OPINION | Democrats and The Press Mustn’t Let Trump Off the Hook on ‘Project 2025’
Right-wing policy manifesto is unpopular and putting pressure on the Republican nominee
The recent surge in interest in the right-wing Project 2025 clearly is making Donald Trump sweat.
A sweeping, 900-plus-page, right-wing manifesto, Project 2025 is intended as a roadmap for a Republican president like Trump to take over after his inauguration in January 2025.
What it seeks to accomplish is as radical as it is unpopular among voters: fire large swaths of the non-political federal workforce and replace them with Trump loyalists, rollback regulations on the environment and protections against discrimination, further limit abortion rights, make it even harder for eligible Americans to access Medicaid and other government programs, as well as much more from the far-right’s wishlist.
As The New Republic notes, Project 2025 is “a remarkably detailed guide to turning the United States into a fascist’s paradise.”
Despite the dangers to American life that it presents, Project 2025 has, for months, gotten remarkably little attention — mostly as discussion fodder for political podcasts and such.
However, that’s all changed just in the last week or so for basically two reasons.
Project 2025 began trending on Google moments after actress Taraji P. Henson urged people — on-camera at the 2024 BET Awards — to look it up, educate themselves on it and vote.
But even more ominously, the head of the right-wing organization behind Project 2025 made public comments calling for a “second American revolution,” with a not-so-veiled threat of political violence if folks oppose the plan.
All of which has ignited a political firestorm and lit a match of broader intense opposition to Project 2025.
So much so that Trump — fearing the political backlash — tried to disavow the project in a social media that was demonstrably untrue.
His social media post claimed simultaneously that he knows “nothing” about Project 2025 and that “some of the some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
But both things just cannot be true. If Trump really knows nothing about Project 2025, how could he possibly know anything said in the document — let alone that some of it is “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal”?
He can’t, of course.
Trump is lying, as he always does.
Many people involved in the effort are former Trump administration officials, and Trump publicly allied himself with the think tank as president.
No one should buy Trump’s fake repudiation for an instant.
And Democrats and the news media must not give the presumptive Republican presidential nominee anything resembling a pass on this.
This has Trump scared just at the moment he thinks he’s got the election all sown up.
President Biden, other Democrats and the media can’t let up now. They have to debunk Trump’s false disavowal of Project 2025, keep talking about what’s in this fascistic wishlist and continue hammering Trump with it every damn day from now until the election.
Editor’s Note: Janet Nance is a longtime journalist based in Washington DC who has covered the federal government since the Clinton administration.
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