The Mistake That Could Cost Trump the Election

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“Let me tell you what our Project 2025 is,” President Joe Biden said at a rally in Maryland last Thursday. “Beat the hell out of them.”

It was a funny line, and against the odds, it might also contain some truth: In a bizarre turn of events, Democrats have managed to make a nearly 1,000-page compendium of detailed policy ideas into one of Republican nominee Donald Trump’s greatest liabilities in the 2024 presidential campaign.

Project 2025 was an exercise, convened by the conservative Heritage Foundation, that sought to set a policy agenda for the next Republican administration. Its final product was a lengthy blueprint called Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, though I’ll refer to all of it as Project 2025 for simplicity. When it was completed, Trump had not yet clinched the GOP nomination, which is to say it was not designed solely with him in mind. But many of the people involved are expected to take leading administration roles if Trump wins.

[Read: The MAGA plan to end free weather reports]

Certainly Project 2025 contains some outré ideas, but nothing about the exercise itself is unusual. Think tanks on both sides routinely produce various blueprints in an effort to further their priorities and aid presidents with whom they’re allied. The documents seldom make much splash, partly because nitty-gritty policy ideas are not usually what determines elections. Party platforms tend to be short and a little vague on details. They are mostly ignored.

Measured against the typical obscurity, Project 2025 has been a wild success. Not since the Republican House leader Newt Gingrich spearheaded the Contract With America in 1994 has a campaign policy document attracted so much attention. The problem is that many voters seem to hate Project 2025.

In a poll that Heritage itself conducted from July 30 to August 2, almost two-thirds of voters said they’d heard of Project 2025. (The numbers are even higher in key swing states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia.) Only 14 percent supported Project 2025, and 47 percent opposed it—again with higher numbers in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Democrats’ efforts to keep talking about Project 2025 suggest that their data, too, indicate it’s a big winner for them.

[Adam Serwer: Trump thinks his ideologue supporters are weird too]

The questions are why Project 2025 has become such a big issue, and why now? The document was published in April 2023 and drew some attention at the time and afterward. But only in the past seven weeks has it become a major campaign issue.

Many of its top-line ideas are very unpopular. It would dissolve the Education Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, slash Medicare and Medicaid, ban pornography, establish federal abortion restrictions, repeal some child-labor protections, and enable the president to lay off tens of thousands of federal career workers and replace them with political appointees.

Some of these are long-standing conservative priorities. Others, like the dismantling of the federal workforce, are newer and more radical. Doing so would entail an epochal shift in the way the federal government works and what it does, and that’s what attracted some of the most attention in 2023, including a detailed report from my colleague Russell Berman. Then interest faded; a shake-up of the government would affect the general public deeply, but not in ways that are immediately apparent or motivate a lot of voters.

[Read: Trump’s open plot to break the federal government]

In June, some Democrats, especially those in Congress, began talking more about Project 2025, attracting some news attention. Then, on June 30, the actor Taraji P. Henson encouraged viewers of the BET Awards to learn the name. “The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up,” she said. Two days later, the Heritage Foundation’s head, Kevin Roberts, appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast, where he celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision granting Trump substantial immunity for actions taken as president. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts said.

All of this thrust Project 2025 into the center of the discourse. Trump was not pleased. “I have no idea who is behind it,” he posted on his Truth Social site. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

The disavowal was obviously absurd. Scores of the people involved in the report had worked in the Trump administration, some in high-ranking posts. By trying to distance himself from Project 2025, Trump only brought more attention to it. Moreover, reporters keep turning up instances of connections among Trump, his campaign, and Project 2025.

[Read: Trump says Americans who died in war are “losers” and “suckers]”

That’s a problem for Trump, because it undercuts some of his attempts to cater more to the middle. His campaign has published a much simpler, more concise set of policies, which has some overlap with Project 2025 but also diverges in places, and avoids the kinds of details that create difficulties. Trump’s campaign has also toned down its rhetoric on abortion (frustrating some anti-abortion campaigners). Because no one is fooled by the attempted distancing from Project 2025, Trump looks like he’s trying to hide something, which he is.

Efforts to create the appearance of separation continue. Paul Dans, a former Trump White House staffer who led Project 2025, left the Heritage Foundation recently. Publication of Roberts’s book, with a foreword by Trump running mate J. D. Vance, has been paused. On Friday, the Trump campaign announced new presidential-transition chairs, conspicuously picking people not connected to Project 2025. Voters in Nevada have received flyers explicitly disavowing Project 2025 and listing Trump’s own platform.

As Barbra Streisand teaches, this sort of thing doesn’t usually work, and mostly calls attention to the very aspects of something that make it unpopular. Project 2025 is not likely to get any more popular between now and November either.