Republicans know Americans despise Project 2025. They don’t care

More than 100 conservative organizations that back the Republican Party created Project 2025, the 920-page right-wing manifesto for governance in a renewed Donald Trump administration that (incredibly) went completely unmentioned in the recent presidential debate, because they know their policies are deeply unpopular with the American public. These are policies that, for the most part, cannot be realized through elections or through legislation—because the American people don’t want them.

There is simply no electoral outcry for massive tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of all other taxpayers. There is no constituency for rolling back environmental, civil rights, and labor protections. There is no widespread demand to transform women and others into second-class citizens whose reproductive destinies are ruled by religious edicts from unelected political appointees. Nor is there any demand by Americans for militant, Christian nationalism in our justice system or public schools, or a politicized FBI and Justice Department meting out “retribution” against Trump’s political opponents. 

The American people, by and large, don’t want any of this. That’s why the more they actually learn about Project 2025’s actual policy goals, the more they reject them. 

The GOP has learned by now that it cannot implement these policies through traditional, democratic means. They’ve tried suppressing the votes of Democratic constituencies. They’ve tried distracting their own voters with contrived non-issues to inflame fears and prejudices so they vote not for their own economic interests, but rather for the interests of the billionaire and corporate Republican donor base. But those strategies have gradually run up against an increasingly daunting demographic wall that shows no real sign of collapsing. 

With every electoral defeat from 2018 onward, the GOP has had a choice: either moderate its noxious positions in conformance with public opinion or double down. They’ve consistently doubled down, which is why this country now faces Project 2025, a blueprint for an incipient fascist regime allowing an emboldened Trump to impose these policies on Americans against their will.