As July continued, the Media Research Center continued to be in defend-and-deflect mode over the Heritage Foundation’s right-wing Project 2025 blueprint for Republican power in the wake of Donald Trump himself triying to distance himself from it even though numerous Trump cronies and former Trump administration officials helped to draft it. Alex Christy complained in a July 12 post:
Former White House Press Secretary and current MSNBC host Jen Psaki traveled over to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers on Thursday to preview President Joe Biden’s press conference, which had not yet happened at the time of recording, by mourning the public hasn’t seen “the magic of Joe Biden.” At the same time, she claimed Donald Trump’s association with Project 2025 should “scare the hell out of you” while flunking basic civics about the Constitution’s separation of powers.
[…]Speaking of Trump, Meyers turned to the left’s favorite boogeyman: The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, “You mentioned, you know, if we, you know, have a democracy in a few years, we’ve been talking a lot about this document, Project 2025. Because, you know, while we, you know, it’s not that we lose our focus. I think what’s happening with the president is serious and requires attention, but Project 2025, this is, you know—”
Psaki interjected with “scary” as Meyers rolled on, “the plan of what the Trump Administration in its second time around wants to do. Have you ever seen anything like it? How outside the norm is this?”
An adjective-addicted Psaki began, “Way crazy, whackadoodle, insane, outside of the norm. You know, when it’s 900 pages, it’s on the Heritage website, and you can read it should you choose. If you’re not asleep, just because it’s long, it will scare the hell out of you. Because there’s a lot of pieces in there. I mean, overall, there’s a lot of things in there like mass deportations, camps, all sorts of things that are frightening and scary and alarming and not who we are.”
Nicholas Fondacaro obsessed over similar criticism during his daily hate-watch of “The View”:
Desperate to shift the public’s attention away from President Biden’s collapsing mental faculties, ABC’s The View kicked off their Friday episode by parroting the Biden campaign’s fearmongering talking points about Project 2025; following Biden’s lead from his train wreck of press conference the previous evening. According to The View, it was the plan to subjugate America and “starve” children.
Ignoring how Biden had introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin” at the NATO summit, and how he somehow confused his vice president, Kamala Harris, with former President Trump, moderator Joy Behar wanted them to focus on something completely different. “So, has anyone out there heard of Project 2025? You can clap if you’ve heard of it,” she instructed the audience.
“Good. See, our audience is very advanced. They read, they know. But a lot of people don’t know about it, so I’m here to tell you what it is,” Behar praised them after they were done clapping.
According to Behar’s hysteria, which she presented without evidence, “It’s a far-right plan for destroying democracy that Trump’s team wants to implement on day one. Let me count the ways. They want to ban abortion, starve schoolchildren, eliminating breakfast and lunch for school kids, they want to have mass deportations of immigrants, they want to gut health care.”
“This is all just for starters,” she proclaimed. “It’s the blueprint for a fascist regime…”
[…]What supposedly scared her most was that Trump claimed he didn’t know anything about it. Yet, they were so petrified by Project 2025 that they were able to joke that Trump was incapable of reading its 900 pages:
A July 17 post by Curtis Houck included “They’re lying about their Project 2025” as an example of supposedly “incendiary rhetoric” by President Biden in the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump. Michael Wnek groused about a “doomsday report” report on Project 2025 in a post the same day:
ABC’s Good Morning America devoted a lengthy segment during Wednesday morning’s episode to a doomsday report about Project 2025. Chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl presented a long-winded analysis of the Heritage Foundation’s initiative, drawing particular attention to the alleged threats to freedom it posed.
Karl introduced Project 2025 as “created by some of Donald Trump’s most important advisers as a blueprint for what he could do if he gets back into the White House again” before transitioning to a clip of President Joe Biden’s denouncement of the plan. “Project 2025 is the biggest attack on our system of government and our personal freedom that–that’s ever been proposed in the history of this country,” the president howled.
Karl further insisted that “the 920-page plan would dramatically remake the American government and American lives,” citing Steve Bannon’s explanation of the Project’s plan to dismantle the administrative state and emphasizing the points he viewed as most especially menacing to what Biden referred to as “our personal freedom”:
Wnek then actually cheered the project, undermining his employer’s distancing campaign: “Of course, ABC knew that a unified and more prepared Trump administration, resulting from Project 2025’s efforts, would spell disaster for liberal agendas that had survived unchallenged for so many years, hence their panicked smear of the initiative.” But Wnek did not identify any actual “smear.”
Clay Waters complained in a July 18 post it was pointed out that Heritage officials tied to Project 2025 are spreading other conspiracy theories:
The segment closed with Barron-Lopez raising up a familiar left-wing scarecrow, the Heritage Foundation (creators of the feared and loathed but rarely read Project 2025). Barron-Lopez ranted:
This is part of a larger effort, Geoff, to sow doubt about America’s election system, to convince the electorate that the country’s system can’t be trusted and that the — and that, if Donald Trump were to lose, that that result is not legitimate. And an example of this comes from Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that has issued a blueprint for a potential second Trump term. Mike Howell, executive director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, said recently at an event that: “As things stand right now, there is a zero percent chance of a free and fair election in the United States of America.” And that transition report from Heritage Foundation also claimed — without any evidence — that President Biden will retain power quote, “by force” and that President Biden will disregard the will of the voters, whatever the ultimate result is. Some fear from election security experts that I have spoken to is that what happens with all this disinformation if Donald Trump were to lose, that it could potentially result in some political violence in the end, Geoff.
(Surprise: The transition report itself is a bit more nuanced than that breathless rendering; the threat is posed as a hypothetical, not a certainty.)
Waters didn’t mention that it was a Republican president — Trump — who tried to disregard the will of the voters in 2020.
Mary Clare Waldron rushed to defend Trump from Project 2025 from then-Biden campaign official Quentin Fulks in a July 19 post:
Throughout the interview, Fulks slipped up, stating Trump had “doubled down on an extreme agenda, talking about ripping away women’s reproductive freedoms, talking about gutting things like social security and medicare, and bringing in a new plan like Project 2025.”
In reality, Trump did the opposite. He never once mentioned anything regarding reproductive health, or Project 2025, a point which was brought up by networks following the speech.
Still in defense mode, Waldron declared that “On Social Security and Medicare, the former president stated he will protect both” while ignoring that he has made inconsistent and contradictory statements on the issue.