Gina M Randazzo/Zuma
For the entirety of his political life, Trump has deployed a strategy of pumping endless toxic content into the political ecosystem, leaving the press and his opponents scrambling to keep up. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign marveled at all of Trump’s disqualifying ravings—until they realized she was drowning in them. With another outrageous tweet always coming, nothing stuck to him, as each controversy was forgotten when Trump tossed his next shiny object. Trump defined his opponent, and no one could land a punch on him.
Over the years, several commentators have analogized the situation to a classic episode of The Simpsons in which local villain Montgomery Burns is diagnosed with literally every disease. But rather than do him in, the illnesses crowd each other out, preventing any single one from taking hold. Being that sick, it turns out, made Burns invincible.
Project 2025 has done what Democrats tried to for years: tie Trump to unpopular MAGA policies.
Similarly, this election cycle, Democrats deployed multiple attack lines to try to disqualify Trump. They’ve called him a threat to democracy, since he tried to overturn the last election. They’ve called him a felon, after he was found guilty of 34 felonies in New York.
But it turns out the political attack that is catching, finally, is one that Trump’s own allies came up with. It is Project 2025, the authoritarian blueprint for a second Trump presidency, that has finally broken through. In 922 pages, the project, helmed by the staunchly conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, outlines a radical restructuring of the federal government that combines the authoritarian goals of the MAGA movement with the deregulatory dreams of America’s plutocrats.
For Trump opponents, the problem “has never been a lack of abhorrent things,” says Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist. “It’s been the inability to communicate them, because there are so many. It’s hard to find the needle in a haystack, it’s also hard to communicate the entire haystack…until they boiled it down into a 920-page instruction manual.”
Data shows how fears of Project 2025 are catching on. In June, less than 30 percent of Americans said they knew about it, according to the progressive polling outfit Navigator Research. A month later, 54 percent said they did—and 45 percent believed that it accurately describes Trump’s goals.
In an indication of the project’s growing prominence, when Navigator asked people to name negative things they had heard about Trump off the top of their head, Project 2025 was one of the top responses. And in an indication voters know the effort is tied to the former president, when respondents were then asked to name negative things they had heard about Project 2025, his name came up the most.
Project 2025 has done what Democrats tried to do for years: tie Trump to the unpopular policies of the MAGA coalition, from the Christian nationalists trying to ban abortion and IVF to the mega-rich trying to give themselves more tax breaks. “If you’re a person who is deeply upset by Roe being overturned in 2022, this is a roadmap of everything that can be done to further curtail reproductive rights,” says Bryan Bennett, a pollster at the progressive Hub Project, which works alongside Navigator on its surveys. “If you are an advocate for a more fair economy, this is a roadmap for raising tax on the middle class and working class while giving tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations. If you are a healthcare advocate, this goes into excruciating detail about how to roll back and undermine things like the Affordable Care Act.”
Essentially, the Heritage Foundation took all the unlikeable goals of the MAGA movement, put them in one place, and gave it an ominous title. To help make these goals into reality, the project also created an action plan covering the first 180-days of a new administration, a database of personnel ready to replace career civil servants, and a training program to prepare them for this massive restructuring.
Heritage took all of MAGA’s unlikeable goals, put them in one place, and gave it an ominous title.
The document was crafted by people in Trump’s orbit—many who were in his last administration and who plan to work for him again—and proscribes dismantling most agencies’ core work: HHS would be used to end abortion access; DOJ would be used to prosecute Trump’s enemies; pollution would skyrocket after an EPA overhaul; and the Department of Education would be shuttered. Together, the sheer volume of information in Project 2025 is easily distilled into something easy to comprehend and sinister: it’s a takeover.
What happened in about a three week period to make Project 2025 go viral? Bennett thinks President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance on June 27 was a catalyst. As Trump became the strong favorite overnight, a natural question arose: What would really happen in a new Trump administration? Project 2025 was there to answer and was online for anyone to read. Organically, it began to get traction on TikTok, with Navigator finding, in a focus group of voters under 30, that most had heard about the project from online sharing platforms. “I’ve only seen it a lot on social media,” one focus group participant, a Democrat, said in July. “From what it sounds like, it doesn’t sound good.”
Democrats have also benefited from a ratchet effect: the more Trump has tried to distance himself from the plan, the more the media has exposed his ties to the project. “I have no idea who is behind it,” he posted on social media, kicking off a round of news stories covering Trump allies who worked on Project 2025: by CNN’s count, over 140 of his former administration officials helped write the plan. Former Trump cabinet secretary Russ Vought, for example, helped oversee Project 2025 and also ran the 2024 Republican National Convention’s platform committee. On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that Trump discussed Project 2025 while on a private plane flight with Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, on the way to a 2022 conference hosted by the organization. After they arrived, Trump gave a speech boasting that the think tank would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
Trump gave the story another foothold when he selected Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate. Ideologically, Vance has aligned himself with the far-right social policies of the Project 2025 coalition and the revolutionary rhetoric of Roberts. Vance has called for “fir[ing] every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people”—just as Project 2025 urges. After he was tapped, attention focused on how he had had written the foreword to Kevin Roberts’ upcoming book. Some outlets obtained copies, and began publishing excerpts. Roberts then delayed publication of his book until after the election, a move that suggested they somehow wanted to hide it, fueling yet more interest. “If Project 2025 could manifest itself as a human being,” says Ferguson, “it would manifest JD Vance.”
Polling shows that Project 2025 has the promise to define Trump’s campaign if it stays in the public eye. But Trump, by returning to his old tricks, may be able to push Project 2025 out of the spotlight.
On Thursday, he gave a freewheeling, hour-long press conference at Mar-a-Lago. He said many things that are imprudent for a presidential nominee to say. It was vintage Trump: insulting, untrue, and narcissistic. He demeaned Jewish people, lied about the 2020 election transition being peaceful, and falsely claimed his rally crowd on January 6 was larger than the one that turned out to see Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington (it wasn’t). On and on he went. Just like in 2016, it appeared that an avalanche of gold was falling on Democrats. Look at all the crazy stuff he is saying!
But avalanches kill—and Trump has demonstrated he knows how to bury his opponents while all the muck slides off of him.
