Media Research Center executive Tim Graham spent his March 13 column complaining that the right-wing plan for blowing up government to turn it into a right-wing autocracy was exposed, even though it was hiding in plain sight in the form of a massive book by a right-wing activist group:
The Heritage Foundation has been issuing its doorstop-length “Mandate for Leadership” books since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. But this is the first one that has inflamed The New York Times into painting it as a manual for autocracy.
On the March 8 edition of PBS’s Washington Week With The Atlantic, moderator Jeffrey “Obama Is Awesome” Goldberg cued up Times book reviewer Carlos Lozada to discuss his article “What I Learned When I Read 887 Pages of Plans for Trump’s Second Term.”
What surely delighted Goldberg was Lozada’s hot take. The Heritage book is “not about anything as simplistic as being dictator for a day, but about consolidating authority and eroding accountability for the long haul.”
Note that Graham refuses to use the more popular name for Heritage’s plan — Project 2025. Perhaps he feels it’s been demonized to the point that he must use its more formal (and boring) name. But what really angers Graham is that bureaucrats exposed how the Trump administration was trying to ruin the government:
Here’s what is unsaid. Conservatives would like to impose more political appointees on the executive branch because they feel the permanent bureaucracy is stacked with “progressives” who treat conservative presidencies as an occasion for clandestine warfare.
Under Trump, both career appointees and political appointees leaked to liberal media outlets with all kinds of anonymous “resistance.” One wrote a New York Times op-ed and then a book under the byline “Anonymous.” The author later revealed himself as political appointee Miles Taylor, who was barely 30 when he became a deputy chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security.
As Lozada noted in reviewing the “Anonymous” book, it was full of “stuff we already know.” It was written to be bought by Trump haters who loved MSNBC-guest snark like Trump is “like a twelve-year old in an air-traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately.”
This, we know, is what Lozada means by “eroding accountability,” making it harder for liberal rags like The New York Times to undermine the Republican president from within. No one on PBS is going to ask him if anonymous sourcing “erodes accountability.” Because “accountability” is a one-way street for them.
At no point does Graham dispute anything that Taylor wrote about the Trump administration — he’s just mad that it was exposed. Nor does he engage in any substantive critique of what Lozada said. He then served up right-wing “lawfare” talking points:
Under Biden, liberal journalists are expected to preach the most preposterous gospels. Lozada proclaimed on taxpayer-supported TV that the Heritage team wants “to politicize the Justice Department…It’s very overt. They emphasize how, for instance, the White House Counsel’s Office and the DOJ have to work as a team. That’s a quote.”
The “accountability” specialists of the pro-Biden media somehow can’t concede that the Biden Justice Department is aggressively prosecuting their opponent as a campaign strategy. Their press statements boast how their prosecutions in the January 6 riot are massive and still unloading indictments.
Graham didn’t explain why Donald Trump is above the law and must be held immune from prosecution, or why running for president is some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. He concluded by serving up another conspiracy theory:
The Heritage folks are not wrong to assert that the Left controls the permanent bureaucracy and they’re very upset that conservatives have gotten organized. Other Republican presidents have taken their “Mandate” seriously, but the “Deep State” – especially defined as the anonymous sources perennially pushing statism – remains an entrenched and powerful foe.
Ah, yes, the dreaded “deep state” bogeyman. Graham seems to be proving that the MRC is sliding further to the right.