How Project 2025 Became Toxic and Exposed the Right’s Toxicity

The public history of Project 2025 reveals a lot about how Trump understands power - and how the mainstream discourse (mis-) understands the extreme Right

A billboard highlighting Project 2025 - credit: DNC

On September 22, NBC News published its latest national poll. The headline results: Kamala Harris’s favorability has soared since July and she now also leads Trump head-to-head, a significant shift compared to two months ago when Trump held a lead over Biden in the same poll.

Beyond just providing a snapshot of where the presidential race currently stands, NBC also asked people to rate their feelings on the two major parties, their leading politicians, a cast of celebrity characters ranging from Taylor Swift to Elon Musk and RFK Jr, but also some ideas and ideologies that are shaping the American imagination: Capitalism, socialism, and Project 2025. And this is where things got really interesting: If the poll is to be believed, capitalism is far more popular than anything or anyone else, Americans like Tim Walz a lot more than Trump or Vance (or even Taylor Swift!) – and they really, really despise Project 2025.

Only 4 percent of registered voters in the poll rated Project 2025 either “very” or at least “somewhat” positively – while 57 percent said they had “somewhat” (6 percent) or even “very” (a whopping 51 percent) negative feelings about the planning operation spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation. Even socialism is significantly more popular than Project 2025! Remarkably, while 16 percent of registered voters declared “neutral” feelings about Project 2025, only 23 percent said they “don’t know” – leaving almost 80 percent of people who at least suggested they are familiar enough with these plans to be having an opinion at all. Project 2025, it seems, is known beyond just the politics nerd circles. And the vast majority of Americans do not like it at all.

Project 2025 is toxic. No matter how much Trump protested, almost three months after he first tried to distance himself publicly from the Heritage operation, and even though the Trump campaign has lashed out aggressively against Project 2025, it has turned into a millstone around the Republicans’ neck. Democrats can smell blood. At the Democratic Convention, many of the speeches brought up Project 2025 as evidence of what Trump was going to do to America, and the plans figure prominently in campaign messaging. In a recent campaign spot, for instance, Tim Walz referred to Project 2025 as the “the manual” Trump and Vance are going to use: “They didn’t create that Project 2025 just to have it sit around as a doorstop.”

Less than six weeks before the election, this is a good moment to check in with how things are going over at Project 2025 as a way of reflecting on the state of the Trumpist Right and the way it is being covered and discussed in the mainstream political discourse. Two things stand out. First of all, while the idea that Trump has nothing to do with Project 2025 has been rightfully and comprehensively debunked, the public quarrel between him and the Heritage program is nevertheless interesting as a window into the power dynamics on the Right, into how Trump himself views and seeks to exert power. Secondly, it is worth investigating how, exactly, Project 2025 has become so toxic, and the dynamics that keep it not only on the public’s radar, but have prompted the media to cover it in a distinctly different way from how the mainstream political discourse has treated the radicalization of the Right more broadly.

The public history of Project 2025

Let’s start with a short history of Project 2025 in the public discourse and imagination. While most people will not have heard about these planning operations until earlier this year, Project 2025 has actually been around for a while longer. It was launched in the spring of 2022, under the leadership of the Heritage Foundation, which united much of the conservative movement, the machine of think tanks as well as activist and lobbying groups, and the reactionary intellectual sphere behind the goal of installing a more effective, more ruthless rightwing regime. The policy agenda they have produced, spelled out in the 920-page report titled: “Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise,” was published in April 2023. “Mandate for Leadership” is often discussed as synonymous with Project 2025, which is not quite correct, as it forms only one of the planks – or “pillars,” in their own parlance – of a much broader planning operation that also includes a personnel database, intended to build an army of loyalists; a “training effort” consisting of online courses and videos they call the “Presidential Administration Academy” to get these loyalists and all political appointees ready to implement the rightwing agenda; and, finally, a “playbook” for executive actions to be taken in the first 180 days of the new rightwing administration.

It was not until late 2023 that Project 2025 entered the broader public consciousness as something distinct worth paying attention to. Its rise to prominence came at a very specific moment of heightened concerns and anxiousness amongst (small-d) democrats. About a year out from the presidential election, it had become fairly obvious that the Republican Party would remain united behind Trump. In early November, the New York Times released a poll that had Trump leading by significant margins in five of the six key battleground states and Biden dramatically losing support from young voters and voters of color, in particular. Rarely has a single poll ever gotten so much public attention. Among those who did not want Trump to return to the presidency it caused outright panic.

