Never Don? Ha!
Lincoln foe ‘sought elex gig’
Well, this is awkward. Steve Schmidt, one of the co-founders of the anti-Trump political-action group The Lincoln Project, met with thencandidate Donald Trump and tried to join his campaign at a 2016 Manhattan meeting, sources with knowledge of the conversation told The Post.
But the Republican operative, 49 — best known for his work on John McCain’s failed presidential bid before becoming one of the faces of the “Never Trump” movement — failed to get the gig because Trump thought he was a “total idiot,” one of the sources said.
Ten days after Schmidt’s March 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, the campaign hired Paul Manafort as chairman and eventually promoted him to campaign manager.
In an interview Schmidt did with PRWeek two years later, the Jersey-born political strategist and p.r. executive nonchalantly recounted the meeting with Trump as a chance to “see what he was about” and likened it to being given the opportunity to see a UFO in Central Park.
But sources familiar with the meeting said Schmidt spent the entire encounter presenting what he thought the outsider candidate needed to do to win the election.
Things soured when Trump thought Schmidt’s ideas were bad, and the real-estate mogul left the meeting with a feeling that Schmidt was “very untrustworthy” and a “total idiot,” the insider said.
“The president was very turned off by the fact that Schmidt had turned on McCain, his former boss, for the money,” the source alleged, referring to Schmidt’s willingness to dish dirt in John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s 2010 tell-all on the 2008 campaign, “Game Change.”
Schmidt did not immediately return requests for comment.