming, half of Washington will rediscover the ancient art of finding their car keys when the hard vote is called. They will tell you the moment requires nuance. They will tell you to wait for the next election. They will tell you anything except the truth, which is that they are scared.

George Conway is not scared. He has already proven it, in public, for years, at the cost to his own family and his standing in a party that once treated him as royalty. He gave all that up to tell the truth about an authoritarian. You do not need a focus group to know how a man like that votes when the lights are off and the cameras are gone.

Now, a word about the alternative being marketed in this race.

Jack Schlossberg is a famous young man with a famous last name and a social media feed that is, let us be charitable, about Jack Schlossberg. There is a version of Democratic politics that believes the answer to a constitutional crisis is a charismatic posting machine with good genes and a famous name.

I do not share that belief. The Twelfth District does not need a content creator. It needs a constitutional litigator who has spent the better part of a decade in the trenches against the exact threat the next Congress will be sworn to confront. One of these men has been studying Trump’s lawlessness like a brief he intends to win. The other has been studying his own engagement metrics.

This is not complicated.

The stakes here are not abstract. The next two years will determine whether the guardrails hold or whether they are quietly dismantled by a regime that has told you exactly what it intends to do. Congress is the firewall. And a firewall made of people who fold under heat is not a firewall. It is kindling.

George Conway is not kindling. He is a human flamethrower.

He is the rare creature in our politics who went looking for the fight, took the worst they could throw, and asked for more. He has the legal mind to expose the corruption, the temperament to withstand the assault, and the proven, scar-tissue-deep willingness to stand his ground when standing your ground is the only thing that counts.

There will come a day when we’re back to regular order, back to trying to pass legislation that matters and help people who need help. But the war before us is vicious, political, and without fighters dedicated to wrecking Trump’s efforts to overturn our democracy before it’s too late, Congress will recede into the darkness the way the old Republican party did.

I have spent my career making ads designed to find the soft spot in a candidate. George is a candidate designed to find the soft spots in Trump…and break him.

That is the highest compliment I know how to give.

Send him to Congress. We need George Conway in this fight.

P.S. Not that it matters that much, but I was a resident of today’s 12th District for several years; Yorkville, baby, 81st between 1st and 2nd.