Beyond the energy at the Democratic National Convention, beyond its all-important TV ratings and the clear affection Democrats feel toward their presidential ticket, it seems that the one thing really getting under Donald Trump’s skin is Democrats tying him to Project 2025.
“They know I have nothing to do with it,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends” Thursday, regarding the Heritage Foundation’s authoritarian agenda for a potential second Trump presidency.
“A group of people got together,” he continued. “They drew up some conservative values, very conservative values, and in some case, perhaps they went over the line. Perhaps they didn’t. I have no idea what Project 25 is, but they use it, and they know it.”
And there’s a good reason he’s afraid for people to connect him to Project 2025. As Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said at the DNC on Wednesday, Trump’s campaign “might not recover from” from the public attention given Project 2025.
Trump has been running from Project 2025 all summer. Even though a CNN review found at least 140 current or former members of Trump’s campaign and White House staff had worked on Project 2025, he claimed to know nothing about it.
There’s a good reason for that too. A Navigator Research poll from July found that only 11% of voters held a favorable opinion of Project 2025, while 43% held an unfavorable opinion. Forty-six percent had no opinion.
A big part of what’s gone on at the DNC has been informing those voters. On Monday, Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow explained how the plan would “turn Donald Trump into a dictator.”
On Wednesday, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis also held up a jumbo-size printing of the plan as he talked about how it would affect our personal freedoms and enforce a strict Christian nationalist version of what constitutes a “family.”
Also on Wednesday, longtime “Saturday Night Live” star Kenan Thompson followed up with examples of how the plan would impact individual lives.
Appearing on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” Buttigieg said that “the biggest scandal of the year is a policy scandal,” referring to Project 2025.
“Most people say elections aren’t really about policy anymore,” said Buttigieg, “but if you think about it, the biggest scandal, the one that actually has the Republicans the most afraid, the one that has the president doing damage control, it’s not a criminal cover up, although they had one of those too. It’s not a sex tape. It’s the simple fact that they wrote down their own policies. That is the thing that they might not recover from.”
And when people learn about Project 2025, they hate it. That same Navigator survey found that after voters read statements for and against Project 2025, 56% opposed the agenda. It’s no wonder that Trump is angry that people are talking about his ties to it.
Now … let’s keep talking.
