In early July, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to condemn Project 2025, the 920-page policy plan that had repeatedly brought bad press to his campaign. After being attacked by Democrats for his well-documented ties to the initiative, the former president decided to finally speak out publicly and, he hoped, put an end to the debate surrounding Project 2025. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he said, calling some of its proposals “absolutely ridiculous and miserable” and claiming to have “no idea who is behind it.”
Trump did not specify in his post what he found “abysmal” or “ridiculous” about Project 2025. He has reportedly complained privately about the extreme abortion policy proposals laid out in the plan for the next Republican administration, drawn up by the Heritage Foundation. According to Rolling Stone, the Republican candidate fumed that the “crazies” running the project could cost him the election, or at least reduce his considerable lead. The following month, the campaign continued to claim no ties to Project 2025 and other far-right groups and ideas. At a rally in mid-July, Trump sharply criticized the “hard right” and called those involved in Project 2025 “seriously extreme.”
Several polls show that Trump has good reason to worry that Project 2025 could hurt his campaign. In late July, the Navigator Research polling firm released surveys showing that more than half of Americans had heard of Project 2025. Of those respondents, only 11 percent had a positive view of the project, while 43 percent had an unfavorable view. The polling firm also found that overwhelming majorities opposed certain policies, such as mandating the federal government to “police” abortion, abolishing the Department of Education and allowing the president to fire thousands of officials in the federal government.
Of these respondents, only 11% had a positive attitude towards the project, compared to 43% who had a negative opinion.
Last week, two separate YouGov polls—conducted for the University of Massachusetts and The Economist—provided further evidence of broad opposition to many of Project 2025’s core points. They found overwhelming majorities opposed to measures such as firing full-time government employees and replacing them with presidential loyalists (-56% net approval), “limiting women’s access to contraception” (-62% net approval), and abolishing the Department of Education (-44% net approval). The YouGov polls also showed growing awareness of Project 2025, no doubt thanks to constant mentions by Democrats. About three-quarters of Americans have now heard at least something about the right-wing project, and just 15% have a favorable opinion of it.
Unfortunately for the Trump campaign, these polls also show that few people have accepted the former president’s public denials. Although Trump continues to try to stay out of the project, only 11 percent of respondents said they believe he “strongly” does not support the policies outlined in it.
Those involved in Project 2025, meanwhile, expressed skepticism about Trump’s departure. “Trump can try to distance himself from it, but 70 to 80 percent of the people who wrote the book will be in his second administration,” a Project 2025 staffer told Rolling Stone. “You can’t look at this constellation of organizations and people without realizing they’re all his people,” they continued.
Aside from the obvious fact that Project 2025 is essentially a jobs program for former Trump officials, another glaring problem has emerged for Trump since he condemned the project over a month ago. If Trump wants to distance his campaign from the more extreme elements of the American right, he has made a colossal strategic error by choosing JD Vance as his vice presidential running mate.
Of all the possible vice presidents Trump could have chosen, none had as many connections to the fringe of “crazy” people as Vance. In recent years, the Ohio senator has been heavily involved in the project of creating a more intellectual, ideologically coherent Trumpism. Those efforts have led to some pretty interesting connections.
Vance is like the Forrest Gump of the far right, showing up wherever reactionaries gather to discuss radical plans for the next Republican administration. He is friends with various “post-liberal” figures who reject the liberal paradigm and its focus on “progress” and “human rights,” and instead point to Viktor Orban’s Hungary as a model to emulate. He has quoted favorably from “neo-reactionary” blogger Curtis Yarvin, a Peter Thiel confidant who advocates installing a CEO-like dictator who would smash the “deep state” and establish a new techno-monarchy in America. He has also been a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” and appeared on even more offbeat podcasts, such as “Jack Murphy Live,” hosted by a manosphere activist who once wrote that feminists “need rape.”
Vance is something like the Forrest Gump of the far right: he shows up wherever reactionaries gather to discuss radical plans for the next Republican administration.
