Donald Trump's Project 2025 Coverup Is Failing

The only way to make campaign reporters care about the policy stakes of elections is for candidates to act like they have something to hide.

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Trying to persuade campaign reporters to place the substantive stakes of American elections at the center of their coverage is a worthy pursuit, but a grueling chore.

Usually it fails, sometimes disastrously.

In 2000, wonks and watchdogs were at pains to convince horserace journalists that much was at stake in November—beyond the pressing question of which candidate was the more affable dude. George W. Bush’s policy agenda was written to mislead voters. It posed a threat to the viability of programs like Medicare and Social Security. Don’t voters deserve to know? Media elites were unmoved, and we’ve been living in the Bush v. Gore era ever since.

Sixteen years later, mainstream media devoted more coverage to Hillary Clinton’s email practices than to all substantive policy issues combined, becoming pawns in a potentially lethal assault on American democracy.

The 2012 election proved a rare exception, where fateful decisions aligned to make the competing policy visions of the Obama and Romney campaigns central to media narratives. Republicans nominated Mitt Romney, who in turn nominated Paul Ryan for the vice presidency, because the party, convinced of its impending victory, was intent on delivering a death blow to the New Deal. Barack Obama entered campaign season at the nadir of his popularity, trailing generic Republicans in head-to-head polling. They thus took the calculated risk of making Ryan’s infamous federal budget proposal the centerpiece of their agenda.

It’s not that Romney and Ryan were scrupulously honest about the implications of their plan. Romney memorably disclaimed his policy ambition during his first debate with Obama; they used voodoo math to rebut rigorous analysis showing their reforms would deliver a windfall to the rich and hardship to the poor. But the basic proposition, still the core of conservative politics, was plain: If we win, we will cut taxes for affluent Americans and their businesses, and make up the budget shortfall by dissolving the safety net.

On its own this wasn’t enough to make political reporters perk up. A big part of Obama’s re-election strategy entailed simply reciting the radical details of the Romney-Ryan blueprint as though they were self-discrediting. But those stories didn’t make the front-page very often, and the ones that did were often written elliptically. Obama’s pollsters found that many voters simply didn’t believe Democratic claims about Romney’s agenda. Why on earth would anyone run for president promising to give billionaires a tax cut and plug the revenue gap with Medicare benefits?

But Romney screwed up!

As the Republican primary wound down, Romney’s most senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom advertised the campaign’s plan to “shake the Etch-a-sketch,” erasing all the unpopular commitments Romney made to sew up the nomination. We won the GOP primary promising our angry voters mass austerity; now we’ll make a whole different set of promises to seize the center.

This was an unusually cynical admission, at least by pre-Trump standards, and it provided both the Obama campaign and the media a subplot more salacious than any policy contrast. Obama could stop repeating raw facts with increasing exasperation, and instead foster the impression of deceit. What are they hiding? What is he hiding. That storyline was much more tempting for reporters: What’s Romney’s game here? What’s he really after?

Romney promised very specific marginal tax cuts for rich Americans, but, when asked to account for lost revenue, he would wave his hands about closing loopholes and deductions. Which deductions? He wouldn’t say.

Prefiguring the next Republican presidential nominee, Romney was extraordinarily reluctant to release his tax returns. Why? Was it because we’d be able to infer the magnitude of the tax cut he intended to give himself? Does he even pay taxes?

Why does he have a Swiss bank account?

Romney’s financial disclosures revealed an IRA valued at a quarter-billion dollars. But annual IRA contributions are limited by tax law to orders of magnitude less money. How’d he pull that off? He again wouldn’t say (though I’m pretty sure I figured it out).

Suddenly there was a drumbeat, and it was all about the contrast in vision between the candidates. Common-good liberalism vs. a new gilded age. Obama won re-election comfortably.

The lessons Republicans learned from that experience drove them toward Donald Trump and his emphasis on identity appeals; it convinced them not to soften their fiscal policy agenda, but to do a better job concealing it. It worked in 2016. But for COVID-19, it most likely would’ve worked in 2020.

In 2024, they got lazy.

PET PROJECT

This is a little parable about how Republicans fell back into old habits. Trump is much more dishonest than Romney, but they both happen to excel at attracting unwanted attention.

Today’s Republicans also assembled a governing blueprint for a new era of GOP control. This time around, they outsourced it; and instead of calling it something conventionally antiseptic like “Pathway to Prosperity” or “Roadmap for America’s Future,” they called it “Project 2025,”like role-playing spies.

But questionable branding decisions aside, the underlying Republican machinery is unchanged. Ever since the conservative movement completed its takeover of the Republican Party, its leaders have viewed GOP officials as ceremonial figureheads. The idea, then as now, is that fanatical ideologues scattered throughout the movement write policies, Republicans in Congress turn them into bills, Republican presidents sign them into law.

“We are not auditioning for fearless leader,” Grover Norquist told conservatives at the CPAC convention in February 2012. “We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. … We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate.”

Norquist went on:

Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.

This is exactly how MAGA movement leaders see things today.

In April, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, a key architect of Project 2025, explained, “My role in the project has been to make sure that all of the candidates who have responded to our offer for a briefing on Project 2025 get one from me.”

A bunch of Trump administration alums drafted the plan, but Project 2025 itself wasn’t necessarily for Trump. If by twist of fate, Nikki Haley had defeated him in the GOP primary, she would’ve inherited it. It was written for any Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen.

HOUSE OF STREISAND AND FOG

The Romney 2012 and Trump 2024 campaigns took different approaches to throwing people off the scent. Romney tattooed himself with many toxically unpopular ideas during his primary, consolidated GOP support by selecting Ryan as a running mate, then tried to “shake the Etch-a-sketch.”

Trump, as the disgraced-but-undeposed leader of the GOP, took a flyer on the primary, and hasn’t really even bothered to stand up a normal campaign. Where past out-party challengers appointed transition leaders and grew teams of policy experts, the GOP diaspora is basically just Trump’s administration in exile. Project 2025 is a bit like the Ryan budget and a presidential transition plan wrapped into one. Trump simply hoped it’d go unnoticed on the periphery, so he could tiptoe back into the White House and spring it on an unsuspecting public.

But in the absence of a credible campaign platform, the fact that Project 2025 is the GOP agenda became just a bit too conspicuous. And now Trump’s clumsy efforts to disclaim it have created a Streisand effect.

Trump recently professed to have “no idea who is in charge” of Project 2025. But as the Washington Post reported, Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president, briefed Trump on its contents, and Trump praised it as “the groundwork and detail plans for what our movement will do.”

Roberts changed the title of his forthcoming book Burning Down Washington to the more anodyne Taking Back Washington, and delayed publication until after the election, because it turns out Trump’s running mate JD Vance wrote the foreword to it. During the GOP convention last month, Heritage excluded reporters from many of its events, which would normally have been open to the press.

Campaign reporters have taken notice.

None of this is to say the fall campaign will play out as a heady contest of ideas about the proper role of government, or that the press corps will ultimately strike a healthy balance between substantive news and the freak show. Trump couldn’t run an ideas-based campaign if he wanted to, and the stakes of the 2024 election actually transcend normal policy to reach the question of whether the U.S. should be a democracy where everyone has equal rights. But the epicenter of campaign journalism has moved closer to the true stakes, and Trump is suffering for it.