I am an American. There is no association, membership or fidelity that exceeds that. Nothing.
I was born in September of 1970 in Jersey City, NJ, while the Vietnam War still raged. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were at the halfway point to their tenth anniversary. My mother was a school teacher and my father worked for the phone company. I was close to my grandfather. He was a factory worker at Union Carbide. His first wife died during childbirth. My father came from his second marriage and was a twin. My grandfather was a bartender during the depression and was the only person in his household with a job. He told stories about picking up pieces of coal on the rail tracks that had fallen from the trains so that he could heat the house. He believed deeply in America. Before he died, he gave me a little pocket New Testament with his birth date inscribed in it. December 31, 1911.
He gave that New Testament to his younger brother Bill. Uncle Bill looked like a sequoia from the waist up in his wheelchair. His withered legs showed no signs of the strength and endurance they held when his feet touched down on French soil under a silk parachute on June 6, 1944. Bill carried that bible in a uniform pocket all the way to Germany and came home with it. He gave it back to my grandfather and then succumbed to polio before there was a vaccine.
My grandmother was born in the United States, but returned to Krakow at the age of two and spent her childhood there before returning to the United States. Marie Kujalowicz would eventually marry Eddie Carroll, a Jersey City bus driver, and raise four children. The occasion of John Paul II becoming Pope in 1979 was one of happiness and exultation unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I called her “Babci” and because of the peculiarities of human memory, I can still remember the Polish nursery rhymes she would never tire of while bouncing me on her knee.
I was thinking about her and all of my family quietly to myself when Air Force 2 touched down in Krakow, Poland, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I was a 34-year-old Deputy Assistant to the President of the United States and Counselor to the Vice President of the United States. I was overwhelmed by the thought of my great-grandfather whom I had never met sitting with his family the night before his departure to America. There was no television or internet. There were letters and tales of what life was like in a place fabled to have streets “paved with gold.”
America for him was an idea and a promise. It was a hope for a better life. I don’t know very much about that man. I do know that his courage and guts made me an American, and on that day in January, I landed with an American delegation that included Elie Wiesel to commemorate human civilization’s greatest act of organized evil, the Holocaust. The final ceremony lasted into the dark on a frigid Polish night. Near the end a light appeared, it was moving down the tracks. The sound of a train arriving filled the air. The volume increased and the light drew closer before there was the unmistakeable sound of the train coming to a stop with the exhale of the hydraulic brakes. It was stunning. I will never forget it.
Adolf Eichmann was the name of the man who organized the shipments of Jews to be incinerated. He was captured by the Mossad in Argentina in 1961 and taken to Israel for trial. There, he was interrogated by a man named Avner Less for hundreds of hours. Less’s entire family had been turned to ash in the Nazi murder camps. He was asked about the experience in 1981 and what he said was chilling. He said sitting across from Eichmann made him realize that there are Adolf Eichmanns all around us. He said that they are harmless in a democracy, but they turn deadly in an instant when democracy falls to dictatorships of the left or right. There are many little Eichmanns in 2022 America.
I was the first Republican my parents ever met. Republican didn’t exist in 1960s and 1970s Jersey City and Bayonne. The year was 1979. The issue was the Iranian hostage crisis and the answer seemed to my nine-year-old self to be Ronald Reagan. The next year, I had my first encounter with partisanship. My parents were close friends with Nick and Pat, and Nick was a Democratic councilman. I wanted to hand out fliers for Nick and Ronald Reagan. I was told that couldn’t happen because Nick was a Democrat and on Team Jimmy Carter. I announced that I was going to do what I wanted and whether he liked it or not, Nick became a Regan Democrat — at least at the houses I visited.
I never hated Democrats. They were my relatives and friends. Today, I’m a Democrat and I don’t hate Republicans because some are my family and friends. It is not possible to live in your country while hating half the people in it. We share this land. We share this country. We share an inheritance and an obligation to make it better and more just.
I have always loved politics and I spent many years working in American politics at the very highest levels. It has been an interesting career that played out in ways that I could never have imagined. I joked recently to an audience that when I turned 40 that I didn’t see myself as a Jewish Democrat living in Utah. Anything is possible is America.
I had a meeting with Donald Trump in 2016 on St. Patrick’s Day. It is the only time I have ever met him. Joe Scarborough asked me if I would go see him. Scarborough believed — like I did — that he would soon be the Republican nominee and the question that hung in the air was whether Trump would change as he assumed the mantle of being the Republican nominee. It seems like a stupid question today, but at that time, it wasn’t. I agreed to go see him.
When I walked into the room Trump stood up and said to Hope Hicks and Ivanka, “This is the first guy who called it on TV. This is the first person who said I shouldn’t be treated like a joke. That I could win.”
I told him a story about Chester Arthur and one about Abraham Lincoln. I told him that he was going to lose to Cruz in Wisconsin, but that was the last place Cruz could win.
Trump’s comportment did not change, and in fact, worsened. I became a fierce critic of him on MSNBC and on social media.
