'Real garbage, not smart people': Trump lashes out at Republican-led Lincoln Project

‘You have the bad Republicans,’ US president claims during rally in Pennsylvania

President Donald Trump lashed out at the Lincoln Project during a rally in Pennsylvania, accusing them of being Republicans in name only (RINO).

At the rally on Monday, President Trump baslelessly accused the “fake news media” and “big tech” of being in a partnership against him.

He continued: “Then you have the RINO’s. You have the bad Republicans. You have the sicko RINOs that I’ve beaten so badly over the years,” as the crowd at the rally booed.

“You know the RINOs that do the ads and stuff? Every one of those guys just about I’ve beaten because they all represented a client in the primaries.

“Instead of saying ‘hey he did a good job’...they said ‘lets go against him,’ but everyone of those guys, take a look. Real garbage, not smart people,” he added.

President Trump was referring to the Lincoln Project, a Republican political action committee that is aiming to prevent his reelection.

It was formed by several high profile Republicans who previously worked for the party’s politicians, or publicly supported it prior to Mr Trump’s presidency.

John Weaver, who serves as an adviser to the committee, was the chief strategist for John Kasich’s 2016 presidential campaign, but is the only founding member to have had a client run against the president in a primary.

The group was formed on 17 December 2019, and has released several ads over the last 10 months criticising the president and his administration.

Mr Trump’s speech on Monday was not the first time the president has criticised the Lincoln Project, as in a series of tweets in May he called its staff “loser types” after the group criticised his response to the pandemic.

After the group released an ad titled Mourning in America, President Trump called them “a group of RINO Republicans,” who are trying to “get even for all of their many failures.”

Some of the group’s most popular ads have centred around the pandemic, and in March the Lincoln Project released a video that criticised President Trump’s initial response to Covid-19 and accused him of being “unfit” for office.

As the pandemic has continued throughout the last seven months, it is a theme the group has returned to, and the committee recently criticised the president after he tested positive for Covid-19.

In that ad, titled Hospital, the narrator said: “His lying is killing us. We have to stop it. Vote him out,” as a blurry image of someone being treated for Covid-19 on a ventilator was shown on the screen.

The group has also taken aim at numerous members of his administration and has released several pro-Biden ads after the former vice president secured the Democratic nomination.

On Sunday, the president’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, threatened to sue the Lincoln Project for defamation over billboards that the group set up in New York City.

In the first of the billboards, a smiling Ms Trump, who like her husband is an adviser to the president, is shown standing next to a graphic of the state’s death tool, which reads: “33,366 New Yorkers, 221,245 Americans.”

In the second, Mr Kushner is shown smiling standing next to a row of body bags with the caption: “New Yorkers are going to suffer and that's their problem' — Jared Kushner, Vanity Fair, September 17 2020”.

After the couple threatened to sue the committee, Matthew Sanderson, a lawyer for the Lincoln Project said that the group “will not be intimidated by empty bluster” and added: “Sue if you must.”