Disavowing Project 2025 is Trump's biggest unforced error

Besides debating Kamala Harris

Some remarkable details from a new NBC News national poll that Daniel Nichanian from Bolts picked out:

Dig into the poll, and you will find this chart:

Project 2025 manages to be more unpopular than JD Vance and Socialism combined.

This is a remarkable result in 2024 America, defined by negative partisanship that ensures that both parties are equally hated. And we have to thank Donald Trump.

This is entirely the result of his sad attempt to disavow this nearly 1,000-page document and the now-shuttered effort to round up sociopaths to execute the plan for a Christian nationalist monarchy that will ruin YOUR life.

At first glance, Trump's attempt to “I am NOT a crook” Project 2025 made some sense.

The public was finally catching on. Thanks to TikTok, Taraji P. Henson, John Oliver, and other dedicated souls, the perpetual GOP nominee, predator, and PR demon felt the need to distance himself from a plan that had been written for him.

It had been written for him in several ways:

1. It’s the nuclear-weapons-grade version of Trump’s Schedule F, his plan to dismantle our civil service and turn it into an army of sniveling sycophants who would make Mike Pence post-January 6th look like Mike Pence pre-January 6th.
2. It gave Trump a series of agreements with the far right he could make in advance so they would feel comfortable choosing his chaos over Ron DeSantis's more tedious and reliable fascism.
3. It appeals to Trump’s narcissism by committing itself to his particular peeves, like hating windmills and wanting to be our dictator.
4. It gives him the plan and personnel to achieve every horrible whim of our Christian Right and the mafiosos in Trump’s world/head, which he mostly sucked at the first time except when it came to appointing Supreme Court Justices because Leonard Leo and Mitch McConnell had a Project 2017 for that.

We all get it.

It’s a Trump plan written by Trump people encouraged by Trump.

Trump denying any real connection to Project 2025 even gives Republicans reason to despise it. And you’ve probably gotten tons of mailers trying to disavow any connection, which, given what we know about the brain, only builds the connection.

And before he denied it, the mainstream media had no idea how to cover the story without seeming partisan. It’s so bad that even describing it accurately offends the “both sides” nature of our political reporting.

Now, Trump’s denial has become the entire story. Everyone knows how to cover that. It’s easy! Just Google the trillion connections between Trump and the thing.

If he just ignored it, they would have gone on with feigned indifference the whole campaign. Now Democrats get to make it a synecdoche for everything bad the GOP has wanted to do for decades and the press just has to go, “Yep, that’s the plan. Always has been.”

One of the best moments of Vice President Harris’s excellent debate performance is when she continued to call it Trump’s Project 2025, even after he denied it.

I get Andra Watkins’s argument that labeling Project 2025 and abortion bans as just Trump’s lets other Republicans get away from responsibility. And we shouldn’t do that, at least definitely not after November. But the GOP sinks or rises in 2024 by Trump’s status and popularity.

The more we shake Trump and force him to have to answer for Project 2025, the worse his mistake comes.