In addition to his podcasting career, Vance is also a regular at conservative conferences hosted by far-right think tanks like the Claremont Institute and the Edmund Burke Foundation. These reactionary fests bring together post-liberals and “national conservatives” to rant about declining birth rates and the woke conspiracy, while strategizing how to destroy the subhuman Marxists destroying Western civilization.
Not surprisingly, Vance’s social network extends to the folks at Project 2025. In fact, the candidate has written a glowing foreword to a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. Vance’s foreword to Dawn’s Early Light not only praises Roberts’ leadership, but also champions Heritage’s ideas as a “vital weapon” in the fight against the left. The institution, he writes, has been “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”
These words were presumably written and submitted before Trump decided to publicly back away from Project 2025. Oops.
Roberts’ book was originally subtitled “Burning Down Washington to Save America” and was scheduled to be released next month, but last week the author announced that the release would be delayed by a week. after the election and have the watered-down subtitle “Taking Back Washington to Save America.”
Roberts’ polemic against the “deep state” was not the only book recommended by Vance that has recently been a stumbling block for the Trump-Vance campaign. Just a week before the Republican National Convention, far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec – who had recently spoken at the same conference as Vance – published a book co-authored with Joshua Lisec called “Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them).” Although it could be described as a fascist diatribe, it received positive reviews from both Vance and Donald Trump Jr., with the former praising the authors for showing the right how to “fight back” against the left.
Even for the far right, “Unhumans” is a fire-breathing text that makes the ideologues of Project 2025 look like timid moderates. The authors praise dictators like Franco (a “Washington figure”) and Augusto Pinochet for “ruthlessly” removing leftists they label as “inhumans” and enemies of civilization from their societies. “The history of throwing communists out of helicopters dates back to Pinochet’s elimination of communism in the mid- to late 1970s,” they write, apparently condoning the Chilean dictator’s infamous mass murder of his political opponents.
Vance’s decision to endorse such an extreme and ugly book does not reflect well on his political judgment. It also reflects the growing hubris of those on the right of the MAGA movement, who until recently were almost certain they would win in November. About a week before the Republican convention, one of Trump’s campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, confidently predicted a landslide victory for Trump and laughed off concerns that Joe Biden might drop out. A similar hubris characterized Trump’s decision to select Vance, the favorite of the terminally online MAGA faithful.
Vance’s most ardent supporters see him as a transitional figure who can help carry Trumpism beyond Trump into the future. When he was announced as Trump’s running mate, the 40-year-old senator was hailed in a Reuters report as the “anointed heir to Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.” Vance is “ready to carry Trumpism into the future … to talk about Trump to people who don’t understand Trump (and) ‘explain the agenda,'” said conservative radio host Erick Erickson.
Since Americans have become more familiar with the senator and his strange views, his popularity ratings have plummeted.
In recent weeks, however, it has become clear that the MAGA “agenda” is not nearly as popular as some initially thought. It is also becoming clear that only Trump can speak Trump fluently, and that cheap imitators like Vance are repulsive to normal people. Vance lacks charisma, has the energy of an answer guy, and is much more comfortable speaking to his fellow ideologues at the NatCon conference or chatting with fringe podcasters reading Bronze Age Pervert than he is giving a campaign speech to a sea of red MAGA hats. For the “normal” majority, Vance is not just unlikable, he is, yes, strange.
As Americans become more familiar with the senator and his oddball views, his approval ratings have plummeted. Polls show Vance’s numbers are deep in the red and have only gotten worse in the weeks since he became Trump’s running mate. Vance is increasingly viewed as “misogynistic,” “weird,” and “extreme,” largely due to past comments that resurfaced after his nomination. It turns out that what bothers most people is the “childless cat lady” slur and the demand that the federal government monitor pregnancies.
When asked at an Aug. 2 fundraiser if Democrats were portraying the Trump-Vance contingent as “weird,” the candidate simply replied, “Not about me. That’s what they say about JD.” That may be true, but it also says something about the people who embody the project of Trumpism beyond Trump. The more people learn about the people around Trump and the ideas they represent, the more repelled they become.