If it hadn’t been obvious before, from that point forward, there could be no doubt that Trump had, at the very least, a very realistic chance of returning to the White House. The attention therefore turned to what he would do with that power. From November through the end of 2023, the political discourse was defined by dark predictions and dire warnings. Was America on the path towards dictatorship? On November 30, the Washington Post published a piece by Robert Kagan, almost 6,000 words, titled: “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” Kagan’s essay crystallized the general sentiment of the moment. His warning was not coming from the Left, but from the heart of the political power center in Washington, where the author had played an influential role in Republican politics for decades. It was intended as a wake-up call: “We are closer to that point today,” Kagan concluded, “than we have ever been, yet we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy.”

A few days after Kagan’s piece came out, Trump reveled in these fears and gleefully fueled them by saying he would indeed like to be a dictator “on day one” (but not thereafter, promise!). However, while the substantive interpretation Kagan and others offered was eminently plausible, the term “dictator” also activated polite society’s tendency to discard such warnings as mere “alarmism.” A dictator? In America? For those primed to view Trump as just a clown or perceive liberal “paranoia” as annoying, and for everyone clinging to an exceptionalist idea that such things “cannot happen here,” the label gave permission to disregard. It was also focused narrowly on Trump himself and remained somewhat abstract: “dictatorship” – what would that look like in practice?

Project 2025 offered an answer to that question and focused the anxieties surrounding Trump and the future of American democracy on something more concrete. Don’t like the term “dictator”? Fair enough. But here was something more tangible, something not so easily dismissed as just “Trump being Trump”: A whole lot of serious rightwingers doing some actual planning.

Already at this early stage of Project 2025’s career as a big deal, Trump himself attempted to signal distance. In mid-November, the Trump campaign tried to mark its territory by releasing a statement that, while acknowledging that “efforts by various non-profit groups are certainly appreciated and can be enormously helpful,” emphasized the fact that “none of these groups or individuals speak for President Trump or his campaign.” Clearly referring to “Project 2025,” the statement made clear that “these reports about personnel and policies that are specific to a second Trump Administration are purely speculative and theoretical. Any personnel lists, policy agendas, or government plans published anywhere are merely suggestions.”

If anything, however, such an acknowledgment only fueled the mainstream interest. By late November, the warnings of academic observers started getting a bigger platform. On November 27, for instance, Don Moynihan wrote in the New York Times about the dangers of Project 2025’s plans to replace thousands of civil servants with ideological loyalists. And very early in the new year, the Times invited a more leftwing perspective from Sam Adler-Bell to discuss the panorama of planning operations on the Right.

The New York Times also sparked a whole new level of interest in Project 2025 when, on January 21, it published an interview with Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. “Inside the Heritage Foundation’s Plans to ‘Institutionalize Trumpism’,” it was titled, and it gave the Times’ audience a taste of who is currently in charge on the Right. Roberts had nothing but praise for Viktor Orbán’s autocratic regime in Hungary that he argued “should be celebrated”; he proudly confirmed he wanted to destroy the administrative state and fire 50,000 federal employees; he stood by his assertion that there was a Communist plot in the highest echelons of American power, arguing that among federal employees, “at least a few of them must be Communists. I think there are far more Chinese Communists who’ve infiltrated our government than American Communists, but at the very least, they’re socialists.” Therefore, he defended the McCarthyism of the 1950s, as McCarthy’s “motivation,” as Roberts put it, to purge the federal government from dangerous Communists who had supposedly infiltrated it had been correct. Asked about whether or not he believed Joe Biden had won the 2020 election, he flatly answered: “No” – and simply insisted that Heritage had an “election-fraud database” of its own to prove he was right. And finally, he described the “Black Lives Matter riots” as “far worse than January 6” and stated that the assault on the Capitol was no big deal while “the far bigger threat to our republic is the Biden family.”

With that, Kevin Roberts had put himself and Project 2025 properly on the board. There was now a name and a face attached to these plans – more names and faces would soon follow. And the Roberts interview also established a pattern of Project 2025 leaders and affiliates simply refusing to keep quiet, instead bragging about their precious plans in the starkest, most revealing terms whenever someone put a microphone in front of them. With all the attention swirling around Project 2025, the microphones would keep coming – and the soundbites Roberts and his allies provided contributed to keeping the focus on these plans. They helped produce the kind of outrageous news events the media will inevitably jump on.

