Conservative PAC The Lincoln Project, known for its anti-Trump stance, is unstoppable right now. Just this week, it’s released more than a dozen individual political ads and videos, ranging from the hagiographical, broadcast-quality “Biden’s Moment,” to “Covey Spreader” (below), a rough, meme-based comedic romp that is pretty much the last thing you’d expect to come out of a creative shop founded by veteran Republican political strategists.
Among the most upvoted comments on the YouTube version of “Covey Spreader” right now is this reaction from one John Upper: “WTF?!?!?!?!? This vid is THE MOST INSANE political satire I have ever seen.” You may find yourself agreeing with Mr. Upper.
“Covey Spreader” serves up clips of President Trump and his circle in public settings not wearing masks; a campy, foul-mouthed voiceover, done in a send-up of the observational style of nature documentaries, treats the lot of them as a pitiable, “nasty” species that blithely spreads COVID-19.
It helps if you know that “Covey Spreader” is a sort of homage to “The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger,” a 2011 hyperviral video (it has more than 95 million views on YouTube as of this writing) that repurposed old National Geographic footage for the sake of comedy. Like “Covey Spreader,” “The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger” is narrated by the one-named internet personality Randall (real name: Christopher Gordon), who made “Honey Badger don’t care” a catchphrase.
“The Covey Spreader’s pretty crazy,” Randall says in voiceover as we see clips of a mask-less Trump. “It has no regard for any other person whatsoever.” If you’re planning on watching the video without headphones in the presence of colleagues or family members, be advised that we weren’t joking about the voiceover being foul-mouthed, which becomes apparent about 20 seconds into the 149-second video.
As Ad Age previously reported, The Lincoln Project launched in December with an op-ed in The New York Times headlined “We Are Republicans, and We Want Trump Defeated” (subhead: “The president and his enablers have replaced conservatism with an empty faith led by a bogus prophet”). The NYT bio line for the op-ed’s authors—George T. Conway III, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver and Rick Wilson—noted that they “have worked for and supported Republican campaigns.”
