Historian Exposes Potentially Fatal Flaws In Project 2025 Handbook
Political historian Rick Perlstein delivered a damning summary of Project 2025, writing in a lengthy analysis published Wednesday that it’s “not what you’ve heard” because “much of it is too dumb to accomplish anything at all.”
The right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank’s playbook — which is widely expected to guide policy in a potential second Donald Trump administration — contains myriad contradictions and conflicting opinions that could effectively render its extremist policy proposals redundant, Perlstein suggested in an essay for The American Prospect.
Present in the document are “great, big, blinking red ‘LOOK AT ME’ advertisements of vulnerabilities within the conservative coalition. Wedge issues. Opportunities to split Republicans at their most vulnerable joints,” wrote Perlstein, the author of “Before the Storm,” “Nixonland” and “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.”
There is “plenty of blunt insanity” but “bottom line, this is a complicated document,” Perlstein added.
“‘Conservatives in Disarray’ is precisely the opposite message from that conveyed by all the coverage of Project 2025,” Perlstein noted. “But it is an important component of this complexity, and why this text should be picked apart, not panicked over, and studied both for the catastrophes it portends and the potential it provides. So, yes, like George C. Scott in ‘Patton,’ I’m here to say: ‘Heritage Foundation, you magnificent bastard. I read your book!’”
The handbook and some of its policy ideas have come under increasing scrutiny in recent weeks. The reelection campaign of President Joe Biden, who continues to face calls to abandon his run following his disastrous debate performance, has made highlighting those radical plans ― including the gutting of the federal government in exchange for Trump loyalists ― a major part of its case against the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
Trump, however, is now seeking to distance himself from its potentially vote-losing proposals, claiming last week that he knew “nothing” about the playbook, has “no idea who is behind it” and slamming some of the policies as “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
CNN’s Abby Phillip, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi and many, many more people have, however, called “B.S.” on that spin, noting how chapters were written by multiple former Trump White House aides and figures who remain linked to the former president.
Read Perlstein’s full analysis here.
