What's a propaganda network to do when the MAGA plan for a second Trump term is wildly unpopular?
The shocking extremism and Christian nationalism of Project 2025, a MAGA blueprint for Donald Trump’s next term, is a problem for him. It is so unpopular that a recent poll found only 4% see it as favorable. So it’s no surprise that Trump keeps trying to distance himself from it (despite having previously endorsed Project 2025) and is pretending to know nothing about it even though it is chock full of people associated with him.
Unsurprisingly, Fox News is there to help. On yesterday’s Fox News Sunday, anchor Shannon Bream hosted Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts as part of a panel discussion. Her question to him was a good one. Unfortunately, everything that happened after that was designed for maximum Trump benefit:
BREAM: Kevin, since we have you here, I want to ask about somewhere where [Kamala Harris] has landed some punches. And this is the connecting Project 2025 from Heritage to President Trump. Here's how The New Republic reports on it: “Mass deportations? Check. Shove a Christian God into schools and workplaces? Check. Weaponize the DOJ for Trump? Check. Fire civil servants en masse and replace them with vetted MAGAs? Check.” It goes on from there. Can you answer any of those and the secondary question of the Trump level, or Trump team members involvement with Project 2025?
Roberts dodged the question and changed the subject, which should have immediately tingled everybody’s Spidey senses:
ROBERTS: Thanks for the question. The greater story is why Vice President Harris is running away from her record. Her legacy is not as the border czar, but as the invasion czar. Her legacy is ending the American dream because of dangerously liberal economic policies.
To the heart of your question, you know that I'm always happy to answer questions about Project 2025.
Translation: Roberts was happy to deflect from, disguise and conceal the real nature of Project 2025.
Roberts continued by pretending that his extremist plans are mainstream conservative. There was no pushback from Bream, liberal panelist Juan Williams or The Hill’s Julia Manchester.
ROBERTS: [Project 2025] is the largest, broadest-scale conservative movement boilerplate set of policies that we've been talking about for 45 years to do what to correct government overreach, which has happened at the expense of everyday Americans who are striving for the American dream.
Then Roberts suggested that Trump and Project 2025 are connected, just before he quickly segued back to attacking Harris:
ROBERTS: That's what Vice President Harris is running against and the conservative movement, but also, many voters in the center are saying, come out and do an interview. Have the courage to defend your policies, but she can't, because they're terrible.
Before anyone else could comment, Bream asked Republican panelist Doug Heye, a former fellow of Harvard’s Institute of Politics, no less, for more reaction. At the same time, she signaled there were only 10 seconds remaining in the segment. In other words, she didn’t want any liberal or non-GOP commentary on either Roberts’ BS or to underscore his implication that Trump and Project 2025 are a team, despite Trump's denials. Heye’s attempt to further whitewash Project 2025 with BS bothsidesism should forever stain his fellowship:
HEYE: Democrats have something that's a Project 2025. They've had it for years. It's called the Center for American Progress. They put their people in Democratic administrations. That's actually normal. The difference is, in Washington, DC, everybody's been to cocktail parties with the Center for American Progress. People, they don't go to events with Project 2025
Heye surely knows that Project 2025 is not about staffing conservatives in a Trump administration. Nor is it hated because its people don’t go to D.C. cocktail parties.
From the same New Republic article Bream quoted at the start of the discussion:
The entirety of Project 2025—which includes not only the 920-page Mandate for Leadership book, but also a personnel database and training for potential employees, and a still-secret “playbook” for the first 180 days of Trump transition—is a shock and awe strategy, intended to situate Heritage as a true MAGA player and to signal to the Big Man that it’s not a suspect hive of loafered lobbyists and D.C. insiders born and bred in the swamp.
Its 30 chapters propose to install a proto-fascist dystopia: concentrate power in the executive, weaponize the Department of Justice to go after Trump’s enemies, further privatize Medicare, institute extreme deportation measures for immigrants, significantly restrict access to reproductive health care in all 50 states, defund public broadcasting, criminalize pornography, and of course scale back civil rights for trans people. Project 2025 is also an employment agency, filtering applicants for a Trump administration through an online purity test.
Bream ended the segment on Heyes’ cover-up. Williams did not push to challenge any of it.
It speaks volumes that Fox, Roberts and Heye feel a need to deceive the true, anti-democratic nature of Project 2025. It's too bad Williams or Manchester didn't have the courage to speak up for the sake of our country and our democracy.
You can watch the Fox try to pull the wool over viewers’ eyes on Project 2025 below, from the September 22, 2024 Fox News Sunday.
