For months, Trump’s opponents have warned that his reelection would threaten American democracy in new ways. It’s a well-founded warning, given Trump’s previous service in the White House and his reluctance to leave after 2020. But it’s also abstract. Most Americans can’t appreciate what a slide back into authoritarianism would look like. Not in the way they can appreciate, say, how people’s faculties decline as they age.
This combination of abstract threat and vague second-term proposals works to Trump’s advantage. He can simply sidestep all of this, confident, for example, that a meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban will be seen not as an authoritarian mentor-mentee confab but as the kind of boring stuff politicians do.
Or he it could avoided it, until his allies at the Heritage Foundation dropped a lengthy description of a second Trump term right into America’s lap.
This is “Project 2025,” which you’ve probably heard of. It’s an aggregated wish list of conservative and right-wing policy wonks, many of whom are veterans of Trump’s first term and many of whom will likely return to Washington if Trump wins in November. The 900-plus-page document outlining what they want to see in a second Trump administration is a very concrete manifestation of what could happen if Trump is inaugurated in January, whether or not Trump wants to admit it.
What he doesn’t do. Last week, despite his previous praise for Heritage and despite those involved in Project 2025 repeatedly outlining their ties to Trump, the former president tried to build a wall between himself and the outcome of the project. One effect of this denial was to draw new attention to Project 2025.
Interest in the topic was already rising before Trump’s denial. That was partly because HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” devoted a full half-hour to the topic. That aired on YouTube on June 20, about a week before the first spike in search interest in the chart below.
Google shares data on search interest in relative terms, displaying the number of searches relative to the peak in a given time period. So for context, here are searches for “Project 2025” contrasted with the evergreen search term, “dinner,” as in “what should I make to…”
This week, people searched for “Project 2025” almost as much as they searched for information about the presidential candidates, which is a lot.
You can see the Trump effect clearly in cable news coverage. MSNBC mentioned “Project 2025” repeatedly before July 5, while CNN and Fox News largely ignored it. (The numbers below indicate the number of 15-second blocks of airtime in a day when the topic was mentioned.) Once Trump denied involvement, however, coverage spiked — in part because it was so easy to connect him to those who put together the document.
On Thursday, YouGov released a survey showing how much people had heard about the project and how they viewed it. Other news topics, such as President Biden’s shaky nomination and the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, were seen by more people. But more than half of those surveyed said they had seen coverage of Project 2025.
Democrats were much more likely than Republicans to say yes, you’ll notice — likely in part because of the gap in coverage between MSNBC and Fox News.
Democrats are also much more likely to have an opinion on Project 2025. These opinions are predominantly negative.
What Democratic campaign officials will note here is that the net view among independents is also strongly negative. Many of them haven’t heard much about it, but what they have heard, they don’t like. Hence Biden posting “Google Project 2025” on social media. (The day he did this was the peak in search traffic in the charts above.) Hence the billboards linking Trump to the project.
One thing Project 2025 does is outline how a Republican president (which the authors obviously hope will be Trump in January) could consolidate power and diminish the role of legislatures and government officials. It’s an explanation of how American institutions could be eroded in the same way Orban has eroded Hungary’s. It’s an argument for moving away from liberal democracy.
In other words, he takes the broad warning about Trump and makes it concrete. And now many more Americans know about it, thanks in part to Trump’s efforts to dispel it.
