JD Lock
Lieutenant Colonel, US Army (Retired), MS, PMP, LSSMBB
How a President Leads
JD Lock, Lieutenant Colonel, US Army (Retired)
Published - YouTube, 25 June 2020
Created / Drafted national add produced by TLP - # of views: 1,540,805
In early 2020, I was invited to join a group of veterans associated with The Lincoln Project, an American political action committee (PAC) founded in December 2019 by moderate conservatives and former Republican Party members who opposed U.S. President Donald Trump and Trumpism.
On 1 June 2020, amid the George Floyd protests in Washington, D.C., I watched, as millions of others did, law enforcement officers use riot control tactics against peaceful protestors to clear a path through Lafayette Square for President Donald Trump to walk from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church with an entourage of senior administrative people.
There, standing before the Ashburton House, Trump posed with Bible raised, for his ‘reality tv’ photo op.
It was Trump’s perverse way of emphasizing a speech he had made just prior, one in which he ‘urged state governors to quell violent protests by using the National Guard to “dominate the streets,” or he would otherwise “deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem.”
Having served 28 years of active duty in uniform – unlike the ‘bone spur’ POTUS who actively avoided such service and proclaimed in a 1997 interview that avoiding STDs in the ‘90s was his own “personal Vietnam,” this pathetic display of perceived leadership did not sit well with me, thus leading me to conceive of and draft a concept of what true presidential leadership was.
I submitted the idea via series of PPT slides and three days later, it had been produced and was being aired.
The Lincoln Project’s primary target audience for the ad was in the three major swing states – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – which Biden won by a combined 255,425 votes, or 0.16% of the total popular vote.
Given YOUTUBE indicates the ad was seen by more than 1.5M viewers, I would like to think I played a role in defeating Donald Trump … to quote Casablanca ...
It's the romantic in me.
Note - TLP added the last segment ref Joe Biden running for office. My understanding is that this was the first ad to have such a reference. Nice to be the first.
