Media Not Seeing the Forest for the Lies
When Donald Trump denies something, you should always take it as a full confession of his absolute guilt.
Donald Trump is lying about Project 2025.
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Too many in the media are following the time-worn game trail of accepting Trump’s latest lie, then repeating the lie, and then ignoring the implications of what’s staring them in the face.
The Project 2025 story should never have been the denial but the lie of the denial.
One of the few stories that got it right came from
The Daily Beast: Trump Ripped for Denying Project 2025 Connections Despite the Evidence. We deserved a front-pager on this one from the
New York Times, but they were too busy running the 4,502th story about The Frenzy. The
Washington Post Editorial Board likewise deserves credit for a
blistering takedown.
That Donald Trump is lying about his knowledge of and his campaign’s intimate connections to Project 2025 is unsurprising.
After all, the man is the most notorious pathological liar in the history of this nation. Project 2025 is deeply wired into the DNA of the Trump campaign and is the accepted roadmap for a new Trump government.
Before anyone says, “All politicians lie,” you’re right.
I hope you’ll understand at this late stage of the game that Trump is in a category of mendacity all to himself. Ronald Reagan told some pretty loose anecdotes. Bill Clinton is a world-class, affable bullshitter. Richard Nixon was…well, Richard Nixon. Even Joe Biden hasn’t always hewn to the hard line of literal truth.
Donald Trump takes the truth as a hostage, beats it to death, mutilates the body, eats the organs in a cannibal blood frenzy, and leaves its bloody corpse in the middle of the street with a note tied around its neck saying, “I, Donald J. Trump, did this. Catch me if you can.”
We are numb to the lies because the media has never genuinely reckoned with their corrosive harm and continues to treat Trump’s lies as one half of a rational exchange of ideas instead of the ongoing manipulations of a pernicious sociopath.
I was able to confirm late last week that this decision by Trump to condemn Project 2025 was a deliberate effort prepared by campaign strategist Chris LaCivita and Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio after research came back showing that Project 2025 is poisonous with groups outside the hardest core of the MAGA base. The same research led the
Trump campaign to demand that the RNC remove the
national abortion ban plank (and other policy statements) from the 2024 GOP Platform.
The 2024 Trump campaign is less leaky than 2016 or 2020, but it tends to brag more to people it
thinks are allies. In this case, a mid-tier staffer boasted about how clever Trump’s team was in defusing this potentially radioactive political issue, knowing
the press would take the bait and write the headlines and stories the campaign wanted.
This is a warning to the Democrats I’ve been banging on about since last year: Trump’s 2024 campaign isn’t the clown car of absurd figures like Brad Parscale, Corey Lewandowski, Kellyanne Conway, and others. These are serious people who know how to win. While the Democrats squabble and play
West Wing fantasy football, Rome is burning, and Trump’s campaign is holding the torch.
So, yes, reporters largely wrote the stories, and headline writers wrote the headlines the Trump campaign wanted, even knowing it was a lie. Few of them weighed in about the context of the lie embedded in the denial, but again, the story should have been about the lie and how easily disproven it is. A few outlets got it right.
Nine long years in, one of the most powerful tools in Trump’s political arsenal remains the short- and long-term media amnesia to the Library of Congress catalog of his lies. He never, ever, ever stops lying, and they never, ever stop falling for it.
Just who’s involved with Project 2025?
Oh, you know, interns and coffee boys Trump has never, ever met like Stephen Miller (R-Transylvania), Mark Meadows (Former Chief of Staff and Fireplace Aficionado), Johnny McEntee (R-Degenerate Gambler), Russ Vaught (Former OMB head), Paul Dans, Spencer Chetrien, and Troup Hemenway are all former Trump White House or Administration aides.
They’re all scrambling to deny it. Suddenly, Project 2025 gets the “Who? What? Never met him” treatment, but it’s not working.
Johnny McEntee is the ultimate Trump
Nationalsozialistischer Führungsoffizier and talent-picker for Trump 2.0 and 2025 is stuck; in 2023 he was hired by Heritage for…wait for it…Project 2025. I’m shocked!
”Ex-Trump aide John McEntee joins Heritage operation as senior adviser” seems like a pretty definitive connection, don’t you think? Again, reporters covering this story know McEntee’s position in the Trump food chain and know the denials ring hollow.
