Early this year, the Media Research Center’s Tim Graham tried to downplay the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan to deconstruct the federal government into a right-wing fantasy, cheering its principles even as he refused to use the popular term for it and described it only has a “Mandate for Leadership.” As attention grew about the plan, the MRC moved to pretending it wasn’t as radical as it actually was. For instance, Graham used his March 20 podcast to complain about “the Left’s overwrought writing about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to help staff a potential second Trump administration.”
Clay Waters played defense in a March 28 post, calling criticism of it “left-wing paranoia”:
The Wednesday edition of the PBS NewsHour featured perhaps the outlet’s most radical member, White House correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez, launching a paranoid broadside against the Trump campaign and the Heritage Foundation’s collection of presidential policy proposals known as “Project 2025.”
Guest anchor William Brangham set up Barron-Lopez’s radical take, conflating privileges that fly in the face of biology and common sense (boys on girls’ sports teams, genital surgery for minors) under the misleading banner of “civil rights”:
[…]Barron-Lopez explained that Trump’s “allies have drafted a sweeping document titled Project 2025…by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation” and stoked fear that the plan acknowledged biological science:
The same day, Alex Christy tried to deflect from Project 2025’s focus on LGBTQ issues when MSNBC guest Juanita Tolliver pointed it out:
In the 920-page document that is Heritage’s Project 2025, the term to “same-sex marriage” appears only twice. Once is to note that same-sex marriages, on average, last less than half that of heterosexual marriages, which is noteworthy for adoption placements and the second is that people should be protected against having to do things such as bake a cake for a same-sex wedding if they object.
However, Tolliver rolled right along, lamenting that Heritage does not care for the left’s abortion euphemisms, “This is not isolated and it won’t focus exclusively on abortion or reproductive rights, it is expansive and the other thing that came out of that Heritage report that is a sign of them going too far, as Doug Jones mentioned, is they literally want to delete the language from the books. I’m talking about deleting abortion from federal regulation. Deleting the phrase ‘reproductive rights.’ Deleting DEI, all of it.”
Christy returned for an April 10 post to complain that the man behind Project 2025 was drawing attention:
The calendar might say 2024, but for MSNBC’s Joy Reid, it is still 2012. On Tuesday’s installment of The ReidOut, the eponymous host declared that it was “grotesque” for pro-lifers to quote Abraham Lincoln while also demanding women “wake up” because “the Republican Party has openly declared war on women.”
In recent times, the Heritage Foundation and their Project 2025 have become Reid’s boogeymen. Heritage’s vice president of domestic policy is a man named Roger Severino, and Reid warned that “this man, according to the New York Times, has been crafting a plan in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 that would circumvent and leverage the regulatory powers of federal institutions including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Justice, and the National Institutes of Health. Here’s what Severino said when the Supreme Court ended abortion access.”
In Reid’s world, only lefties are allowed to claim the mantle of Lincoln and the Civil Rights Era. That Severino made Reid uncomfortable by highlighting that the logic that is used to defend abortion is strikingly similar to that of slavers says more about her than it does about him.
It was Michael Wnek’s turn to grouse about Reid in a May 21 post when she criticized others behind Project 2025:
In Monday evening’s edition of The ReidOut, MSNBC’s Joy Reid took a stab at apparent conservative “distress,” explaining their recent actions as irrational efforts to advance an impending Trump “dictatorship.” Her chief targets included former White House Personnel Director John McEntee, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, NFL kicker Harrison Butker, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott, among others.
Reid attacked McEntee’s involvement in Project 2025, labeling it as “the plan for the Trump dictatorship.” She went on to list a series of miseries that plague conservatives, whom she collectivized as “the Alitos and McEntees of the world.” These included: “out-of-control liberated women who won’t marry conservative men, have babies, and give up no-fault divorce, people who keep insisting that Black Lives Matter, immigrants of course, and accurate history that doesn’t always make the white guys look good.”
Christy downplayed Project 2025 as merely “basic conservatism” in a June 18 post:
The Rube Goldberg-like logic train that sits inside of John Oliver’s brain was on full display on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight on HBO, where he warned that former President Donald Trump and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025’s plans for civil service reform could lead to the former governing like segregationist Gov. George Wallace.
Project 2025 styles itself as the blueprint for the governing agenda for a second Trump term and is an 887-page doorstopper that has become the boogeyman for liberals trying to scaremonger about a second Trump term. However, it’s mostly basic conservatism.
[…]Basically, Trump’s plan is to take 50,000 civil service jobs and turn them into political appointees. Oliver reckons that with 50,000 additional Trump loyalists in charge, implementing the rest of Project 2025 will be much easier, therefore everyone needs to vote for Biden[.]
Sarah Butler commented in a July 3 post when Washington Post reporter Yasmeen Abutaleb was a guest on CNN:
Abutaleb described Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump term, as the “platform that seeks to basically eviscerate the federal government.” She continued to claim that the Trump campaign has “been quite systematic and figuring out how they can gut a lot of the protections that exist in the federal government.”
She mourned that the Court just made Trump’s job easier, “getting rid of career federal workers, and now there’s this ruling that says he can proceed with that carte blanche and go even further.”
Reid made only a passing reference to Project 2025 on one show, but that was enough for Jorge Bonilla to write a July 4 post headllined “Deranged Joy Reid Rambles About ‘King Trump’, Project 2025.” Later that day, Wnek lashed out at another Reid take on it:
On Tuesday night’s episode of MSNBC’s The ReidOut, host Joy Reid took another shot at the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, after her previous meltdown on Monday night. Among her other guests, she invited MSNBC contributor Dean Obeidallah who warned about the apparent threat to democracy that the decision posed, as well as equated The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
[…]Obeidallah declared that his callers were increasingly angry as a result of the decision, fussing that it signified Project 2025’s “prophecy come to life now, even before winning any kind of election,” and boasted his clever comparison of the Project to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. But Project 2025 was supposedly worse because of the page count: “Project 2025 is the GOP’s version of Mein Kampf. The difference is Mein Kampf is only 700 pages. Project 2025 is 900 pages…”
Wnek offered no response to any of the criticism.