An interesting thing happened while I was ignoring the news of the weekend—I do not find long-distance neurological diagnoses delivered by amateurs from a bar in Dupont Circle to be either edifying or entertaining, and besides, Rafael Devers was lighting the Yankees on fire—and I consider it worthy of note. In the middle of the feeding frenzy over the president’s debate performance, the Republicans began to evince some real jelly in the belly and a freeze in their knees. It began a week ago Sunday, when actress Taraji P. Henson, while hosting the annual BET Awards, took the time to warn the audience of the perils of Project 2025, the nine-hundred-page transcription of Newt Gingrich’s last 250 wet dreams that is the game plan for an El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago Restoration come next January. From The Wrap:
Henson spoke out against the project to the BET Awards’ predominantly Black audience, noting, “They are trying to bring the draft back. Who do you think they’re going to draft first?...Our careers, our next generations to come. Did you know that it is now a crime to be homeless? Pay attention. It’s not a secret, look it up. They are attacking our most vulnerable citizens,” she said. “The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!” She then called on non-voters to get out and vote. “I’m not trying to scare us; I’m trying to inform us. We’ve got three Supreme Court seats up, you guys. We need those seats or we have no protection,” she said. “Okay, I got it out of my system. I’m talking to all the mad people that don’t want to vote. You’re going to be mad about a lot of things if you don’t vote.”
I feel fairly sure that the former president* wasn’t watching the BET Awards, and that neither was Stephen Miller, that appalling Gauleiter, except possibly for the purpose of compiling a list of people he’d like to send to a camp one day. But they surely acted as though the mention of Project 2025 shot about fifty thousand volts up their hindquarters. The former president* denied knowing anything about Project 2025, despite the fact that its upper echelons are lousy—in every sense of the word—with people who worked for him in the White House. And Miller professed similar ignorance, despite the fact that he lent his crepuscular visage to its promotional material. As Will Bunch noted in The Philadelphia Inquirer:
In fact, Trump’s campaign press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, even appears in a video for Project 2025 as it seeks to recruit would-be government employees for a second Trump administration. Other highest-level Trump advisers involved with Project 2025 include a potential Trump 47 chief of staff, Russell T. Vought, who was Trump 45’s final budget chief, and John McEntee, who was Trump’s White House chief of personnel and architect of the plan to install MAGA loyalists. One report found that 25 of the 36 Project 2025 authors have ties to the Trump White House or his current campaign. Trump himself has twice lauded the Heritage Foundation’s Roberts at public events this year, making a mockery of the candidate’s claim that he has no idea who is really behind Project 2025.
Other prominent Republicans found the microchip placed in their brains by the MAGA crowd suddenly activated as well. Take, for example, Sen. Marco Rubio, the Incredible Shrinking Lawmaker. From Rolling Stone:
“Think tanks do think tank stuff. They come up with ideas. They say things,” Rubio said on CNN’s State of the Union, denying involvement with the 887-page policy agenda the group has written as guidelines for the next Republican president. It’s worth noting that as president, according to the foundation itself, Trump enacted approximately two-thirds of Heritage’s policy agenda during his first year in office alone. Heritage officials told Axios in 2023 that they had briefed both Trump’s and Rubio’s campaigns.
For most of the past three years, the Democratic party has taken as its message that the former president* is a threat to the future of democracy. But they had no way to brand it, no way to boil it down to an easily recognizable lump of poison. Now they do. Project 2025 is a blueprint for an authoritarian oligarchy, and it has a cool Bond-villain-esque name. It is also replete with easily salable atrocities: How about its proposal to do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just as a hurricane is drowning parts of Texas? How about virtually eliminating any efforts to cope with the climate crisis at a time when parts of Oregon and California have been reduced to ash, and the entire East Coast has been turned into a convection oven? How about the proposal to criminalize porn?
“Pornography should be outlawed,” the roadmap decrees. “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
Nah, let’s just leave the possible consequences there to speak for themselves.
You know they’re scared because of how fast they’re running away from it, in the hope that nobody will notice that every proposal in those nine hundred pages is something the Republican party has advocated for almost four decades. And now it has a catchy title. Easy to remember. Easy to hang around the neck of every Republican for the next four decades.
