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media matters for america
Media Faces Reckoning After Helping Trump Downplay Project 2025 on Campaign Trail
"A Trump denial is not a fact," said one media critic.
Oct 03, 2025
As President Donald Trump openly embraces Project 2025, mainstream media outlets are facing criticism for their role in helping him downplay his ties to the wildly unpopular far-right governing playbook in the lead-up to his reelection last year.
After she became the Democratic nominee in July, former Vice President Kamala Harris made the Heritage Foundation's over 900-page manifesto for “the next conservative president” central to her case against Trump during the 2024 election, often referring to it as "Trump's Project 2025."
She and other Democrats warned that if he retook power, he would swiftly enact many of its most extreme and unpopular proposals and dramatically expand executive power while doing it.
Among those proposals were steep cuts to social safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the "mass deportations" of millions of immigrants, the elimination of the Department of Education, new restrictions on abortions, the gutting of climate protections, and the replacement of career civil servants with political appointees, among many others.
Democrats amplified the plan's danger at the Democratic National Convention and in campaign ads, and Trump began to distance himself from the platform. Despite the fact that as many as 140 people who'd worked in his first administration—including Paul Dans, Heritage's director of Project 2025—had a hand in its creation, Trump said: "I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it."
This was demonstrably untrue, even at the time. Media Matters for America dug up a clip from as far back as May 2023 of Dans stating that "President Trump's very bought in with this," speaking of the program.
Project 2025 was almost inconceivably unpopular. An NBC News poll from September 2024 showed that while 57% of registered voters viewed the plan negatively, just 4% viewed it positively.
But in the critical months leading up to the election, many media outlets took Trump's denial at face value, publishing fact checks and other commentary that painted Democrats' warnings about his connection to the plan as alarmist or misleading.
Responding to a social media post in July stating that "Trump has made his authoritarian intentions quite clear with his Project 2025 plan," a fact check by USA Today rated the statement "false," because, as the headline said, "Project 2025 is an effort by the Heritage Foundation, not Donald Trump."
In September, after Harris confronted Trump about Project 2025 at the first and only debate between the two, the paper published another fact-check with the headline: "Harris repeats claim that Project 2025 is Trump's plan. That's still not right."
In response to Harris' claim during the debate that Project 2025 was "a detailed and dangerous plan... that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected,” Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, whose coverage received a fair bit of criticism during the 2024 cycle, reported in bold text that "Project 2025 is not an official campaign document."
A CNN fact check of the Harris campaign's social media in September remarked that one account "frequently invokes Project 2025," before caveating that "Project 2025 is not Trump’s initiative, and he has said he disagrees with some of its proposals."
In an October interview on CBS's "Face the Nation," anchor Norah O'Donnell, Harris attempted to warn about Project 2025, before O'Donnell responded: "You know that Donald Trump has disavowed Project 2025. He says that is not his campaign plan."
After nine months back in power, the website Project 2025 Tracker estimates that Trump has already implemented approximately 48% of the objectives outlined in the policy document.
In addition to his key campaign promises many of his second administration's policies are highly specific to Project 2025, such as his pledge to abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), his efforts to privatize the National Weather Service (NWS), his reconfiguration of Title X funding to promote pregnancy, and his elimination of the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
Trump is no longer hiding his connection to Project 2025, having brought in many of its hiring picks and authors to staff his administration almost immediately after his victory last November.
This week, he began to boast about it openly. As his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director, Russ Vought, one of Project 2025's architects, began using the current government shutdown to unilaterally cut off funding to infrastructure projects in blue states and cities, Trump lauded him as "he of PROJECT 2025 Fame."
"This was always the plan," Harris responded on social media.
While many commentators expressed outrage that Trump blatantly lied about his connections to Project 2025, others dredged up old clips of newspapers and anchors taking him at his word.
"All those 2024 media fact checks that said, 'Donald Trump and the Trump campaign deny any connection to Project 2025' look pretty ridiculous right now," said MeidasTouch editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski. "A Trump denial is not a fact. You just used his lies to 'debunk' a reality that was obvious to anyone paying attention."