Russ Vaught, who helped write Project 2025 is now the man in charge of — and stop me if you’re surprised about this — writing the Republican Party platform. I mean, it’s
such a coincidence.
Stephen Miller denied any ties to Project 2025 and yet here he is in a
Heritage Foundation video promoting…wait for it…Project 2025. (See those two books on the table? They’re old editions of the Heritage Foundation’s
Mandate for Leadership, a kind of proto-Project 2025 that started in 1979. Fun fact: Jack Eckerd, who helped kick off version 1.0 of
Mandate was a family friend.)
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Every reporter covering this story knows Trump’s entire political team is deeply integrated into the Project 2025 infrastructure. Yet a week from now, they’ll respond to anyone who shows the connections between Trump and Project 2025 with, “He denied it.”
Project 2025 is Trump’s roadmap, written by Trump loyalists and embraced by Trump’s constellation of sycophants, fellow travelers, hangers-on, and job seekers. It will be the driving force of what Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts boasted was “…a second American revolution.” (Also, in keeping with all things MAGA, Roberts dropped an unsubtle threat into the statement, adding the revolution would be “bloodless if the left allows it to be.”)
He’s right. Donald Trump’s return to power would be marked by the most expansive view of the role of the executive than at any other point in American history. It will expressly and overtly hand over to the Trump Administration a clearly stated roadmap to shred the rule of law, remove all executive restraint, and target Trump’s political opponents.
It also has the added feature of ending 250 years of religious tolerance, placing evangelical Christian nationalism in the very center of American policymaking. If you think the evangelical right has gotten what it wants yet, think again. They’re just getting started.
Philip Bump noted,
“The target of the right’s ‘revolution’ is pluralistic democracy itself.” He’s right.
Lest you think Project 2025 is the only part of the massive conglomerate of Trump-centered plans for a revolutionary reversal of rights, liberties, and democracy, consider one more example. The American Accountability Foundation is creating a hit list of Federal employees to be doxxed, exposed, targeted, and fired in the Trump administration.
Oh, a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, you say? Well, that is a
striking coincidence.
Even Trump’s campaign statements about his
“Agenda 47” are a gumbo of Trumpian populist excesses and deserve as much scrutiny as Project 2025. The
New York Times “If Trump Wins” piece also breaks down a series of policy ideas and plans that map
directly onto Project 2025’s agenda.
Too many Americans still miss
why Project 2025 is such a dangerous plan. It was dangerous enough before the Supreme Court’s new ruling granting Donald Trump immunity from any future legal sanction for his past and inevitable future abuses of power.
Now, there’s nothing to stop Donald Trump if he returns to power.
Leonard Leo’s Supreme Court is a rubber stamp. Republicans in the Senate? I’m sure when the arrests begin, Susan Collins will whinge about Trump learning his lesson from her sternly worded letter. Republicans in the House will be (Inshallah) in a minority but remain in lockstep with Trump no matter what excesses are ordered. The vaunted GOP Establishment or money classes? MAGA
is the Establishment now, and the money people would kill their children for a tax cut.
Upgrade to paid
The vast, seething mass of MAGA, Christian nationalists, monarchists, minarchists, kleptocrats,
blut-and-boden boys, and Red Ceasar activists smell blood in the water. They won’t make the mistakes of the first administration by allowing the grownups into the room or listening to the lawyers and experts about trivialities like legality or Constitutionality. They’re sprinting for a finish line that the Democrats and the media seem scared even to acknowledge.
Even those who see the immensity of the threat are locked in their “Must Remove Biden” frenzy and will remain there until the clicks driven by the story fade.
Trumpism has a cohesive, terrible set of plans, policies, and ideas with the singular goal of wildly expanding executive power, destroying the ability of anyone in or out of government to resist his illegal, unwise, or un-Constitutional ideas. For all that Republicans love to bleat, “We’re a Constitutional Republic, not a democracy,” Trump will kill
that part as well in an autocratic power grab from hell.
It doesn’t matter who writes the documents or which Trump-world ally or enabler crafts the policies; they will be put into action the moment he’s elected. The story of the July denial will “no longer be operative” when the firings begin, and the policy changes will be word for word from Project 2025.
Trump’s long obsession with dictators and his desire to be one himself is a matter of record.
With Project 2025, he finally has the roadmap to be one himself.
