Surprisingly, WorldNetDaily did not do a whole lot about Project 2025, either in touting it or helping Donald Trump distance himself from it. Michael Brown took a shot in his July 24 column:
What on earth is Project 2025, and why has it become such a talking point for the presidential elections? According to former President Trump, he knows nothing about it, other than that it represents the worst of the radical right. In contrast, immediately after being endorsed by President Biden to take his spot in the elections, Vice President Harris stated, “My intention is to earn and win this nomination. I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party – and unite our nation – to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda.”
We have now have two questions: What is Project 2025? And why has it become a political football? (One news report claims that in the last week, Project 2025 has been searched for online more than Taylor Swift!)
To indicate just how deeply Trump has distanced himself from the project, he stated over the weekend, “Some on the right, the severe right, came up with this Project 2025. You have the radical left and you have the radical right. You read some of the things and they are extreme. They are seriously extreme.”
He also said, “I don’t know what the hell it is this Project 25. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it.”
Two weeks earlier, on July 5, he posted on his Truth social network: “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
Talk about getting dissed.
In stark contrast, a July 15 article in the New York Times by Paul Krugman is titled, “Don’t Lose Sight of Project 2025. That’s the Real Trump.”
Brown ultimately decided to play dumb:
Personally, I cannot comment on the contents of Project 2025, both because of its length and because it touches on many areas outside of any areas of expertise I have.
What is clear is that: 1) from day one, Trump’s opponents were going to accuse him of having a radical, rightwing, Christian nationalist agenda, the latest version of the lie that “all Trump supporters are dangerous, white supremacist, religious fanatics and insurrectionists”; 2) Trump saw this coming and completely trashed Project 2025.
Either way, Trump apparently believes that Christian conservatives have nowhere else to go, and the more he can downplay the “radical right” allegations, the better chance he has of getting elected. This is politics at its rawest: Tell people what they want to hear in order to get their vote.
For the Democrats, this means fearmongering in the extreme, throwing every possible accusation at Trump in the hope that something will stick. For Trump, it means running as far as possible from those accusations, even at the expense of historic relationships, not to mention truth itself.
As if Brown and other Republicans have never fearmongered about Democrats.
Bucky Fox’s Oct. 15 column ignored Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025 and proclaimed it to be awesome:
The meat of Project 2025 is a feast for President Donald Trump to devour upon taking office on Jan. 20. The Heritage Foundation wrote it and titled it “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.”
Most of it is a reflection of Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda, and indeed it’ll help the country do a U-turn before driving off the left-hand cliff.
But who has seen the project’s substance? Trump swears he hasn’t. His America First crowd treats it like cyanide because of one lonely corner raising the alarm about abortion pills.
Why the panic? Because Vice President Kamala Harris’ pinko team paints it as a psycho manifesto even though the project states the obvious: “Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.”
Instead of cowering versus the roaring radicals, Republicans should stand tall with a spine and cheer the brilliance of Project 2025-29. Add those years because in reality, President Trump will push its champion aspects throughout his second term.
Rachel Alexander played both sides in her Oct. 28 column, noting Trump’s disavowal while endorsing Project 2025:
The left is incessantly bringing up Project 2025, attempting to tie the conservative strategic plan to Donald Trump in order to hurt him in the election. One of my leftist friends insists over and over that I read all 922 pages of it – he hasn’t bothered to – ominously warning that it is a plan for fascism. But it’s a whole bunch of to-do about nothing.
Project 2025 was created by the respected, longtime conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, not exactly a fringe organization. The plan covers typical topics for conservatives – primarily securing the border, energy independence, education and dismantling the deep state.
Even the leftist USA Today’s fact checkers rated it false that Trump is connected to Project 2025. Trump has said repeatedly, over and over, that he has nothing to do with Project 2025, and even called some of the proposals in it “abysmal.”
The main accusation about Project 2025 appears to be that it would give the executive branch additional power. What it would do is ensure that there aren’t rogue agencies under that branch, such as what Trump encountered with some of his appointees like Attorney General Bill Barr. Barr refused to authorize U.S. Attorneys to investigate the 2020 election anomalies, instead declaring without looking into them that there weren’t any problems.
There’s nothing illegal about this reorganization of the executive branch; even the BBC admitted it’s known as “unitary executive theory.” However, the station spun the rest of its description, stating that “independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, be placed under direct presidential control.” Well, there’s nothing in the Constitution that says executive branch agencies were ever supposed to be independent.
Alexander concluded by huffing that Democrats said mean things about Project 2025 even though there is purportedly nothing extreme in it:
Joe Biden posted on X that Project 2025 “will destroy America.” Harris said during a speech that “Project 2025 is a plan to return America to a dark past.”
It is no different than how the left is trying to make MAGA a bad word. MAGA is synonymous with conservative Republicans. But since it’s a new, different word, they are focusing on it as a bogeyman, trying to fool people into thinking it’s not just standard conservatism, but something nefarious. The ACLU said that Project 2025 is a “a roadmap for how to replace the rule of law with right-wing ideals.” How is this any different than its attitude toward ANY conservative viewpoint?
If the MSM were honest, which they’re not, articles about Project 2025 would be titled “Conservative Groups Issue Expected, Regular, Updated List of Conservative Recommendations for a Trump Presidency.” Heck, they could even be critical about it and note that there’s not much new in there; it’s much of the same conservative agenda that has been in place the last few years.
The lies about Project 2025 have spread so much that the group issued its own fact check refuting many of them. Elon Musk posted a meme on X a couple of days ago that said “Project 2025 is just QAnon for lefties.”
While the left may have successfully made Project 2025 into a bogeyman, causing Trump and others to distance themselves, don’t forget it’s just yet another super sneaky, sleazy way the left is coming after standard conservative principles to falsely discredit them.
But if Democrats have so fearmongered about it that Trump felt compelled to distance himself from it, doesn’t that mean he’s a weak leader? Alexander doesn’t explore that further.