Mehdi Hasan, the founder of the independent media company Zeteo, highlighted the CBS interview, saying Trump's embrace of Project 2025 was "embarrassing not just for Norah O'Donnell but a whole host of leading American anchors and reporters who echoed Trump’s false denials."
"Nothing showed the difference between mainstream and independent media better than the response to Trump’s obvious lie about not knowing anything about Project 2025," said David Pepper, author of the book Saving Democracy: A User's Manual. "Most mainstream media started fact-checking those who claimed a connection to be somehow false. Others 'both sides'ed' it. Far more in independent media called it out as a whopping lie."
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'The Orban Playbook': Trump Assault on Media Matters Seen as Dire Warning to Other Critics
"The speed of the collapse in the media environment is something I had not foreseen," wrote John Hopkins University economist Filipe Campante.
Jul 25, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump and his allies have been waging legal war for months against liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America, and a report from The New York Times on Friday claimed that the organization is now in dire financial straits as it's been racking up millions in legal expenses.
According to the Times, Media Matters has incurred legal expenses of $15 million in its efforts to defend itself against lawsuits from X owner Elon Musk, as well as investigations launched by the Federal Trade Commission and two Republican state attorneys general. The expenses from the lawsuits have also had the add-on effect of making donors to the organization "skittish," writes the Times, and the organization has had to slash its staff in half.
To make matters worse, even victories in court for Media Matters bring it little reprieve given that Musk, with his limitless resources as the world's wealthiest man, will file appeals that will force the organization to shell out even more legal fees.
John Hopkins University economist Filipe Campante, who regularly writes about authoritarian threats to democracy, commented on Bluesky that the plight of Media Matters is linked to Trump's other efforts to clamp down on the free press, such as his lawsuit against CBS News that resulted in parent company Paramount agreeing to pay out $16 million shortly before the Federal Communications Commission signed off on its $8 billion merger with studio Skydance.
In fact, he likened the Trump administration's current actions to those of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has successfully strangled independent media in his country over the span of several years.
"This, yet again, is competitive authoritarianism in practice," wrote Campante. "The speed of the collapse in the media environment is something I had not foreseen... weaponization of lawsuits, persecution by regulators, donors scared away. It's the Orbán playbook, on steroids."
And Campante isn't the only expert making comparisons to Orbán.
Gábor Scheiring, a former Hungarian member of parliament who is now an assistant professor of comparative politics at Georgetown University Qatar, told CNN's Brian Stelter on Friday that Trump's strategy for taming the news media is almost the exact same strategy he once saw Orbán employ. Scheiring zeroed in on CBS' recent announcement that frequent Trump critic Stephen Colbert would have his show canceled next year as particularly Orbán-esque.
"Most of Orban's tactical weapons to take over the media resemble the moves that led to Colbert's cancellation," he explained. "The legal warfare, the lawsuit against CBS, the regulatory capture and threats, the financial pressures, the sale of the parent company, and the new owner's apparent friendliness to Trump."
Scheiring added that Orbán was able to achieve this result by isolating media owners and picking them off one by one to ensure they never forged a sense of solidarity with one another.
"Media owners, both foreign and domestic, largely capitulated individually rather than mounting collective resistance, which enabled Orbán's systematic capture strategy," he said.
Even media moguls ideologically allied with the president haven't escaped his wrath, as Trump filed a lawsuit against right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch earlier this month after the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal published a story detailing an obscene birthday card the president allegedly gave to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
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Watchdog of Far-Right GOP Issues 'The Definitive Guide to Project 2025'
"It's a clear threat to our democracy, as our government could be weaponized against us as part of a concerted effort to control how we live our live," said the vice president of Media Matters for America.
Aug 08, 2024
A watchdog organization that monitors the Republican Party and the far-right movement at its core released a document Thursday characterized as "the definitive guide to Project 2025," a sweeping policy agenda crafted by more than 100 conservative groups and alumni of former President Donald Trump's administration.
