Trump Panics Over Project 2025 And Media Refuses To Show Up
Donald Trump is desperately trying to distance himself from the consequences of his actions—and legacy media is letting him
With less than 120 days until Election Day, Donald Trump is going into overdrive to avoid accountability for Project 2025. Sadly, legacy media continues to abscond from its responsibility of holding the powerful accountable, and we are all worse off for it. We cannot let fascists like Trump hide from who he is and has always been, and instead must hold him accountable.
So, Let’s Address This
Trump (Tries) To Run Away From Project 2025
Last week I wrote what has since become my most read piece on Substack, Project 2025 Invites Fascism To America. I described (accurately) Project 2025 as:
…a well funded MAGA theocratic fantasy turned reality. Electing Trump will further accelerate Project 2025 with the goal of implementing Christian nationalism in American government. With Trump at the helm, they will seek to abolish the Department of Education and reallocate federal tax dollars to school choice, enforce a national ban on mifepristone, severely limit immigration and exploit those seeking asylum through monetizing their suffering, gut climate justice initiatives, and increase fossil fuel usage despite the climate crisis. Project 2025 also seeks to purge anyone not openly right wing conservative from the Federal government, including from non-partisan civil service roles.
You can count on Donald Trump for two things—he will always lie to save his own skin, and he has no core values so he will flip flop at will. After launching his own Agenda 47 as a near carbon copy of Project 2025, Trump panicked at the massive backlash the public has given to Project 2025 and tweeted another lie and flip flop:
How can a person “know nothing” about something while simultaneously also know enough to disagree with part of that something, and call other parts “ridiculous?” Indeed, this is a quagmire for the ages. Or, Trump is simply lying again.
In reality, Project 2025 is exactly what it looks like, a Trump endorsed attempt at a fascist takeover of the United States, and Americans are not pleased. Trump is doing what he does best—attempting to avoid the consequences of his actions. Fortunately, people are wising up to the existential danger Project 2025 is to the future of our republic, as they should. However, legacy media continues to fail us.
Even Now Legacy Media Ignores The Trump Threat
Unfortunately, while independent journalists and human rights activists are sounding the alarm on the fascist Project 2025, legacy media remains asleep at the wheel. The CNN debate was a factless disaster with zero mention of Project 2025. As I wrote after that debate:
While watching the first Presidential debate last night, I reflected on the sage wisdom imparted by one Sally Claire on effective journalism: “If someone says it's raining, and another person says it's dry, it's not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the f*cking window and find out which is true.”
It appears neither Jake Tapper nor Dana Bash got that memo. I watched the absolutely disgraceful spectacle of CNN moderators who refused to fact check Trump (or Biden) on anything, refused to separate fact from fiction, and refused to take a stand that truth matters.
Not to be outdone, on July 4th no less, the New York Times ran an Op Ed by a Hitler cosplaying Nazi convincing people to not vote. Adding to the irony is that OpEd author Matthew Walther voted in the last two elections, is a right wing Christian nationalist, and reportedly supported the January 6 insurrection. The NY Times failed to fact check or disclose any of this.
The NY Post continued its long tradition of promoting overt racism against Vice President Harris by calling her a “DEI President.” Look, VP Harris is a politician and no politician is above criticism. But if a critics only criticism of another is due to their immutable racial or gender characteristics, then they should just own up to the racism they’re enabling.
And sure maybe the NY Post is a tabloid rag, but what excuse did George Stephanopoulos have at ABC? During his exclusive post-debate interview with President Biden, Stephanopoulos avoided asking a single meaningful policy question, spent 20 minutes on Biden’s health, 3 minutes Biden’s campaign, and helped voters learn nothing new we didn’t already know. Meanwhile, he asked zero questions on what the UN calls "Israel's extermination of Palestinians," zero questions on the Supreme Court’s draconian rulings hurtling us towards dictatorship, and zero questions on an economy that still leaves 78% of Americans struggling paycheck to paycheck. But this isn’t the first time Stephanopoulos abdicated his journalistic responsibility. Recall back in July 2015 as he laughed in then Congressman Keith Ellison’s face on national television for Ellison’s suggestion and warning that Trump could win he Republican nomination. That laughter aged like milk.
The Washington Post proudly displays their slogan as ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness.’ Meanwhile, last week they published this fawning article over Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett as “charting her own path.”
Barrett, meanwhile, has overturned Roe, repealed Affirmative Action, gutted the separation of religion and state, expanded Presidential immunity, criminalized homelessness, legalized bribery, decimated environmental protections, and is fully on board with Project 2025. To whitewash all this as “charting her own path” is to consciously undermine democracy itself. In reality Democracy dies in broad daylight at the hands of these absurd articles.
And while media outlets like the New York Times have called on Biden to withdraw from the race, they remain silent on Trump despite his 34 felony convictions, civil conviction of rape, three more pending criminal trials, and refusal to state that he will concede should he lose in November.
In Summary
Media is called the fourth estate for a reason. It plays an absolutely critical and irreplaceable role in holding the powerful and our government accountable. When legacy media instead fawns over the powerful and whitewashes the injustices they commit, it hurts our nation and the future prospects of a stable democracy. Watching media fail in 2024 makes it seem like they learned nothing in 2016. Or perhaps, the scary version, is legacy media recognized the record profits it made through clickbait and wants to repeat that financial success at the cost of our democracy.
Donald Trump is an existential threat to the future of our democracy, as is Project 2025. Rather than pretending he and the fascists behind Project 2025 are innocent bystanders, legacy media should hold Trump accountable to the highest of standards, stop enabling his extremism, and loudly denounce Project 2025 for the authoritarian MAGA fantasy it is. The future of our republic depends on it.
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CEO of New York Times is a Trump donor, as are the CEOs of CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, and MSNBC. And the owner of the Wall Street Journal is Rupert Murdoch. Does that make the stance media is taking a little clearer?
I think it's going to be up to REAL AMERICANS to keep sounding the alarm about Project 25 to those in our spheres of influence because clearly, we cannot rely on mainstream media. A first year college journalism student could have moderated a debate better than Bash and Tapper. Of course, CNN has been on a downward spiral for a couple of years now.
The unfortunate thing is there's not a solid media infrastructure for progressives to get accurate news consistently.