One night in 1984, when Heath Eiden was sixteen, he found himself at the Hotel Meridien in San Francisco, in the campaign suite of Walter Mondale. This was during the Democratic National Convention. Consultants and congressmen milled around, wreathed in cigar smoke. Eiden, then a high-school junior from Minneapolis, was there with Mondales son Ted, as a volunteer. He was next to Mondale when the candidate took a call from Lane Kirkland, the head of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. (You got it, Fritz), and then announced to the room that hed won enough delegates to secure the nomination. Eiden was bewitched. The spirit left the road and jumped up into me, he recalled. Fritz Mondale, the last honest politician: he actually said, Yeah, Im going to raise your taxes.

After Reagan beat Mondale that year in a landslide (Mondale won just one state: Minnesota), Eiden, an early adept with his schools Sony Betacam 1800, got the first on-camera interview with the loser. (It led to his short film, Triumph Over Tragedy: The Humphrey-Mondale Tradition, which is archived at the Minnesota Historical Society.) Eiden had TV-news aspirations, but before long disillusionment over sensationalism and dishonesty in the media soured him on it all. His last-ditch attempt was a documentary, in 2004, of another doomed White House bid, called Dean and Me: Lessons from an American Primary, which failed to change the world or to make him rich.

A couple of weeks ago, Eiden, who now lives in Stowe, Vermont, and works as a video producer, got a call from Stuart Stevens, the political consultant, who also has a house in Stowe. Stevens has advised five Republican Presidential candidates, including GeorgeW. Bush and Mitt Romney, but has recently abandoned the Party, in the belief that it has abandoned him. (His eighth book, to be published next month, is called It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. Last week, he said, The Party always had a dark side. We thought it was a recessive gene, but it turned out to be the dominant gene. I feel like a sucker.)

Stevens was calling on behalf of the Lincoln Project, the confederation of G.O.P. apostates who, appalled by Trump, had formed a political-action committee to defeat him. The Lincoln Project had been producing sharply negative TV ads about Trump, which have run mostly in Washington, D.C., mainly to needle their subject, but which, because of their sass and their source, almost always go viral on social media.

Stevens wanted Eiden to shoot the Lincoln Projects new spot. This one would feature an emergency-room doctor down the road, in South Burlington, named Dan Barkhuff, a former Navy Seal and a graduate of the Naval Academy and of Harvard Medical School, who had started an organization called Veterans for Responsible Leadership. The occasion was the news that the President had ignored intelligence reports that a Russian military unit had been paying bounties to the Taliban for the killing of American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Eiden was torn. On the one hand, work was scarce during the pandemic, and, of course, he abhorred Trump and had been frustrated by the Democrats failure to hit back. But, as a dyed-in-the-down Minnesota liberal, he had misgivings about working with what he called the dark sidesome of the Republican operatives who, by way of rough tactics, had engineered the demise of so many of his favored candidates through the years. Ultimately, though, the enemy-of-my-enemy principle pertained.

The previous week, hed driven to Minneapolis with his teen-age son, to pay their respects (and shoot some footage) at the memorial for George Floyd. That experience, plus a few days in the suburbs among Covid truthers, and an encounter with a waiter making an I cant breathe joke, had only quickened his revulsion. If it takes working with Republicans to get this fucker out of the White House, fine, he said.

What kind of style do you want? Eiden asked Stevens.

Think Swift Boat, Stevens replied.

I knew exactly what Id found myself in the middle of, Eiden recalled.

Eiden and Barkhuff met up at Stevenss house. The Lincoln Project had sent a script, by a screenwriter of the HBO series Band of Brothers, but Barkhuff ditched it for one of his own. Identifying himself as a pro-life gun-owning combat veteran, he said into the camera, Any Commander-in-Chief with a spine would be stomping the shit out of some Russians right now, diplomatically, economically, or, if necessary, with the sort of asymmetric warfare theyre using to send our kids home in body bags. Mr. Trump, youre either a coward who cant stand up to an ex-K.G.B. goon or youre complicit. Which is it?

Afterward, Eiden went home and uploaded the footage. An editor named Joey, in Denver, put it together overnight. The following afternoon, Stevens noted that the spot, called Betrayed, had been viewed online more than six million times. To what end, time will tell.

Link:

Is Working with the Lincoln Project Sleeping with the Enemy? - The New Yorker