The 67-page report published by Media Matters for America lays out in detail Trump's close ties to Project 2025 and examines specific policy proposals included in the agenda, which—if implemented—would affect every area of American life, from the workplace to the environment to reproductive rights and other fundamental freedoms.
"Project 2025 lays out an extreme far-right agenda that would impose draconian restrictions to the lives of everyday Americans," Media Matters vice president Julie Millican said in a statement. "If enacted, not only would it gut the checks and balances that our country relies on, but it's a clear threat to our democracy, as our government could be weaponized against us as part of a concerted effort to control how we live our lives."
"Project 2025's extremist goals make clear what's truly at stake," Millican added.
"Project 2025 looks like an albatross that Trump will find hard to get rid of."
Contrary to the Republican presidential nominee's claim that he "knows nothing about" Project 2025 or who's behind it, Media Matters noted that "Trump and his allies are deeply connected" to the initiative spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation.
The new report points to Trump's remarks at a 2022 Heritage event, where the former president declared that the group would "lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do." The Washington Post revealed Wednesday that Trump traveled to the event via private jet with Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation.
"CNN reported that there are 'nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump,'" Media Matters observed in its new analysis. "The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee nominated Project 2025 author Russ Vought as the policy director of the RNC's 2024 Committee on the Platform... John McEntee, a Project 2025 senior adviser, said in April he would 'integrate a lot of our work' with the Trump campaign later this year."
The report spotlights plans outlined by Project 2025 and the Trump campaign to purge the federal workforce and replace career civil servants with Trump loyalists dedicated to implementing the far-right movement's assault on abortion rights, climate regulations, labor protections, and more. Trump allies have already begun screening "thousands of potential foot soldiers" to replace federal employees across the U.S. government.
"This posture toward witch hunts against federal bureaucrats recalls the days of disgraced Sen. Joe McCarthy's anti-communist crusade, which resulted in massive purges of left-wing federal employees as well as those perceived to be gay or gender-nonconforming," Media Matters noted, adding that "MAGA media, including Project 2025 allies, have openly celebrated McCarthy's destructive legacy."
The report also points with alarm to "a blog published to The American Conservative, a Project 2025 partner, [that] advocated for repealing the 22nd Amendment to allow Trump to serve a third term."
The Media Matters report came as the University of Massachusetts Amherst released new national survey data showing that Project 2025's policy proposals are "deeply unpopular" with U.S. voters.
Tatishe Nteta, provost professor of political science at UMass Amherst and director of the poll, said Thursday that "Project 2025 looks like an electoral liability" for Trump and the GOP, which has been accused of injecting Project 2025 policies into government funding proposals currently before Congress.
Nteta said that given the results of the new survey—conducted between July 29 and August 1—"it is no surprise that the Democratic Party has sought to link" Project 2025 with Trump or that the GOP nominee has attempted to "move away from any and all association with the unpopular 900-page playbook."
"Large majorities of Americans oppose the key pillars of Project 2025, such as the replacement of career government officials with political appointees (68% opposed), restricting a woman's right to contraception (72% opposed), and eliminating the Department of Education (64% opposed)," said Nteta. "While our politics are usually divided by class, generational, racial, gender, and partisan identities, among these groups we find strong opposition to many of the policies associated with Project 2025."
"Even former Trump voters exhibit opposition to many of these policies," Nteta added, "a bad omen for the Republican Party and Trump campaign."
Just 8% of Trump 2020 voters support Project 2025's proposal to strip emergency contraception access from tens of millions of women across the U.S., according to the new poll. Only 18% of Trump voters said they support "firing federal employees and replacing them with political appointees loyal to the president."
More than half of Americans say they have heard about Project 2025, the new survey shows—a finding that UMass Amherst professor Jesse Rhodes described as remarkable given that Heritage Foundation reports are "usually incredibly obscure."
"For the most part, Americans don't like what they are hearing," said Rhodes, a co-director of the new poll. "It's no wonder Trump is trying to distance himself from Project 2025, but unfortunately for him, because dozens of his former administration officials worked on the report, this is going to be hard to do. Project 2025 looks like an albatross that Trump will find hard to get rid of."
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