Democrat officials have launched a disinformation campaign about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, misattributing policies nowhere to be found in the project and falsely linking them to former President Donald Trump.
The project is a policy roadmap for a future Republican administration created by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and outlined in a nearly 1,000-page document highlighting long-held conservative priorities. The left’s fearmongering campaign comes amidst panic in the Democratic Party, which has fractured over Biden’s cognitive decline and abysmal election polling.
“[Project 2025] is a dangerous takeover by Trump and his allies to pass his extreme MAGA agenda,” Biden recently said on X, including a video that claims the project “would allow employers to stop paying overtime for millions” and “enact a national abortion ban.”
The claims are massive distortions of the project’s actual policies. The outline, in reality, suggests “calculat[ing] the overtime period over a long number of weeks” with the goal of giving workers greater flexibility in their schedule.
A national abortion ban is nowhere to be found in the policy outline, which insists conservatives should “recogn[ize] the many women who find themselves in immensely difficult and often tragic situations.”
The project encourages “complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion” and notes that “alternative options to abortion, especially adoption, should receive federal and state support.”
The Biden campaign has doubled down on efforts to attribute the project to Trump, even creating a webpage that calls the policy plan “Trump’s Project 2025.” Trump has repeatedly distanced himself from the think tank’s policies.
“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
The website, nevertheless, insists that Trump plans on “reinstating and expanding [the] racist Muslim ban,” “arming teachers,” and “raising the retirement age.” It also claims Project 2025 will put “families’ access to IVF treatments … in jeopardy” and “cut Social Security.”
Not one of these policies is contained anywhere in Project 2025.
Other Democrats have participated in the fearmongering.
“They’re going after IVF,” Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed on MSNBC in February. “They also want to control … what they call recreational sex. … This is so clearly a patriarchal theocracy.”
Project 2025 makes no mention of in vitro fertilization (IVF) or “recreational sex.” Mentions of “God” and “Christian” are limited to religious freedom, tax exemptions, work as “service to God,” and “God-given individual rights to live freely,” contrary to AOC’s claims of theocracy.
Celebrities on the left have joined in the misinformation campaign as well.
Hollywood actor Mark Hamill, a longtime Democrat fundraiser and Biden supporter, spoke out against Project 2025 in a recent post, writing, “With fear for our Democracy, I dissent.”
The actor included a graphic of Trump with a laundry list of goals supposedly outlined in the project, including ending no-fault divorce, banning African American studies, banning contraception, banning Muslim immigration, cutting social security, raising the retirement age, and court packing.
Project 2025 responded with an enumerated list of 30 “myths vs. facts,” clarifying Hamill’s more misleading claims.
“Mandate for Leadership calls for LOWER taxes for ALL Americans. Individuals spend their money in more productive ways than the government does,” the post noted, debunking the assertion that Project 2025 calls for higher taxes for working-class people.
“Mandate for Leadership’s plan would not eliminate the FDA or the EPA, and NOAA’s functions would be transferred to other agencies, the private sector, and states and territories,” the post clarified about misleading claims on government agency policy.
But regardless of the facts about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Democrats and their supporters will continue to lie about the policy plan’s substance and inaccurately link the plan to Trump in an attempt to derail his presidential campaign.
Monroe Harless is a summer intern at The Federalist. She is a recent graduate of the University of Georgia with degrees in journalism and political science.
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