Gullible journalism helped Trump turn Project 2025 into a living nightmare for America, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.
WHEN U.S. PRESIDENT Donald Trump claimed during the 2024 election campaign that he wasn’t interested in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, it would have taken an astounding level of gullibility to accept his claims at face value. Considering how untrustworthy Trump has consistently shown himself to be, anything he claims is not happening is reliable proof that it is happening.
Yet, despite Trump’s known dishonesty, mainstream media journalists took Trump at his word. Now, America suffers the consequences of the media’s failures for not warning voters of the reality of life in Project-2025-authoritarian-America, a reality which challenges the sustainability of American democracy.
Before President Biden withdrew from the 2024 Election and during Kamala Harris’ campaign, the Democrats regularly warned voters about the dire consequences of Trump’s Project 2025 agenda.
These warnings were front and centre at the Democrats’ election convention, where Michigan senator Mallory McMorrow showcased a hard copy of the 900-page Project 2025 document, warning it was a "Republican blueprint for a second Trump term".
Zeroing in on one of the document’s thousands of plans for a Trump presidency, McMorrow said:
“If Donald Trump gets back into the White House, he's going to fire civil servants like intelligence officers, engineers and even federal prosecutors if he decides that they don't serve his personal agenda”.
McMorrow went on to warn that under the plan, just as dictators do:
“... Trump would be able to weaponise the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents. He could even turn the FBI into his own personal police force.”
Pointing out that people might think this is all illegal, she countered that thanks to Trump’s “handpicked Supreme Court. He's now completely immune from prosecution, even if he breaks the law”.
Alongside Democrats, progressive media outlets and commentators did their job investigating the Project 2025 agenda, authored by secretive, billionaire-funded “think tank”, the Heritage Foundation. For example, in September 2024, The Guardian’s Rachel Leingang wrote that the plan outlined how Trumpism could be institutionalised to “upend the U.S. government”, including stacking government jobs with Heritage Foundation allies, and undertaking “mass deportations and curtailments of legal immigration programs, including Daca. It would dismantle the Department of Education.”
In response to progressives highlighting these dire risks, you would think the “watchdog” mainstream media would go to work investigating this document and reporting what it would mean for American citizens in Trump’s second term. It is literally news media’s most important job in a democracy to provide voters with the information they need to make voting decisions in their best interest, with all available evidence in hand.
But instead of doing this important democratic work, journalists working at the largest and most powerful media outlets deferred to their cowardness and apparently, unending gullibility. This meant that when Trump - predictably - disavowed the document, they shrugged and accepted his denials.
Incredibly, some went even further and criticised the Democrats for using Project 2025 to misrepresent Trump’s agenda.
A shocking example of this is a fact check by PBS which pours water on the Democrats’ warnings, reporting that:
'Project 2025 offers a sweeping vision for a Republican-led executive branch, and some of its policies mirror Trump’s 2024 agenda. But Harris and her presidential campaign have at times gone too far in describing what the project calls for and how closely the plans overlap with Trump’s campaign.'
The fact check – which presents itself as the authority on what Trump certainly or certainly would not do based on blind faith in what Trump himself has said – claims that although Project 2025 wanted to ban abortion, Trump would just curtail access.
It also says that although Project 2025 doesn’t plan to cut social security, it does propose changes to Medicare and that Trump and Project 2025 both want to eliminate the Education Department. In other words, even if the plans are not identical, they’re still cut from the same cloth. And this is just the stuff Trump was admitting to.
Even those outlets which reported Trump was distancing himself from Project 2025 during the Election admitted he only did so because of public backlash. This is a pretty big hint that Trump’s disavowal of the project was not an honest position, but rather a politically expedient one.
Even more absurdly, when reporting about Trump disavowing the plan, journalists still admitted the architects of the plan were likely to be in Trump’s Administration – another pretty big hint about what the agenda of that Administration would be.
These are the same journalists who have watched Trump make all kinds of promises and denials in the past, which turned out to be completely untrue. They have learned nothing from this history, preferring instead to constantly take Trump at face value.
Yet, at the same time, the Democrats never get the benefit of the doubt in warning of the extreme and dangerous nature of Trump’s plans and are instead the ones to be hurt politically by these valid warnings. As per usual, whatever Trump does, he wins in the media and whatever the Democrats do, they lose.
We all know how the story of Trump’s second term is playing out. Colour me shocked, 200 days into Trump’s second term, fact-checkers PBS hosted journalist David Graham, author of a book about Project 2025, who reported that half this agenda had already been implemented.
Yet, even with such obvious evidence in front of their eyes, like Trump hiring the authors of Project 2025 to head up key agencies, and every decision the Trump Administration makes falling neatly into the plan, it wasn’t until Trump finally admitted on Truth Social that the shutdown would give him the perfect cover for Project 2025 – the document he claimed not to have read during the Election – that PBS published the following headline.
Without even the tiniest bit of contrition, it read:
“Amid shutdown fight, Trump no longer distancing himself from Project 2025.”
You don’t say. Who could have ever seen this coming?
Dr Victoria Fielding is an Independent Australia columnist. You can follow her on Threads @drvicfielding or Bluesky @drvicfielding.bsky.social.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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