The Roberts interview in the New York Times also provided the impetus for me to properly get into Project 2025. On February 1, Liliana Mason and I released a deep dive for our Is This Democracy podcast; on February 21, I published the first part of my series on Project 2025 on Democracy Americana. These explorations have found a pretty significant audience – the second part of my Project 2025 series, in particular, is by far the most read piece I have ever published via the newsletter. Once again, the attention was tied to shifts in the broader political discourse, and, more specifically, to the heightened fears of a looming Trump victory. In February, the “Biden too old” discourse went into overdrive, sparked by the release of the Hur report. Special counsel Robert Hur, tasked by attorney general Merrick Garland with investigating Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents after he was vice president, used the report for a political attack on Biden: He gratuitously talked about the president’s memory lapses during the investigation, including supposedly not remembering when his son died. He also speculated there wouldn’t be much chance to get Biden convicted anyway because “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Hur’s presentation of the interviews he had conducted with Biden was, to put it charitably, extremely tendentious. But it also fell on fertile ground and caused an avalanche of coverage and opinion pieces predicated on the idea that the Hur Report scientifically and conclusively proved that Biden was impaired, senile, too old not only to do his job as president but, crucially, to campaign and win the next presidential election. The rising panic about Biden’s weakness channeled even more attention towards the Right’s plans. As a Trump victory went, in the estimation of many people, from “possible” to “likely,” understanding what the Right was planning to do to America became a much more urgent task.

Throughout the spring and early summer, there was report after report, investigation after investigation, podcast after podcast dissecting Project 2025. And in June, some legitimate heavy hitters with enormous public reach got involved and acted as multipliers. In mid-June, John Oliver focused on Project 2025 on his HBO show Last Week Tonight: The YouTube clip of the extended segment racked up millions of views within just days. Then, on June 30, Taraji P. Henson emphasized how dangerous Project 2025 was while hosting the BET awards, pleading with the audience to “Pay attention, it’s not a secret – look it up.” Project 2025 had undoubtedly become a thing far beyond the elite circles of politics professionals or academic observers.

Henson’s intervention came three days after Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate. And on the next day, July 1, the Supreme Court declared Donald Trump basically immune from criminal prosecution. At that point, a sense of impending, almost inevitable doom was engulfing (small-d) democratic America. But the Right was enthused. On July 4, Kevin Roberts celebrated the Court’s disastrous decision in an interview on Steve Bannon’s show. Roberts rejoiced that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

These bold assertions of dominance and brazen threats of violence caused outrage that was directed at Trump as much as at Heritage. In the broader perception, Roberts was Project 2025, and Project 2025 was Trump – this, then, was the dark future the country was barreling towards. Team Trump immediately tried to control the damage by once again, and more forcefully than at previous moments, signaling distance. On July 5, Donald Trump – or someone with access to his account – took to Truth Social to say: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

This time, Trump’s public complaint seemed to have an impact and perhaps spell the end of Project 2025 – at least that’s how it was reported in the mainstream press. On July 30, Paul Dans, a Trump administration alumni himself who served as the director of Project 2025 at Heritage, publicly announced that he had resigned (turns out he was fired – but more on that later!). The same day, the Trump Campaign released a statement on what they called “Project 2025’s demise”:

“President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way.

Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign – it will not end well for you.”

Was this it then for Project 2025? The Washington Post certainly suggested as much. Project 2025 “is winding down its policy operations,” the Post reported on the day Dans announced he was leaving Heritage, in an article boldly titled: “Project 2025 to end policy work after Democratic attacks angered Trump.”

No so fast.

Project 2025 is very much alive

Trump may have, momentarily, succeeded at getting the type of headline in a major paper he desired. But his claim that he knew “nothing about Project 2025” was a blatant lie widely debunked immediately. With so many Trump administration alumni dominating these plannings, and so many of the high-ranking Trump confidantes intimately involved in the proceedings, the personal connections between Trump and his inner circle on the one hand and Project 2025 on the other were exceedingly obvious. 

