Trump’s opponents have been warning for months that his reelection would threaten American democracy in new ways — a perfectly valid warning, given Trump’s experience in the White House and his lack of plans to leave office after 2020. But it’s also abstract: Most Americans can’t comprehend what a decline into authoritarianism would look like, in the same way they can’t, say, comprehend the decline in people’s capacities as they age.
This combination of abstract threats and vague reelection offers works to Trump’s advantage: he can easily sidestep it all, confident that his meeting with, say, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán will be seen as a pedestrian politician’s stunt rather than an authoritarian master-pupil meeting.
Or he did it He got away with it until his allies at the Heritage Foundation thrust a lengthy explanation of Trump’s second term in office in front of the American people.
You’ve probably heard of it already: Project 2025. It’s a wish list compiled by conservative and right-wing policy experts, many of them veterans of President Trump’s first term, who would likely return to Washington if he wins in November. The 900-plus page document outlining what they want from a second Trump administration lays out in great detail what would happen if Trump takes office in January, whether he concedes or not.
But he doesn’t think so. Last week, despite his previous praise for Heritage and repeated references to Project 2025 by Project 2025 officials to his ties to Trump, the former president tried to build a wall between himself and the project’s products. The denials brought new attention to Project 2025.
Interest in the issue was already growing before Trump’s denial, in part because HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” devoted a half-hour to the subject, which aired on YouTube on June 20th, roughly a week before the first spike in search interest seen in the graph below.
Google shares data on search interest on a relative basis, showing the number of searches relative to peaks in a given time period, so for context, here’s a comparison of searches for “Project 2025” to the classic search term “dinner,” or “what should I make…”
This week, people searched for “Project 2025” as much as they searched for information about presidential candidates — that’s a lot.
The Trump effect is clear in cable TV coverage: MSNBC mentioned “Project 2025” repeatedly before July 5, while CNN and Fox News largely ignored it. (The figures below show the number of 15 seconds of airtime per day the topic was mentioned.) But once Trump denied any involvement, coverage soared, in part because it was so easy to link Trump to the people who put the dossier together.
YouGov released a poll on Thursday showing how much people know about and what they think about the project. Other news topics, such as President Biden’s shaky nominations and the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity, were seen by more people. But more than half of respondents said they had seen coverage of Project 2025.
You see, Democrats were far more likely to make those statements than Republicans, likely due in part to differences in coverage between MSNBC and Fox News.
Democrats are also much more likely to have opinions about Project 2025. Those opinions are overwhelmingly negative.
What Democratic campaign officials are finding here is that independents online are also very negative, many of whom haven’t heard much about the issue, but don’t like what they’ve heard. So Biden posted “Google Project 2025” on social media (the same day search traffic peaked in the graph above). So they put up signs linking Trump to the project.
One of the things Project 2025 does is describe how a Republican president (the authors clearly hope for Trump’s inauguration in January) could consolidate power and reduce the role of Congress and executive branch officials. This explains how American institutions could be eroded in the same way that Orbán has eroded Hungarian institutions. It’s an argument for moving away from liberal democracy.
In other words, it embodied a comprehensive warning against Trump — and, thanks in part to Trump’s efforts to push it aside, far more Americans now know about it.
