Trump wants us to forget about Project 2025. We shouldn’t, writes Jesse Ferguson.
From running a business into the ground to doing the same with our country, Donald Trump does a lot of things wrong. But, if we’re being honest, his instincts in marketing are usually pretty darn good. In recent weeks, though, he’s made a colossal marketing mistake.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]On July 5, Donald Trump took to his social media platform Truth Social to declare that he “knows nothing” about Project 2025, a 920-page guidebook for a second Trump presidency, put together by right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation. And he tried it again this week. He thought he could distance himself from the backlash to his blueprint. But, Donald Trump claiming to not know Project 2025 would be like Jeffrey Dahmer claiming to be an introvert who has never met people before.
More than simply not being believed, though, Trump did something that he never expected: He supercharged interest in Project 2025. On Jun 24, the pollsters at Navigator Research found Project 2025’s favorability underwater by 9-points (10-19%) with most people unaware of the plan altogether. Less than one month later, the favorability had plummeted to negative 32-points (11-43%) after Trump made it a bigger subject of conversation. When people learn about it, they react like they would watching a horror movie: They hate each minute of it but they can’t stop themselves from watching what comes next.
In fact, by July 11, more people were searching for information about Project 2025 than were searching for Taylor Swift or the NFL. People ranging from John Oliver to Taraji P. Henson have brought attention to it. Vice President Harris even referenced it in the announcement that she was running for President last weekend.
Project 2025 outlines how a second Trump administration would take over the government and give the MAGA movement more power than any president has had in the history of the United States The detailed plan meticulously lays out all the freedoms the Trump administration plans to take away from the American people and the threat they pose to working families and seniors, including letting government monitor women’s pregnancies while they pass a national ban on abortion; overturning health care protections for people with pre-existing conditions while removing the $35 cap on the price of insulin; and eliminating the Department of Education, Head Start, clean energy and the National Weather Service.
Read More: Project 2025’s Plan to Eliminate Public Schools Has Already Started
There is real power in having a national conversation about Project 2025. As people hear more about the plan, they shift from opposing it by 13-points to opposing it by 48-points. The biggest growth comes from non-MAGA affiliated Republicans and independents, especially non-college educated women under 55. All of these are key to building an electoral coalition in 2024 and beyond.
There are three main things people need to know when it comes to communicating about Project 2025.
Most voters think a “plan” or an “agenda” from a politician is meaningless and largely disconnected from what will really happen. While that is sometimes true, Project 2025 isn’t like that. Twelve years ago, Republicans were caught on defense because they actually passed a budget (the Ryan budget) that would privatize Medicare. For the last two years, they’ve had to defend the actual overturning of Roe v. Wade. It wasn’t theoretical. It was real. People will know that this 920-page meticulous blueprint to takeover government is just as real and as present a danger.
People are fearful of what another Trump presidency would mean—the chaos, the criminality, and shredding the Constitution. Americans start with a pre-existing belief that Trump and the MAGA allies are power-hungry, but Project 2025 proves they intended to do it and shows how. For example, they will take away the Department of Justice and replace it with hand-picked loyalists who report to them. It’s clear this is exactly what people featured—them pursuing absolute power.
If you look at the massive uptick in the online conversation about Project 2025, one theme emerges consistently: curiosity. People see a 920-document written in secret by a bunch of Trump’s agents as mysterious and probably sinister. So they want to read it. They want to understand it. They want to reveal it. It plays into the conspiratorial notion of how people think and the conspiracy-theory attributes that drive many of the algorithms that dominate social media. In fact, as Trump found out starting with his July 5th tweet, the more that his team denies ownership of the plan, the more convinced people are that they own it.
But Democrats can’t just name drop the plan and expect that to evoke its intended impact. We have to frame the plan as the extreme blueprint it is and explain its consequences. We need to tell a common story, not just use a common set of magic words.
Project 2025 is more than a white paper, a policy proposal, or an agenda. It’s an instruction manual for a takeover—eliminating the protections for people and strengthening their ways to control people. We have to treat it as such.
The Trump team made the mistake of writing down their manual, giving everyone a chance to see what the future would look like under their administration. Then, they told everyone not to look at it. Predictably, now everyone wants a peek.
