Despite reality, Trump tries to distance himself from Project 2025

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In recent weeks, President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign and its allies set out to inform the public about Project 2025 — a right-wing policy agenda being crafted by The Heritage Foundation, with the assistance of several prominent Donald Trump associates. The Democratic incumbent’s campaign website created a page dedicated specifically to the governing blueprint and promoted it via social media in the hopes of getting the word out. The push caught on. Not only has it become more common to see “Google Project 2025” messages online, but as my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones recently noted, the right-wing plan also became “the talk of the Black Entertainment Television Awards” after host Taraji P. Henson “made multiple references to it.” By Friday, it reached the point that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee decided to issue a brief statement about it by way of his social media platform: I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them. There are, of course, a few glaring problems with Trump’s pushback. The first is the flawed logic: On the one hand, the former president would have the public believe he doesn’t know anything about Project 2025. On the other hand, Trump believes some of the provisions in the right-wing document are “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” — suggesting he does know at least something about it. The second problem is that it’s impossible to take seriously. Popular Information’s Judd Legum published a detailed takedown on this, highlighting the lengthy list of people from Trump’s own team who co-authored the Project 2025 document. “I literally don’t have enough time to list every connection between Donald Trump and Project 2025,” MSNBC’s Ali Velshi told viewers over the weekend. “But I can absolutely confidently say that Donald Trump’s claim that he ‘knows nothing about Project 2025’ and has ‘no idea who is behind it’ is, how do we say it in Canada? Complete and utter BS.” But I’m also struck by the larger context: Trump wouldn’t have bothered to publish a denial unless he was concerned that Democrats’ focus on Project 2025 was gaining traction. In other words, the efforts to make Project 2025 a real campaign issue are having the intended effect, and it’s making the former president nervous.