Is he trying to lose the election? Ms. Loomer is usually described in the press as “far right,” but that’s unfair to the fever swamps.
People in the Trump campaign are trying to get her out of the former President’s entourage, to no avail. . . . They know Mr. Trump’s association with Ms. Loomer feeds the concern among voters that Mr. Trump listens to crazy courtiers who flatter him and play to his vanity. Is this who the next four years are going to feature?
A growing segment of the American right is populated by, and susceptible to, cranks and conspiracists. A movement that used to admire William F. Buckley Jr. and Thomas Sowell now elevates a pseudo-historian who blames Winston Churchill for World War II and media personalities who sell falsehoods as a triumph for free speech.
Another albatross is Project 2025 released by the Heritage Foundation and involving a huge number of Trump 1.0 personnel. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but his denials are less than believable - like almost everything coming out of his mouth - and the 900+ page plan for taking America backwards in time has been a gift to Democrats. The majority of Americans simply do not want a total abortion ban, rolling back LGBT rights, building more obstacles to voting, and a new version of Jim Crow, and political ideologues devoid of expertise and credentials replacing qualified civil servants, among other things. A piece in Politico Magazine looks at Project 2025's toxicity:
Whenever Vice President Kamala Harris mentions Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s now-toxic blueprint for the next Republican administration — blood starts throbbing in the temples of certain conservative Heritage veterans. Like think tank leaders across the spectrum, the professionals are cringing at the tone-deaf naivete of an organization that touted such a polarizing document as an election-year gospel without realizing it might blow up on their own side.
“We now have a very good example of what not to do,” said Heritage alum Tim Chapman, who leads Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom nonprofit and is a former chief of staff to Heritage founder Ed Feulner.
“I cannot think of a study that has done more damage,” said Ken Weinstein, a one-time former President Donald Trump appointee and former head of the conservative Hudson Institute. “It’s the exact opposite of the Harris approach of don’t say anything about what you’re doing.”
Not long ago, the current Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, was triumphantly promising a “second American revolution” and darkly declaring that it would be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.” Steve Bannon floated him as a possible White House chief of staff.
That was before Project 2025 was turned into a campaign issue by Harris — and disavowed by Trump. Last weekend, the 922-page playbook became quite possibly the first think tank paper in American history to appear in TV spots during NFL games, naturally via a scathing negative ad.
For the Heritage old guard, the bill of complaints against Project 2025 dovetails with broader gripes about Roberts, a culture-war intellectual who has dramatically reoriented the foundation in a populist, pro-Trump direction.
[T]he bitterness these days focuses on a new house style that allegedly enabled the current embarrassment: an elevation of marketing over research; a chest-thumping tendency to assert dominance within the Trump-era right; an inability to distinguish partisan agitation from policy advocacy because “engagement on X, positive feedback from Slack channels or mentions in their news feeds” have become paramount, in the words of one conservative activist who watched Project 2025 take shape.
To critics in the old Heritage diaspora, it’s all a byproduct of how the foundation operates under Roberts: While other policy outfits claim to be devoted to an abstract idea, Heritage has increasingly tied its image to a specific person. Roberts told an interviewer earlier this year that the mission was “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Heritage fundraising bragged about the large percentage of the think tank’s previous ideas that were implemented by Trump. Roberts also claimed Project 2025 spoke for the movement, boasting that “never before has the American conservative movement been this unified around a set of possible policy prescriptions.”
“For six months before this came out, I knew more than several people who were nervous about the press that was out there,” one former Heritage staffer said, referencing Trump world’s anxieties about Project 2025’s media image. “They were like, ‘They’re not listening to the signals’” telling its sponsors to quit claiming to call the shots. “It’s in their DNA, a real desire to prove you’re at the center of things.”
Anyone who needs to raise money for a think tank, of course, knows that telling people you’re at the center of things is how you get folks to write checks. . . . . For the broader public, meanwhile, those very same imperatives helped turn Project 2025 into a big, fat “kick me” sign.
There was also the matter of timing. Notably, the hugely influential original version of Heritage’s quadrennial Mandate for Leadership, which laid out ideas for Ronald Reagan’s presidency and served as a model for Project 2025’s book of the same name, was published in January 1981 — after Reagan had won the 1980 election but before he’d taken over. That’s a logical timetable if you want to sway policy, but not if you’re trying to swagger around and play election-year kingmaker.
Indeed, in conversations with think tank graybeards, one theme that emerged across the spectrum was a kind of professional amazement that any serious policy organization could put itself in a position of becoming the story.
“It’s not just that they were thumping their chest, but they were sticking out their chins,” said Patrick Gaspard, who runs the liberal Center for American Progress, an organization that was famously close to the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns — but never a household name that could be bogeymanned to a mass audience.
[T]he confounding thing about Project 2025 is that it actually is full of policy ideas about even obscure corners of the federal government. Some of them are shockingly radical, like the idea of replacing thousands of professional public servants with political loyalists, but many of them are familiar conservative boilerplate.
Mario Cuomo famously said that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. But the upshot of Project 2025 was that it managed to tie Trump to 922 pages of often radioactive prose right when the moment called for something lyrical.
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