Project 2025 Exposed . . . in People Magazine

Donald Trump may have made a critical error when he tried to pretend he did not know anything about Project 2025, the massive far-right blueprint for a dictator, prepared by his allies at the Heritage Foundation, and led by alumni of his first term who have even more authoritarian plans for a second.

The Christian nationalist details of the plan have now made the pages of People magazine, which on Thursday published a 2,500-word story with a headline calling it "the Far-Right Plan Threatening Everything from the Word 'Gender' to Public Education."

It is rare to see the term "Christian nationalism" in news coverage of Trump and the Republican Party anywhere, much less in the pages of a magazine known for celebrity gossip and pop culture coverage. But this story, by reporter Kyler Alvord, not only pointedly breaks down the core ambitions of Project 2025 in a highly accessible way, it smartly recognizes its plans for a fully Christian nationalist government. Christian nationalism is the first topic in the article's concise summary of what's inside the nearly 900-page document.

"Though the mandate accuses the 'woke' left of infringing on people's religious freedoms, its policies are rooted in a singular, extremist view of how society should function based on its authors' own Christian nationalist values," the article reads, emphasizing how it targets reproductive, LGBTQ, and other civil rights. "In an effort to stop 'woke culture warriors,' Project 2025 demands that the terms abortion, reproductive health and reproductive rights be deleted from 'every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists,'" the piece notes. Project 2025 further "calls to allow discrimination on the basis of 'sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc.,' by 'refocusing' enforcement of sex discrimination laws so that they only apply to the 'biological binary' of sex." The article points out, importantly, that transgender people are a particular target of Project 2025.

As someone who has long covered the Christian right's campaign to elevate the "religious freedom" of anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ Christians to strip away other peoples' rights, I was amazed when I read this article yesterday. Because I don't often read People magazine—mostly, like a cliche, in doctor or dentist waiting rooms—I was unaware of its politics coverage. But even if I had known the magazine is covering the election, I would not have expected it to zero in on a topic that so much news coverage has tiptoed around, too often giving credence to the right's "religious freedom" claims. It is rare to see Christian nationalism in mainstream political coverage at all, much less described so precisely.

But here is People magazine telling its readers, without euphemism or equivocation, that Christian nationalists hold anti-majoritarian, extremist views, demonize other people to take away their rights, and are working towards an even more authoritarian Trump second term to achieve their ultimate goals. There it is, in People magazine.

Coverage like this is going to make it harder for Trump to pull off his standard ruse of lying that he is unaware of the views and schemes of his closest allies. On July 5, Trump said on his social media platform that "I know nothing" about Project 2025 and "I have nothing to do with them." This is similar to his tactic in 2016, when he pretended to know nothing about the white supremacists and white nationalists who were cheerleading his campaign, some of whom he had retweeted. He tried to claim he did not know enough about former klansman David Duke or the Klan to disavow them on national television, and simultaneously falsely claimed he had previously done so. His white nationalist and white supremacist supporters were thrilled, believing he had brought them into the mainstream by not roundly denouncing them.

This time, though, things might be different. After Trump's post, CNN quickly found that at least 140 people who worked in his previous administration are involved in Project 2025, including his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, his close advisor Stephen Miller, and "more than half of the people listed as authors, editors and contributors." NBC News reporter Vaughn Hillyard unearthed a clip of a speech Trump gave to the Heritage Foundation in 2022, which should resolve any questions about what he knows about them. He praised the organization for how it was "going to lay the groundwork and detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America."

Trump now may not be able to lie his way out of an emerging avalanche of coverage and awareness of what Project 2025 is about. BET Awards host Taraji P. Henson's call for people to "look it up," on June 30, prompted a quadrupling in Google searches for Project 2025. Searches spiked even further after Trump lied about not knowing anything about it, five days later.

Tens of millions of people read People magazine, without finding it through a Google search. The magazine's Project 2025 coverage will reach people who do not follow politics closely, or at all, or who still might think Trump is a brash but successful celebrity businessman who will be better for the economy than Biden. They might be stunned to discover that Trump, still somehow known as a playboy and a libertine rather than a coup-planning despot, has paired up with moralizing, sexually repressive theocrats. I wrote a book about that. But perhaps nothing could sound the alarm to tens of millions of Americans like an article in People magazine.