Hey gang, it's Reid. Before we get going, I just want to say thanks again to everybody for your hard work this year and for listening.

And I hope that everybody gets a chance to spend time with friends and family and take a little bit of time to reflect on what we were able to accomplish this year and what we have to get done in the coming two years.

I know that we'll do it together and I cannot say thank you enough. And now on with the show.

Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reid Gailan. Today, I'm joined by multi-emey winning filmmaker, Melissa Jo Peltier.

She's the writer and director of the award-winning documentary The Game Is Up.

Disillusion Trump voters tell their stories, which studies how hardcore Trump voters turned away from the Magicalt in 2020.

And it's now available to stream on Amazon Prime.

Today, she's coming to us from just north of New York City. Melissa, welcome to the show.

Hey, how are you? I'm happy to be here.

So, you over the course of your career have not only been incredibly successful, but also have covered a lot of diverse topics in a variety of media, both documentary and fiction and all that including

Cesar Milan, the famed dog whisper, my big fat Greek wedding and documentaries that again sort of run the gamut of subject matter.

So, tell us a little bit about how you came up with the idea of making The Game Is Up and how you started the sort of creative process of finding these folks.

Sure. Well, like so many people, I was watching helplessly. You know, I was donating money and I was writing my mouth off on Twitter, but I wanted to do something in this time of crisis that we're all in.

And I wanted to be able to just use my 30 years of road skills. And I watched on Twitter. I watched in real time as Joe Walsh changed his mind about Trump.

And it was fascinating to watch it in real time. It's happened over about a year to half. And that's when I first came up with the idea, but I really didn't know how I was going to make it.

And I didn't have any money. I can do anything in this business that raised plenty. That's the one thing I don't am terrible at.

So, I let it go, let it go. And then after the first impeachment trial, I didn't expect them to get impeached, but I didn't expect the Republicans to be acting like schoolboys throwing spitballs in the impeachment trial.

It was really upsetting to me. And I thought, you know, if he gets reelected and I don't do this, even if this doesn't make a difference, I have to do it.

So, Mary Kerry Craven, who is our producer, who is wonderful, she was the one who sort of convinced me. She sort of said, build it and they will come. And we did raise some money for it.

And then the rest sort of pulled from me and my husband. But it had to be done. It was right or die. And that's sort of how it got started. But yeah, I was actually inspired by watching Joe change in real time.

And so Joe Walsh, a friend of the show, was elected to Congress in 2010 as the tea partyist of the tea party member of that wave. The story goes back through and his story goes back through, you know, the things that he would say in office, he only served a term.

Then he switched into sort of the right wing media ecosystem at which point, you know, you're all in with Trump or you're out. And certainly we learned that we weren't with Trump. And we were out in which we're happy to be.

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