Portside

As the political press obsessed over President Joe Biden’s reelection plans earlier this summer, a curious phenomenon developed on TikTok and other social media outlets. Fueled by a new generation of online activists, everyday people began poring over Project 2025, a then-obscure document from conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. 

Despite receiving almost no coverage from the mainstream press, the extensive blueprint for an autocratic government produced by more than 140 current or former members of Donald Trump’s campaign and White House staff went viral. The result: People were so terrified and the electorate found Project 2025 so repulsive that Trump has spent the past two months running away from it. 

The Heritage Foundation is now pretending to shut down the project, and Trump is pretending that the issue is going to go away. It’s not. 

The general public’s awareness of Project 2025 is remarkable. An early July poll by YouGov found that about one-half of U.S. adults had heard of it. Of course, people lie to pollsters all the time about what they know or don’t know, so even if the actual number is half that, we’d be talking about one-quarter of the nation’s 260 million adults, or 65 million people. 

According to the YouGov poll, Project 2025 had a 13% favorable and 64% unfavorable rating. Among independents, it was 7% favorable and 38% unfavorable. Even among Republicans, 12% viewed it unfavorably.

Navigator has also polled it. At the end of June, the polling firm found that Project 2025 had a 10% favorable and 19% unfavorable rating. By mid-July, that favorable number stayed steady at 11%, 43% while the unfavorable rating jumped to 43%. 

Remember, that shift happened despite a dearth of coverage from the traditional media. Though to be fair, it didn’t hurt when Trump gave Project 2025 a boost via the “Streisand Effect”: His feigned ignorance of the plan and the people behind it only served to bring more attention to the shady scheme.

Trump has repeatedly denied any connection to Project 2025, fully sensing the damage it is doing to his campaign. 

But the widespread disdain seems to have gone beyond the substance of the plan and morphed into much broader bad vibes. Anecdotally, I’ve had several people mention how terrible Project 2025 is. But when I ask them for specifics about what’s in it, they don’t know any details beyond some of the obvious targets (e.g. abortion restrictions) even though outlets as mainstream as People Magazine have jumped into the fray to inform readers.

Voters don’t need to know exactly what’s in it: Project 2025 has become a catch-all term for every horror that conservatives want to inflict on our country, and quite frankly, they’re not wrong. It is a horror show. 

Trump picked up on that fact as soon as it started to go viral. So what to do? 

In what seems like an orchestrated effort, Project 2025 director Paul Dans has reportedly stepped down, and talk of “pressure” from the Trump campaign has prompted political reporters like The Daily Beast’s Roger Sollenberger to tweet, “This suggests Project 2025 will likely shut down.” 

There are two problems with that. The first is that Project 2025 doesn’t consist of some guy sitting in an office at The Heritage Foundation’s headquarters. It’s an extremely detailed blueprint, and it has already been released. You don’t “shut down” a blueprint. Trump and his extremist cronies have their roadmap for the complete remaking of the federal government, and it’s ready to go if Republicans retake the White House in November.

Secondly, there is a lesser-known component to Project 2025: a database of 20,000 conservative minions ready to be hired and eager to implement the blueprint’s tenets. And according to The Washington Post, that terrifying list isn’t getting “shut down.” 

Hilariously, the Trump campaign claims this news should put to rest any and all further discussion about Project 2025. 

“President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” the Trump campaign said in a Tuesday statement. “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.”

These weird threats won’t do anything to hide the plain truth: Trump’s cabal is the embodiment of Project 2025. Pretending to fire the director and “close down” the project (while keeping that creepy database alive) won’t change a thing. 

Conservatives were so cocky that they revealed their entire deranged agenda in that 900-page blueprint. There’s no running away from it now. 

[Markos Moulitsas Zúniga is the founder of the Daily Kos political blog. He is also the coauthor of Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics and has appeared frequently in the media.]