WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) - A few days before the US presidential election, the leadership of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project gathered at the Utah home of Steve Schmidt, one of the group's co-founders, and listened as he plotted out the organisation's future.

None of the dissident Republican consultants who created the Lincoln Project a year earlier had imagined how wildly successful it would be, pulling in more than US$87 million (S$117.5 million) in donations and producing scores of viral videos that doubled as a psy-ops campaign intended to drive President Donald Trump to distraction.