One day, I got a call from Maggie Haberman, then of Politico, saying that she would be reporting — anonymously, of course — with no facts, evidence or details whatsoever that I had interviewed for a job with Trump and had been spurned. This, of course, turned me from a principled critic to a spurned grifter who was simply angry that I had been denied the privilege of working for Donald Trump. At the time, I was the vice chair of the largest PR/communications firm in the world and would never work for Donald Trump. Why did she write it then? She wrote it because it was a transaction for her. She took information and used it to accrue points for later in a never ending game. She laid out the hit for Trump, so that she could get things from him for fame, books and celebrity later. It took her all the way to The New York Times where her special access to the Trump clan has returned a mighty profit. Today, the former host of “The Apprentice” calls the reporter he made a celebrity his “psychiatrist.” I know exactly how this all works and I am going to continue to use The Warning platform to explain the corruption.
John Weaver, Rick Wilson and Reed Galen could have started the Lincoln Project without me. There was nothing stopping anyone from starting a super PAC. They believed that it would not be successful without my participation. I was the hold out and extremely reluctant to start it. I was asked what my reluctance was, and I laughed and said, “It will destroy my life.” It almost did, but I have made it through.
I admire Senator Elizabeth Warren, though I disagree with her on many issues. What I like about her is that she believes the things that she says. She has conviction. My memory may be faulty on this, but I gave the green light for the Lincoln Project after a Democratic primary debate during which Senator Warren commented that she thought it was the best debate yet because no one talked about Trump. My view was that the election was about one thing: Trump.
The Lincoln Project spent 84% of every dollar raised on voter contact programs. It played a very significant role in the defeat of Donald Trump. It destabilized him and the MAGA movement. I am happy about that, but it came at a tremendous cost.
I have been smeared as a pedophile, a pedophile enabler, a grifter, a drug addict, mentally ill, and the list goes on. None of it is true. The Associated Press ran a story alleging that I used Lincoln Project profits to buy a house. The house in question is the house shown in the Lincoln Project documentary. The house is shown with me in it before they claimed I purchased it. Curious, isn’t it? That story led to so many Fox News and other right-wing media stories that identified the place where my children sleep. My home became a target for MAGA extremists. Boxes filled with human feces and hate mail arrived — all because I had the audacity to start a political group to oppose an American president in 2020.
The Lincoln Project documentary that was just released on Showtime is a portraiture of character. New information was revealed in the documentary that I wasn’t previously aware of. It captures the vanity and egos of broken people fighting in a good cause. It tells the story of betrayal and revenge. It tells the tale of the destructive impact of a lie in an organization and how deadly a coverup can be. I have told the full truth about what happened at the Lincoln Project over the last several days. They address the stories that were written, identify their sources, make the point about the ethical breaches and violations of journalistic standards that are asserted as core by each of the organizations that broke them.
Every person who came to Park City was brought to a Rocky Mountain resort town in the year 2020, a year when one million Americans suffered and died. They came in a year in which the whole country suffered in lockdown misery. They were well paid and made part of a team in a worthy cause. This is the cause of their grievance. They didn’t get famous enough. The abandonment of ethics, decency and integrity that flow from that are stunning to watch.
The outcome of the actions of several involved resulted in this — multiple anonymous direct mail campaigns targeted at the actual Lincoln Project co-founders and top donors (whose names are intentionally edited out here):
I had to move because of this. The safety issues were acute, but they have faded.
If I had to do it all over again I would, but I regret my association with nearly every person involved in the Lincoln Project with few exceptions, starting with Stuart Stevens. If you watch the documentary you will understand why.
My friendships have gotten tighter in the aftermath of the Lincoln Project. My circle has grown smaller but stronger. I am much more skeptical of people and I have an absolute zero tolerance policy for ego, vanity, narcissism and insanity.
I will never permit it again. During a difficult two years, I found my way to a contented happiness around a simple truth: I am an American who stood up and fought back against the worst cause this country has seen since Jim Crow and the Confederacy. I am an American who founded a political group that hurled itself at Donald Trump when everyone quaked and trembled in fear of him. I am an American who was born free and I am the father of Americans who were born free. That freedom is precious.
I don’t know what the future will bring for me, but I know this: I will raise my American voice and assert my rights to freedom of speech, assembly and religion under the United States Constitution to defend the most precious of ideas — American freedom.
Politics is a brutal business. I’ve been a bit banged up, but that’s okay. I’m not the first. I won’t be the last.
I am an American. I am one person who is connected to 330 million others. Together, we are a vast mosaic made up of all of the world’s people and races. WE the People.
We are all Americans who must live and stand up for one another. We must find our way to peace with one another. We must defeat the insidious MAGA movement. We will.
We are Americans.
There is much to comment upon here, but I'll focus on one recurring theme: Maggie Haberman and her brand of commodified access journalism, free from any principles that traditionally have formed the underpinnings of true journalistic ethics, is perhaps the greatest threat to our democracy today. Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Tim Russert must all be spinning in their graves. We must push back against the Habermans of the world at every opportunity.
Steve, thank you for what you and TLP did in 2020. I believe that Trump losing can be tied, directly, to your efforts. I am a very early supporter of TLP and donated often. The reason I did was simple: these people SEE him and aren’t afraid of him. The cowardice of the GOP is disgusting when it comes to Trump. We must all continue to fight for our country and defeat these people. Thank you, as well, for your candor.