The Project 2025 Protection Project

As the Heritage Foundation's right-wing plan to blow up government faced criticism for its extreme positions and links to Donald Trump, the Media Research Center went into defense mode over it.

As Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s right-wing plan for blowing up government to turn it into a right-wing autocracy — started getting attention, Media Research Center executive Tim Graham spent his March 13 column complaining that all this was being exposed, even though it was hiding in plain sight in the form of a massive book by a right-wing activist group:

The Heritage Foundation has been issuing its doorstop-length “Mandate for Leadership” books since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. But this is the first one that has inflamed The New York Times into painting it as a manual for autocracy.

On the March 8 edition of PBS’s Washington Week With The Atlantic, moderator Jeffrey “Obama Is Awesome” Goldberg cued up Times book reviewer Carlos Lozada to discuss his article “What I Learned When I Read 887 Pages of Plans for Trump’s Second Term.”

What surely delighted Goldberg was Lozada’s hot take. The Heritage book is “not about anything as simplistic as being dictator for a day, but about consolidating authority and eroding accountability for the long haul.”

Note that Graham refuses to use the more popular name for Heritage’s plan — Project 2025. Perhaps he feels it’s been demonized to the point that he must use its more formal (and deceptively boring) name. But what really angers Graham is that bureaucrats exposed how the Trump administration was trying to ruin the government:

Here’s what is unsaid. Conservatives would like to impose more political appointees on the executive branch because they feel the permanent bureaucracy is stacked with “progressives” who treat conservative presidencies as an occasion for clandestine warfare. 

Under Trump, both career appointees and political appointees leaked to liberal media outlets with all kinds of anonymous “resistance.” One wrote a New York Times op-ed and then a book under the byline “Anonymous.” The author later revealed himself as political appointee Miles Taylor, who was barely 30 when he became a deputy chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security.

As Lozada noted in reviewing the “Anonymous” book, it was full of “stuff we already know.” It was written to be bought by Trump haters who loved MSNBC-guest snark like Trump is “like a twelve-year old in an air-traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately.”

This, we know, is what Lozada means by “eroding accountability,” making it harder for liberal rags like The New York Times to undermine the Republican president from within. No one on PBS is going to ask him if anonymous sourcing “erodes accountability.” Because “accountability” is a one-way street for them.

At no point does Graham dispute anything that Taylor wrote about the Trump administration — he’s just mad that it was exposed. Nor does he engage in any substantive critique of what Lozada said. He then served up right-wing “lawfare” talking points:

Under Biden, liberal journalists are expected to preach the most preposterous gospels. Lozada proclaimed on taxpayer-supported TV that the Heritage team wants “to politicize the Justice Department…It’s very overt. They emphasize how, for instance, the White House Counsel’s Office and the DOJ have to work as a team. That’s a quote.”

The “accountability” specialists of the pro-Biden media somehow can’t concede that the Biden Justice Department is aggressively prosecuting their opponent as a campaign strategy. Their press statements boast how their prosecutions in the January 6 riot are massive and still unloading indictments.

Graham didn’t explain why Donald Trump is above the law and must be held immune from prosecution for his crimes, or why running for president is some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. He concluded by serving up another conspiracy theory:

The Heritage folks are not wrong to assert that the Left controls the permanent bureaucracy and they’re very upset that conservatives have gotten organized. Other Republican presidents have taken their “Mandate” seriously, but the “Deep State” – especially defined as the anonymous sources perennially pushing statism – remains an entrenched and powerful foe. 

Ah, yes, the dreaded “deep state” bogeyman. Graham seems to be proving that the MRC is sliding further to the right.

Pretending Project 2025 isn’t radical

As attention grew about Project 2025, 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.

Heritage president’s gaffe

As the MRC was deflecting from Project 2025, it also it had spend time deflecting from Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who said that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be” — which sure sounds a lot like a plan to repress dissent if Donald Trump wins that second term. The MRC, of course, chose to serve up a Roberts-friendly interpretation that was an attack on his critics and those of Trump. Graham huffed in a July 6 post that “The Democrats seized on the comments of Kevin Roberts, who was describing the tendency of the Left to riot. In reaction, the Heritage Foundation tweeted a video full of Democrat talk of violence and support of the rioting in 2020.” Graham whined that MSNBC host Amna Nawaz portrayed Trump as an “antidemocratic candidate with authoritarian tendencies,” and that her friends allegedly didn’t see that “relentlessly comparing Trump to Hitler is alarming or inflammatory.”

