It’s Monday morning. And Donald Trump’s insistence that he will respond to the senseless attempt on his life with a speech at the Republican National Convention that will “bring the whole country, even the whole world, together” will likely age as well as the press’ moldy decision to make a race between two men rounding into the ninth decade of their lives pretty much only about age… of just one of the candidates.
Maybe he’ll be different this time?
But nah.
Most likely: he will spew a minute or two of tripe about unity and love, which the press will fixate upon, and then return to the rhetorical embrace of violence that has defined his political career. I’d be glad to be wrong.
Either way, this is an opportunity to do the most important work of this political season.
Let me remind you of what messaging mastermind Anat Shenker-Osorio told us she’s learning from focus groups with the two groups who will decide this election, “double haters” who despise both nominees and ‘reluctant Dems” who were reliable Democratic voters in the recent past but not so thrilled with the ticket now:
“...what you're seeing is, if not a one-to-one, a close to it correlation between how much voters know about the agenda, how much voters believe that the agenda by the agenda, the MAGA agenda is likely be implemented and whether or not they have moved away from Biden.”
If they know Trump’s agenda AND believe he will actually implement it, they will turn toward the obvious non-Trump choice.
That’s why you should email someone this !People! magazine article...
Or email them this Last Week Tonight explainer that shows how Project 2025 is not just a massive scheme to centralize powers and policies around Christian Nationalists’ wettest dreams but is also about building an army of maniacal MAGA suck-ups to replace the experts that make government work. This is crucial to getting people to understand how real this nightmare could become.
Educating people about Project 2025 (and presenting the positive alternative as The Quiet New Deal) is critical to what we can do as earlyworms, along with sending as much possible support down the ballot to help create the “reverse coattails” effect that Run for Something’s Amanda Litman never stops talking about.
We’ve reached an inflection point with Project 2025 that really illustrates the earlyworm theory of change.
I mentioned in this interview with Don Moynihan, one of the experts who helped provide background for the Last Week Tonight piece, that the first time I saw the words “Project 2025” in print was in an op-ed he wrote towards the end of 2023 about Schedule F, Trump’s executive order that is the foundational document for this plan. It didn’t mean much to me then! And I’m an earlyworm.
The work of many, including Thomas Zimmer and Andra Watkins, helped inspire the launch of our Project2024.info mini-site. We knew then that we were speaking to earlyworms, the 10-20% of us obsessed with the news and thus do an outsized job of shaping the content that gets consumed with our clicks and spreading it to our loved ones who do their best to avoid the news.
News junkies caught on so that when Project 2025 broke into the mainstream thanks to Taraji P. Henson, Sidney Watts on TikTok, and John Oliver, we were ready to explain to the early birds who dabble in the news what was going on. It may feel like everyone knows about Project 2025 by now, but most people have just heard the words. They don’t get that it’s both a list of policies they’d hate and a plan to replace the government with the MAGA mafia, who will make their only business enforcing that plan.
And there are so many policies to dig into, from gutting funding into research that prevents the spread of disease to turning the Department of Health and Human Services into the Department of Force Birth to banning porn. There’s something for everyone to hate.
We must also thank Donald Trump for doing more than anyone on Earth to spread Project 2025 to normal people.
By denying any connection to Project 2025, he made the plan as famous as Stormy Daniels. Before that moment, the press had no idea how to cover this perversion of a Republican tradition of coming up with a plan for a new administration that is now a plan for permanent dominance of America. Debunking his ridiculous rebuttal has become the story.
So, in this potential moment of unity, let us thank Donald Trump for making Project 2025 the story of this campaign. Let us all do our best to tell everyone what is truly at stake this November.
Project 2025 makes the nightmare of a second Trump regime undeniable