Commentary
Project 2025, a scheme led by the Heritage Foundation to “take the reins of government” after former President Donald Trump or another MAGA Republican becomes president, is backed by more than 100 right-wing organizations. The project’s harmful agenda and destructive operational plans have generated significant critical media coverage, to which Heritage has responded with snarky commentary that confirms the organization’s identity as a propaganda arm for the MAGA movement.
Project 2025 is a detailed policy agenda and action plan meant to advance two different long-term goals. One is a libertarian-leaning effort to gut federal agencies from within and limit their ability to regulate corporate behavior and protect the climate. The other is an openly authoritarian plan to empower the president to dismantle checks and balances, impose his will on the executive branch, use federal agencies to punish his critics and enemies, and deploy the power of the government to enforce the religious right’s “traditional” views on abortion, family, sexuality, and gender.
The scope and intent of Project 2025 is alarming, and journalists and progressive activists have been sounding the alarm about its consequences for democracy, people and the planet.
In response, Heritage has mocked critical news coverage and published an electronic pamphlet titled “5 Reasons Leftists HATE Project 2025,” which declares, “Radical leftists are terrified…and they should be.”
The Heritage flyer is less of a substantive engagement with Project 2025 critics and more of a Trumpish exercise in name-calling and inflammatory MAGA-movement rhetoric meant to demonize opponents.
For example, a section promising that Project 2025 will “restore the American family” begins with these claims: “The radical left hates families, because when people have strong families, they don’t worship big government and succumb to leftist ideologies like gender ideology. The Left wants to eliminate the family and replace it with the state.” Among the policies Heritage says will somehow restore families: imposing work requirements for food stamps, censoring teaching about race and gender, promoting privatization of public education, outlawing pornography, and banning abortion.
Another section of the pamphlet boasts that Project 2025 will “dismantle the deep state”—code for purging professional civil servants, weakening regulation of corporate behavior, and eliminating institutional checks on the president’s power. Heritage says Project 2025 will eliminate “woke propaganda at every level of government” and shut “wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices.” If you get past the “wasteful bureaucracy” rhetoric and wade into Project 2025’s detailed agenda, you find out that means defunding, dismantling, and redirecting agencies that provide vital services and protect Americans and their communities, like the Environmental Protection Agency.
When it comes to immigration, the Heritage pamphlet equates the Biden administration with “the radical left,” which Heritage claims “rejects the idea of borders and national sovereignty.” While that claim shouldn’t be taken seriously, Project 2025’s plans for aggressive detentions and massive deportations should be.
Heritage also brags that Project 2025 will “reject climate hysteria.” Its pamphlet contains no recognition of the well-documented harms already caused by climate change and its potentially catastrophic future effects. Heritage dismisses the very idea of a “climate crisis” as simply “a tool for scaring Americans into giving up their freedom.” Like Trump’s “drill, drill, drill” ideology, Project 2025 focuses on maximizing fossil fuel production, abandoning sustainable development goals, and otherwise undermining or reversing federal government actions to protect the climate and regulate pollution.
The fifth reason Heritage says that “leftists” hate Project 2025 is that it promises to “stop socialism in its tracks.” For MAGA movement leaders, the actual meaning of words or the truth of statements doesn’t seem as important as their potential propaganda value. Just as Heritage Foundation’s MAGA-minded president Kevin Roberts and Trump aides like Stephen Miller smear opponents as “communists,” Project 2025 lumps progressives together with both communists and fascists: “Leftists today are driven by the same rotten socialist ideas that nearly destroyed much of the world during the 20th century. The promise of socialism—Communism, Marxism, progressivism, Fascism, whatever name it chooses—is simple: Government control of the economy can ensure equal outcomes for all people.”
Given what we know about Trump’s admiration for authoritarian strongmen, his equating brutality with strength, and his willingness to undermine the Constitution for his own benefit, the Heritage Foundation’s hopes for Project 2025 read as a clear threat: “The next conservative president will enter office with a simple choice: greatness or failure,” declares the Heritage Foundation, adding that “Project 2025 will ensure the next president has the tools needed to succeed at this daunting task.”
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