In a July 7 post, Mark Finkelstein cheered that Marco Rubio weaseled out of answering a question about Roberts’ remarks and played whataboutism instead:

Bash tried to put Rubio on the spot. She played a clip of a leader of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 saying “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be,” and asked Rubio if he were comfortable with that. Rubio made the obvious and devastating reply: “Well, he’s not running for president, is he? Our candidate is Donald Trump, and he’s running on restoring common sense and working-class values.” He pointed out that in contrast, many of the lunatic ideas of the far left have actually become the policies of the Biden administration.

After that, though, it was back to defending Project 2025 itself. Waters cheered in a July 10 post that the one of the project’s goals is to defund (and, thus, effectively censor) public broadcasting:

The Heritage Foundation’s attention-getting Project 2025 initiative, which so far has been more fear-mongered about than actually described, includes a blueprint of limited-government policy proposals for limited government, the 900-page “2025 Mandate for Leadership.” Among those proposals for the next president to peruse is a call to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds the liberal forums PBS (the Public Broadcasting “Service”) and National Public Radio on the taxpayer’s nickel.

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and member of the Free Speech Alliance led by the Media Research Center, laid out the case for denying federal money to those liberal outlets and provided historical context for defunding, noting that “Every Republican President since Richard Nixon has tried to strip the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) of taxpayer funding.” And, has failed.

Gonzalez argued “the government should not be compelling the conservative half of the country to pay for the suppression of its own views,” and noted that “PBS and NPR do not even bother to run programming that would attract conservatives. And those conservatives are tuning out the programming they are obliged to support through their taxes.

[…]

Defunding would also strip National Public Radio (and other, even further-left publicly funded entities like Pacifica Radio) of the advantage of being an official “noncommercial educational” (NCE) radio station, such as better placement on the radio dial and exemption from licensing fees.

Neither Waters nor Gonzalez explained why they approve of censorship of views they don’t agree with, or why public broadcasting must be forced to become right-wing propaganda.

The same day, Michael Wnek complained that MSNBC’s Joy Reid claimed that “warned that Republicans would elect Trump ‘as their Project 2025 dictator marionette, and the Leonard Leo Supreme Court conservatives as their star chamber.'” Wnek didn’t counter that claim.

Christy used a July 11 post to downplay the importance of Project 2025 after a discussion of it on Stephen Colbert’s show:

Like so many on the left, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has become shorthand for the supposed nightmare that will fall on America should Trump win:

[…]

In the real world, Project 2025 is just Heritage’s fancy name for its quadrennial Mandate for Leadership that it releases every four years as its wish list should the Republican win the presidential election.

The same day, Mary Clare Waldron lashed out at CNN’s Jim Acosta — a frequent MRC target — for talking about Project 2025:

As President Biden’s blunders flood the news, CNN Newsroom host Jim Acosta tried to switch the conversation back to Donald Trump on Thursday. As the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has been used to fearmonger in the past few weeks, Scott Jennings, political commentator for the network, took to the air to defend Trump, calling out Acosta’s agenda and the left in one fell swoop.

Following a “detailed” look at Project 2025, Acosta questioned Jennings on the number of conservatives who are part of the project:

[…]

Jennings, calling out the simpleminded argument of Acosta, stated plainly, “They’re not the president, they’re not running for president. Heritage Foundation doesn’t appear on the ballot. The people working on this don’t appear on the ballot.”

It is not surprising that conservatives, being of a common mind, would be in similar circles. Yet, they aren’t synonymous, a point Acosta does not understand, so it fell to Jennings to educate him:

Waldron didn’t mention that her employer has used the same “simpleminded argument” to accuse all Democrats of supporting Hamas or Black Lives Matter.

More defend-and-deflect

As July continued, the Media Research Center continued to be in defend-and-deflect mode, following the lead of Trump’s claimed disavowal of the project even though dozens of Trump administration officials played key roles in drafting it. 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.