Democrats Have A Project 2025 Branding Challenge

A single word and a number aren’t that scary.

Democrats are raising alarms about Project 2025. President Joe Biden posted on Tuesday, “Google Project 2025,” which reminds me of the guerilla marketing campaign for The Matrix back in 1999. Biden has his share of troubles right now, so the least I can do for him is google Project 2025.

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Look at those smoking guns!

The first thing that comes up is the official Project 2025 website. Unfortunately, its launch page doesn’t carefully detail all the ways that Project 2025 is evil. This is probably why Republicans never suggested that people google Black Lives Matter. “Oh, Black Lives Matter is working inside and outside of the system to heal the past, reimagine the present, and invest in the future of Black lives. That doesn’t sound so bad. My aunt thinks they’re violent Marxists who abhor the nuclear family! She’ll be so relieved.”

Project 2025’s About page opens with some over-the-top venting about the Left but ultimately defines itself in fairly banal terms:

The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is being organized by The Heritage Foundation and builds off Heritage’s longstanding “Mandate for Leadership,” which has been highly influential for presidential administrations since the Reagan era. Most recently, the Trump administration relied heavily on Heritage’s “Mandate” for policy guidance, embracing nearly two-thirds of Heritage’s proposals within just one year in office.

This isn’t the most compelling reading material. Maybe the president just wants to make sure everyone gets a full night’s sleep?

Hillary Clinton isn’t the sitting president, alas, but her communications staff seems more on the ball. Here’s her significantly less cryptic post from Tuesday: “Trump is desperate to make sure voters don’t know about Project 2025 — his team’s blueprint for American dictatorship. That's our cue to make sure our friends and family know ALL about it.”

Dictatorship? Now, you’ve got our attention. Clinton points out that Project 2025 is so bad that Trump has distanced himself from it. Hiding away in his own basement while pointing and laughing at Democrats, Trump insisted, “I know nothing about Project 2025,” which is certainly plausible because he’s very stupid and struggles with numbers.

“I have no idea who is behind it” — maybe he should google Project 2025 — “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Trump is lying, of course. Multiple Trump cronies have deep ties to Project 2025 and have worked on the GOP platform.

Clinton shared a link to a New Republic article about Project 2025, but it reads like a dream where you’re at a party but can’t quite make out the guests’ faces: “Project 2025 reflects Trump’s core political philosophy and has been boosted by key allies, including former advisers Stephen Miller and John McEntee. Trump’s own super PACs have run ads highlighting Project 2025’s policy goals.” But what are those goals and why will they end with me in a cage without champagne service?

The New Republic states that “the project has already ‘trained and vetted’ more than 10,000 people to replace executive branch employees should the presumptive GOP presidential candidate win in November. But they may have more on the way—in November, Trump allies claimed they were looking to install as many as 54,000 pre-vetted Trump loyalists to the executive branch via a ‘Schedule F’ executive order.”

It’s obviously very bad if Trump stacks the executive branch with far-right hacks who march in perfect goosestep to him, but a lot of this is likely to go over the heads of average voters. I don’t mean to sound condescending. I just think Democrats are assuming that thunder crackles and horses freak out whenever they say “Project 2025.”

Titles are everything. I remember back in 1983 parents forbidding their kids from seeing the new James Bold film Octopussy based solely on its name, although the actual content was no more risque than the previous installment, For Your Eyes Only. (A friend’s big brother tried to con their parents by simply asking to see “the new James Bond movie,” but my friend couldn’t help shouting “OCTOPUSSY!”)

Project 2025, on the other hand, sounds like a 1980s sci-fi series set “twenty minutes into the future.” Soylent Green or The Matrix don’t seem like a big deal on their own until you learn one is food made from people and the other’s a computer simulation with excellent steaks. The relatively innocuous titles help enable the twist endings, but Democrats shouldn’t worry so much about spoilers.

Liberal activists often lead with IT’S MADE FROM PEOPLE!!! That’s certainly honest and in-your-face but it’s rarely effective politics. During that lengthy 15 minutes of racial reckoning in 2020, the “Defund The Police” slogan terrified a lot of normal people who assumed that axe murderers would freely roam their neighborhoods and steal their axes. By the time I explained that the goal was police reform and increased accountability, not The Purge, the next election had passed and they’d voted out the local progressive district attorney. Around the same time, the “We See You, White American Theatre” document made the rounds. The title was suitably confrontational, but I personally might’ve gone with “Better Theatre For All,” not because I’m a race-hating coward but because in my experience, people are fundamentally less cooperative when they’re on the defensive. Republicans are very good at packaging their poison pills in candy floss.

CBS News describes Project 2025’s proposed policies in general terms — “less federal intervention in education and more support for school choice; work requirements for able-bodied, childless adults on food stamps; and a secure border with increased enforcement of immigration laws, mass deportations and construction of a border wall.”

These are typical awful Republican positions — workers rights would also take a hit — but average voters probably don’t consider them a blueprint for fascism. Project 2025 proposes reshaping the nation according to Christian values, but a disturbing number of people, including your grandparents, consider that a good thing — more The Waltons than A Handmaid’s Tale.

Democrats can’t rely on the media or Google to fill in the blanks for voters. They’ll probably have to specify every terrible thing Republicans will do if Trump wins and they control Congress. Repeating Project 2025 won’t make fetch happen.

“Project 2025 plans to upend structures, institutions and the basic rights that have supposedly been afforded to Americans to make it great,” Rep. Stacey Plaskett said this week. “It’s a playbook for Donald Trump’s second term and a plan for the destruction of America as we know it.”

That’s better. There were definitely more words than “Project” and “2025.” Still a little vague, though. Fortunately, Vice President Kamala Harris offered some specifics when she discussed the end stages of secular democracy at a recent campaign event.

HARRIS: Trump’s advisers have created a 900 page blueprint they’re calling “Project 2025,” detailing everything else they plan to do in a second term. They plan to cut Social Security, to repeal our $35 cap on insulin, to eliminate the Department of Education, and end programs like Head Start … Project 2025 outlines a plan to limit access to contraception and for a nationwide abortion ban, with or without an act of Congress. If implemented, this plan would be the latest attack in Donald Trump’s full-on assault on reproductive freedom

I get why Democrats would like to cover Trump’s assorted mad schemes under the single umbrella of “Project 2025,” but there’s a reason Stephen King’s book about a killer dog is called Cujo and not Muffin. It’s probably worth the extra effort to call out the individual horrors.

Over on the platform that was once Black Twitter, artist Jaye Allison Ashtear wrote, “I fear that way too many want to jump in to the weeds on the threats [Project 2025] poses to the civil service and the material damage to democracy if independent agencies etc. etc. when in fact they need to plaster ‘republicans want to make divorce illegal’ all over the place.”

Yeah, that’s actually one of the individual horrors I mentioned: Although Project 2025 specifically doesn’t target divorce, members of its advisory board have called for an end to no-fault divorce. If random protesters at a Black Lives Matter rally shouting “defund the police” is sufficient to tank an unrelated Democratic Congress member in a swing seat, then it’s fair to argue that Trump wants to make divorce illegal (even though he’s on his third marriage).

Democrats shouldn’t overthink this: Republicans are weird and want to impose their bizarre beliefs on normal people. That’s the bumper sticker. Just keep hammering them with relatable specifics until Election Day and beyond.

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