After comparing himself to Lincoln, Trump calls new attack ad ‘a disgrace to Honest Abe’

Campaign to prevent president’s re-election is run by prominent Republicans, including Kellyanne Conway’s husband

Just 24 hours after participating in a Fox News town hall at Washington, DC’s Lincoln Memorial, Donald Trump fired a barrage of scornful tweets at a political lobby group named for the 16th US president, saying their campaign against him is “a disgrace to “Honest Abe”.

His broadside against the group comes after he used the town hall to compare his treatment by the press to the abuse Lincoln suffered, saying he is in fact being treated worse than his murdered predecessor.

The Lincoln Project, a political action committee founded by a group of high-profile Republicans to try and avert a second Trump term, has released a video attacking the Trump administration for its handling of the Covid-19 outbreak.

A homage to Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” ad from 1984, “Mourning in America” shows lines of unemployed Americans and bodies being loaded into trucks while a voiceover asks: “If we have another four years like this, will there even be an America?”

The video has apparently sent Mr Trump into a fury. Citing their failure to obstruct his path to the Republican nomination or the presidency in 2016, Mr Trump raged at the group’s leaders, many of whom have worked on previous Republican campaigns.

“They don’t know how to win, and their so-called Lincoln Project is a disgrace to Honest Abe. I don’t know what Kellyanne did to her deranged loser of a husband, Moonface, but it must have been really bad. John Weaver lost big for Kasich (to me). Crazed Rick Wilson....

“....lost for Evan “McMuffin” McMullin (to me). Steve Schmidt & Reed Galvin lost for John McCain, Romney’s campaign manager (?) lost big to “O”, & Jennifer Horn got thrown out of the New Hampshire Republican Party. They’re all LOSERS, but Abe Lincoln, Republican, is all smiles!”

It is not clear what Mr Trump meant by saying Lincoln, assassinated in 1865, is “all smiles”. The president is known to have suffered bouts of deep melancholy, and the statue at his memorial wears a pensive, solemn expression.

The man Mr Trump refers to as “Moonface” is George Conway, husband of White House adviser Kellyanne Conway. Mr Conway has been one of the president’s most outspoken critics on the right, regularly sparring with the president on Twitter and founding the Lincoln Project out of his concern for the consequences of Mr Trump’s temperament and behaviour.

While Mr Trump derided the group’s deliberate invocation of the Reagan ad for its supposed lack of imagination, others pointed out that “Make America Great Again” can be found on Reagan buttons from 1980.

Mr Trump’s claims to victimhood have reached grandiose levels on more than one occasion. He previously complained of suffering the highest level of Presidential Harassment in the history of our Country”, placing himself above the four presidents who were assassinated and the two others who survived attempts on their lives.