The relationship between Trump and Project 2025 is not only defined by the close personal ties and the significant personnel overlap. Most importantly, MAGA extremists and the institutional and intellectual elites of American conservatism that are behind Project 2025 are aligned on substance, on policy and ideology. It is an alliance based on a deep ideological affinity, compatibility of plans and policies, a shared reactionary vision for the country, a shared desire to punish their “Un-American” enemies and exclude them from the body politic. Project 2025 is evidence of how far the Right has radicalized, how far beyond Trump the problem goes. And anyone who objects has long been ostracized from the power centers of American conservatism. Project 2025 crystallizes the self-mobilization of a rightwing elite that has radicalized to the point where their plans are entirely in line with Donald Trump’s vengeful desires and the fever dreams of the extremist fringe.

The whole idea that Project 2025 is “winding down” is also misleading. First of all, the policy work Project 2025 set out to do is done. That was the first of the four “pillars” – culminating in the publication of “Mandate for Leadership,” their 920-page report in which a host of different authors lay out what it is the Right wants to do with / to American government in 30 chapters, each one dealing with a separate department, federal agency, or commission. There is also the “training effort” to prepare the “conservative warriors” Project 2025 wants to bring into government for their task. As of mid-August, Project 2025 has created at least 23 secret training videos, according to an investigation by ProPublica, and they were supposed to form the core of the so-called “Presidential Administration Academy.” If parts of Project 2025 are “winding down,” it is because they have been completed.

The work on at least two of the four “pillars” of Project 2025 is, however, very much continuing. That starts with the headhunting operation, the personnel database, intended to build an army of loyalists. And it’s not like the people behind this operation are trying to hide their continued engagement. On the very day Paul Dans declared he was “resigning” (again, he was actually fired – stay tuned!), Heritage president Kevin Roberts took to ex-Twitter to assure the world that “Project 2025 will continue our efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels – federal, state, and local.”

About the fourth and final pillar, the 180-day “Playbook,” Project 2025 has been a lot more secretive. Nothing is official. But in mid-August, Russell Vought, the man leading this initiative, was caught on hidden camera confirming that these efforts were very much ongoing. Vought represents the camp of committed ideologues in Trump’s coalition. He served in Trump’s Cabinet as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, then founded the openly Christian nationalist Center for Renewing America. In May, the RNC named Vought policy director for the Republican 2024 platform committee – a move Trump enthusiastically approved and embraced. According to reporting, he is the favorite to become Trump’s Chief of Staff. Vought has also authored the chapter on the Executive Office of the President in the Project 2025 policy agenda, and it appears he is now in charge of the final “pillar,” the 180-day Playbook. In that secretly recorded conversation, Vought claimed he and his team had already drafted hundreds of executive orders and regulations to be implemented immediately; he specifically emphasized executive orders to turn Trump’s fever dream of a mass deportation of more than 20 million people into reality as quickly as possible. This doesn’t sound like Project 2025 is “winding down,” does it?

Trump vs Project 2025: What’s that all about?

If there is very little substantive disagreement between Trump and Project 2025, and the planning operations are continuing under the guidance of Trump’s closest allies and most fervent disciples, what was all the public quarreling about?

First of all, much of this is about power and ego. By July, the mainstream media coverage was focused so much on Project 2025 that one might have gotten the impression that elite operators like Kevin Roberts were the real leaders on the Right while Trump was merely doing their bidding. Someone like Trump, obsessed with projecting dominance, won’t simply accept that – he probably felt like he needed to re-assert his status. The timing of Trump’s intervention in July certainly supports such an interpretation, as it came in direct reaction to Kevin Roberts fabulating about a “second American Revolution.” Trump didn’t disagree with the barely veiled threats of violence – he was annoyed by the presumptuous pretender.

The exact langue in the Trump campaign’s statement “on Project 2025’s demise” is especially revealing:

Project 2025’s supposed “demise,” a result of Trump exerting his power over the Right, we are undoubtedly meant to believe, “should serve,” I will quite this again, “as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign – it will not end well for you.” This is not a statement presented in the idiom of democratic politics – it is mob language, the way the head of a criminal organization would remind everyone in his orbit what awaits them if they dare to step out of line.

Why has Project 2025 broken through all the smokescreens and distractions?

The second reason why Trump felt the need to lash out against Project 2025 is that he wants to win the election in November. There is a strategic element to all of this: Project 2025 has generated devastatingly negative publicity. While it is hard to gauge exactly how much this might hurt Trump’s campaign electorally, it certainly isn’t helping. And that brings us back to the beginning: Project 2025 has become toxic.

