The far-right’s Project 2025 also dodged a bullet, and they know it

MILWAUKEE — To borrow a phrase uttered by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts on Monday, the architects of Project 2025 — the extremist blueprint for a second Donald Trump presidency — ran a “silver linings” playbook at a daylong policy festival just a few blocks from the Republican National Convention.

The foundation, its role in Project 2025, and even Roberts himself have come under fire during the last week from the left and some Democrats, including President Joe Biden. Critics sought to expose its radical agenda for replacing thousands of civil servants with Trump loyalists, ending all climate action, and implementing the mass deportation of migrants. Foes of the plan also ripped the Heritage chief for implying “a second American Revolution” might get violent if the left opposes it.

But one minute Saturday in Butler, Pa. — and the would-be assassin’s bullets that grazed Trump, killed a spectator, and wounded two others — changed everything, and the key figures behind Project 2025 acted Monday like people who also dodged a bullet.

“It’s a glorious day here, and I mean that,” the director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, told the hundreds of RNC attendees who spent the day inside the ornate Art Deco-style Bradley Symphony Center. “What happened on Saturday changed the world. We are constantly reminded that we are all Americans.” Dans added: “We have to take the vitriol down” — seconds before he suggested that Biden’s amped-up rhetoric around Project 2025 created the climate for an assassination attempt.

The world did change, and you could feel the chill even on an unseasonably hot day near the banks of Lake Michigan.

Now, suddenly, it’s an outrageous political crime to suggest a second Trump administration would rule America in a dictatorial fashion, even after those plans were all written in cold ink in Project 2025’s main manifesto, a 920-page document with contributions from dozens of well-connected and Trump-friendly right-wing groups. Roberts asked attendees in Milwaukee if they were ready to take back America “very steadily, calmly, peacefully” — even as their plan’s extreme details haven’t changed.

The Republican Party line that it’s now time for national unity — and that this week in Milwaukee is about asking America what’s so funny ’bout peace, love, and understanding — is clearly carrying the day. Never mind that most GOP calls for toning down the rhetoric are followed by an attack that blames Democrats for all the toxic political speech. Never mind that Trump summoned violent protesters to Washington after posting violent memes, or cheering attacks on a Biden bus or on Paul Pelosi. Or that the Fiserv Forum is packed with Republicans chanting “Fight!”

» READ MORE: In ‘eerie’ Milwaukee, the Trump shooting isn’t bringing America any closer together | Will Bunch

Just like the days after 9/11, Americans need to watch what they do, watch what they say — or so we are told. We continue to obey in advance. The nervous nellies who run MSNBC for Philadelphia-based Comcast continued on Monday to keep the occasionally liberal opinion journalists of shows like Morning Joe off the air, terrified someone might shatter the new zeitgeist and utter a criticism of the newly minted Republican nominee. Ditto the producers of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, who called off months of planning and decided not to come to a sold-out theater here in Milwaukee. Apparently, politics isn’t funny. They may be right.

“The more we as a society bow to the pressure and self-censor — the dream of autocrats is for you to silence yourself, doing their job for them — the more arrogant and lawless the enemies of democracy will become,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University historian and author of the book Strongmen on modern dictators, posted on Monday. Even as Trump’s allies proclaimed he was a changed man after his brush with death, the 45th president took to Truth Social to attack the criminal charges against him — including the classified documents case that was dropped on Monday. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp wrote that “Trump’s idea of ‘unity’ is everyone agreeing he can do crimes with impunity.”

Although there was a moment of silence at the outset of the Heritage Foundation event to mark Saturday’s shooting and its victims, there was little evidence that an assassination attempt cast any real pall over the proceedings, here or anywhere else in Milwaukee. Arrivals at the historic concert hall were greeted by a three-piece R&B combo blaring “I’m Walking on Sunshine” and “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” — anthems for a party convinced the November election is already won.

Dans, the Project 2025 chief, said he woke up Saturday morning expecting that he’d have to defend the minutia and some of the detailed allegations against Project 2025 and was relieved he didn’t have to. “What Democrats said about Project 2025 is probably the greatest misinformation campaign since the Russia hoax — that’s what they do, move from hoax to hoax.”

But Dans’ claim, and the other speakers like Roberts who accused the left of distorting Project 2025, didn’t feel a need to really defend any of the project’s more controversial ideas, like eliminating popular agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or the U.S. Department of Education, or banning pornography, or potentially criminalizing being a librarian, or giving a president more control over the U.S. Justice Department to prosecute enemies or pardon friends.

Instead, speakers insisted Project 2025 — which, as a centerpiece, calls for axing thousands of federal jobs, although some would be replaced with Trump loyalists — is meant to “deconstruct the administrative state,” which is the right-wing theory that Ivy League-educated elites in government agencies have too much power over average citizens.

“We don’t want to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state,” insisted Vivek Ramaswamy, the failed presidential candidate who was a keynote speaker at the Heritage Foundation event. That may have been an implied message to far-right thought leaders who insist that only a “Red Caesar” president, wielding authoritarian powers, can successfully crush the left with “post-constitutional” rule. But his question obscures the reality that many of Project 2025’s ideas about weakening bureaucrats would ultimately give power to the president, whom they fervently believe will be Trump on Jan. 20, 2025.

Until then, Roberts — citing his combative past as a conservative professor on a liberal state university campus — told reporters that “I have been arguing that the temperature needs to be turned down ... particularly by people on the political left.”