To hear it from those behind The Lincoln Project, they’re merely placing country over party by opposing the excesses of Donald Trump. Thus, they support Joe Biden only for the purpose of removing Trump. But rest assured, they tell us: They’re still conservatives and Republicans.

Well, here are some data points that we can use to evaluate their claims:

• The project’s leader, John Weaver, has declared that the group will go after Republicans who oppose Biden’s far-left agenda.

• The Lincoln Project is also targeting moderate Republican senators in swing seats with the express goal of flipping the Senate.

• The content of the group’s attacks on those senators repeats progressive canards, including the discredited “kids in cages” lie.

Just a quick look makes one want to blurt out an eight-letter word that starts with “bull.” But a closer look causes us to rethink whether the Lincoln Project’s top figures were ever really that conservative — or interested in advancing conservative policies and principles — in the first place.

For starters, let’s break down the threat to go after Republicans who oppose Biden’s far-left agenda. This means, essentially, that to stay in the good graces of The Lincoln Project, a Republican must tolerate abortion on demand, sweeping gun control, packing the Supreme Court, ending the Senate filibuster, hiking taxes, and the hard Left’s scheme to destroy the suburbs. What, then, are the “policy differences” they claim to have with Biden? They don’t say.

Next, these same “Republicans” want to flip the Senate to the Democrats. If they’re successful, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer could nuke the filibuster and then follow it with legislation to pack the Supreme Court, for example. That would undo important First Amendment protections for campaign speech and religious freedom. But other items would soon follow. If the problem had been only with Trump, The Lincoln Project would be working to reelect the likes of Maine Senator Susan Collins. Again, if these activists truly had policy differences with Biden, wouldn’t they want a Republican Senate to check Biden and a Nancy Pelosi-led House?

As for their attack ads, they include the usual left-wing canards. Again, if they merely wanted to stop Trump, they wouldn’t repeat the lies that no self-respecting Republican or conservative would ever condone. It’s almost as if they believe smears like the ones John Lewis spewed about John McCain and Biden told about Mitt Romney.

In all these matters, Lincoln Project actors are acting like doctrinaire Democrats. At some point, many grassroots Patriots depended on men thought to be conservatives — “leaders” like Romney, John Kasich, Jeff Flake, and Paul Ryan — to advance the cause of Liberty. They trusted media figures like George Will, Jonah Goldberg, Amanda Carpenter, and others to have their backs. After what appeared to be unilateral political disarmament at best, incompetence in other cases, and deliberate weakness at worst, these Patriots understandably looked elsewhere for people who would fight for them and for policies that they believed would benefit the whole country.

In fact, it should be noted, Lincoln Project “conservatives” are leveling far more vitriol at Trump, who is actually pursuing a conservative agenda — whether it’s securing the border, moving the embassy to Jerusalem, taking on the genocidal Iranian regime, getting tough with China, and turning the economy around — than they are at those who smeared conservatives.

This is why The Lincoln Project wants to destroy conservatism to “save” it. Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential race exposed the group’s hoodwinkers as failures at best, and frauds at worst. That is what really bothers them, and that’s why they need to destroy him. Because as long as Trump is around, they and their turncoat ilk will be rightly ignored.