It is worth reflecting on how we got to this point, even if it may seem self-explanatory on the surface. What Project 2025 is planning to do to America is extreme, the people behind it are radicals. But the anti-democratic radicalization of the Republican Party and the Right more broadly is nothing new. It has certainly accelerated in recent years – but that has usually not been enough to generate the type of sustained, focused coverage Project 2025 has received. In fact, the mainstream media’s unwillingness and / or inability to acknowledge and describe how much the power centers of conservatism and the GOP have radicalized, its insistence on normalizing frameworks and sanitizing language, has been a constant frustration among Liberals and people on the Left since long before Trump entered the scene. The Right has been extreme in words and actions, the Republican Party has been elevating proper extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and wherever Republicans are in charge, they have been ruthless in imposing their reactionary agenda against the will of the majority of Americans. One plausible way of looking at Project 2025 is to see it as an attempt to scale up what Republicans are doing in “red” states, to take over the federal government so that it can be used as an authoritarian tool to extend what is already happening in Republican-led states to the whole country. Despite all of this, a lot of people who now – rightfully! – point to Project 2025 as evidence of how severe the threat to democracy and fundamental rights is, were all too willing until not that long ago to disregard what was happening on the Right and discard warnings as “alarmism.” And a lot of mainstream outlets and journalists who have been investigating and covering Project 2025 with great clarity and urgency have too often refused – and are still refusing! – to apply the same approach to covering Trump, the Republican Party, and the Right more broadly.

Why has Project 2025 broken through all the smokescreens, why has the coverage largely evaded the dynamics of sanitizing, normalizing, legitimizing, both-sidesing and minimizing?

A crucial part of the answer is that Trump’s “superpowers” don’t apply to Project 2025. Through much of the past decade that he has spent as a leading figure in the Right, Trump has benefited from the fact that somehow, a lot of people steadfastly refuse to take his most radical, most aggressive announcements seriously, while at the same time insisting that Trump is a kind of political superweapon that must not be openly challenged.

Even people who are professionally tasked with analyzing and commentating on politics, and therefore should certainly know better, still tend to fall back to some variation of “Just Trump being Trump” all too easily. Just last week, for instance, David Runciman, former professor of political science at the University of Cambridge and through his very successful work as an author and podcaster one of the more prominent political commentators in the world, called Donald Trump “too fickle” and “too flaky to be an actual fascist and too erratic to be a credible authoritarian” in a big essay in The Guardian. It boggles the mind, frankly, that people still offer something like that as analysis in the year 2024, but here we are.

Add to the failure to take Trump seriously the reluctance to hold him accountable. There is an element of volkish ideology underneath the way the institutions have behaved towards him, a widespread ideology of “real Americanism” that is centered around an essentialist view of who gets to represent the nation. It assumes that Trump channels the Volk, and therefore is to be given wide latitude; as he supposedly embodies and gives voice to a populist uprising of “regular folks,” his message is to be amplified; the will of the true people must not be impeded. Who wants to bring the hammer down on the tribune of “real America”?

As a result, Trump has been treated differently from any other major political figure, arguably in U.S. history. But his “superpowers” simply do not extend to anyone else on the Right, certainly not to anywhere near the same degree – they are not transferable. Kevin Roberts and his Project 2025 allies are not seen as mere clowns and buffoons, they are regarded as exceedingly serious; nor do any of them register as tribunes of the people in the public imagination. Strip away the idiosyncrasies that have distorted the mainstream perspective on Trump himself, and what is left is the ugly face of a radicalizing reactionary movement fueled by ethno-religious nationalism – and the grievance-driven authoritarian desires of rightwing elites.

Project 2025 came to demand a coverage markedly different in focus and tone. And it did something else on top of that: As a label, it recalibrated the sensors of mainstream media coverage, producing a constant flurry of news events that otherwise would have gone unnoticed; and as a frame of reference, it provided the context to weave these events into a cohesive narrative about the imminent threat to democracy from the Trumpist Right.

Consider these examples from just the past few months:

On July 29, USA Today ran a piece titled: “Project 2025 decried as racist. Some contributors have trail of racist writings, activity.” It named five people – among them far-right troll Richard Hanania and Michael Anton, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. Although it was impossible to discern their exact role or influence on the planning operations, USA Today investigated their histories because they had been listed among the, as Project 2025 puts it, “more than 400 scholars and policy experts from across the conservative movement and around the country” who contributed to “Mandate for Leaderhsip.”

