George Conway group targets Tillis’s loyalty to Trump in new ad

The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump conservative super PAC run in part by George Conway, is condemning Sen. Thom Tillis’s loyalty to President Trump and claiming the North Carolina Republican puts “politics over people.”

A new 30-second ad released Thursday says North Carolinians know “how to judge people, work hard, help others, do right.”

“But we can spot the other kind too,” the narrator of the ad says as images Tillis, who is up for reelection in November, appear. “You know the type. Obsessed with power, care more about themselves than anyone else. They put politics over people, folks who don’t understand or just don’t care what the rest of us are going through.”

“In the White House, that’s Donald Trump. In North Carolina, it’s Thom Tillis,” the ad, titled “We See You,” continues. “Don’t worry Thom, we see you. We see you better than ever.”

The ad recalls a May 6 quote from Tillis to Politico praising the president’s response to the public health crisis.

“We’ll be doing million and millions of tests, we’ll do the antibody tests, we’ll have good reports, I think, on the beginnings of economic progress,” Tillis said. “And I think all those things will benefit the president and they’ll benefit me.”

Lincoln Project co-founder Jennifer Horn said in a statement that Tillis has been “silent” despite his state’s need to obtain personal protective equipment during the battle against the coronavirus.

“What’s truly deplorable is Tillis’ silence in the face of Trump’s gross negligence in the handling of the coronavirus crisis,” Horn said about the state’s junior senator. “Over 83,000 American lives have been lost, including nearly 600 North Carolinians — and still, Tillis lacks the courage to speak up to Donald Trump.”

The Hill has reached out to Tillis’s campaign for comment.

The group has targeted Tillis, one of the most vulnerable Republican senators up for reelection, before.

The Lincoln Project, made up of prominent conservatives, has been at odds with Trump and Republican lawmakers in Congress as it seeks to gin up GOP and independent support for former Vice President Joe Biden’s Democratic White House bid.

The GOP group released an ad earlier this month called “Mourning in America” that was critical of the recently passed CARES Act and its Paycheck Protection Program, which provides loans to small businesses during the coronavirus pandemic.

Facebook slapped a warning label on the ad after PolitiFact rated the content “false.”

Trump has since torn into the group, dismissing its leaders, such as Conway, a Washington, D.C., attorney who is married to Trump White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, as “losers.”

“I don’t know what Kellyanne did to her deranged loser of a husband, Moonface, but it must have been really bad,” Trump tweeted.