In early August, Hans von Spakovsky made headlines for arguing on a rightwing radio show that Kamala Harris “resembles in attitude the slave owners of the old South” because she supposedly supports “basically abortion with no limit.” Von Spakovsky has been one of the leading propagandists of the myth of voter fraud for decades – but that is not usually enough to make him a news-worthy character. But he also authored the chapter on the Federal Election Commission in the Project 2025 policy report. Now, headlines about von Spakovsky read “Project 2025 contributor…” says this and does that, making him more visible as part of a bigger story.

On September 20, a headline in The New Republic read: “A Project 2025 Adviser Just Defended Slavery in Haiti.” The subheading explained: “Speaking at a congressional hearing, Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the far-right Center for Immigration Studies, argued that Haiti would have been better off if colonization – and, by extension, slavery – had continued for decades.”

On September 24, Wired reported that “Teens Say Trump’s Former Personal Aide and Project 2025 Higher-Up Made Them Uncomfortable in Chats.” The “Project 2025 Higher-Up” was John McEntee, who embodies a key promise of Trumpism: That the world owes deference to racist, sexist “alpha male” frat boys.

On the very same day, The Guardian published a story titled: “Project 2025 mastermind allegedly told colleagues he killed a dog with a shovel.” It focuses on Heritage President Kevin Roberts who, twenty years ago, bragged to his colleagues at New Mexico State University, where Roberts worked as a historian, that he had killed his neighbor’s dog with a shovel because the dog had been annoying. Roberts denies the allegations. But the neighbor’s dog did go missing, and a whole lot of his former colleagues confirmed to The Guardian that Roberts had indeed told them that story. Seems very likely that he is either the kind of guy who grabs a shovel to club a dog to death for barking too much – or the kind of guy who proudly makes up a story about having beaten a dog to death for barking too much.

Finally, on September 27, RealClear Politics published a report titled “Heritage: Director of Project 2025 Did Not Resign – He Was Fired.” Crucially, Heritage getting rid of Paul Dans back in July had nothing to do with whatever conflict exists between Trump and Project 2025. Instead, he was fired “after an investigation found repeated incidents of professional misconduct and mistreatment of colleagues.” Dans had a pattern of “abusive or demeaning behavior,” especially towards women. The director of Human Resources at Heritage has confirmed that Dans is out because of “professional misconduct and mistreatment of colleagues.”

These are just six randomly selected examples. The racist guys in the USA Today article, von Spakovsky, Krikorian, McEntee, Roberts, Dans. Just a year ago, it would have been hard for even people who follow politics closely to make connections between them – if such stories about them would have been reported in the news at all. Now, they are all identifiable as part of Project 2025.

The exploits of these rightwingers are no longer reported as a series of unrelated events featuring a bunch of fairly obscure figures not known to the broader public. Project 2025 has come to serve as the connective tissue, the overarching narrative that provides context. It thereby makes these people legible – What do they stand for? What do they want to do to America? What is their relationship to Trump? – for a broader audience. And it provides a framework that transforms these stories from isolated events to examples that are indicative of the rightwing extremism that is now threatening democracy.

As a frame of reference, Project 2025 demands the media take these people, their actions, and their ideology seriously as the true faces of today’s American Right. Conversely, it also exposes how flawed polite society’s perspective on the Republican Party and the Right more broadly has been. It basically took an unforced error by the reactionary elites behind Project 2025 and a rather dramatic public relations blunder for the mainstream discourse to see what should have been blatantly obvious all along.

In a way, we should be grateful for Project 2025. It can be really difficult to convey to people who, for whatever reason, don’t pay much attention to politics – as well as to those who engage with politics entirely through the sanitizing prism of mainstream media coverage – how much not just Trump, but the center of conservative politics has radicalized. Project 2025 is helpful because rightwing leaders could not possibly be clearer about the extreme vision they want to impose on the country. And because the normalizing dynamics that usually distort the discussion about what is happening on the Right apply to a much lesser degree, this is actually getting through to people. Project 2025 not only remains an excellent window into where the Right currently stands ideologically, it also focuses our attention on who the people leading the reactionary authoritarian charge are.

The emerging picture is ugly, as toxic, anti-social behavior seems to be rather pervasive in these circles. Could this possibly be connected to the fact that these men have risen within a movement dedicated to maintaining a “natural” order, as they like to call it, defined by hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth; that they are pursuing a political project seeking to preserve the ability of some (“deserving,” “virtuous”) groups to dominate (“undeserving,” “subversive”) others – that they themselves believe it is their right to dominate?