Project 2025 Was Missing from the First Debate. Will Harris Make the Same Mistake?
Are you watching the presidential debate tonight? I am.
If the last presidential face-off didn’t make it obvious, debate performance is critically important, especially as Vice President Kamala Harris fights to set herself apart from her predecessor and the orange megalomaniac representing the right.
I feel fully assured that Harris, who has taken on fraudsters of all stripes, will wipe the floor with Donald Trump. I’m so confident that I’ve invited people over so we can cheer and jeer together as Harris (cheers!) and Trump (jeers!) take the stage. Harris has prosecuted men who have abused women, predators who have victimized hard-working Americans, and liars who cheated for their own gain. This debate should be a cakewalk for Democrats.
But that was also true of the last one.
Yet, when given the chance to bring up Trump’s assault against women, both in policy and in person, Joe Biden argued about golf. When given the chance to stand up for middle-class Americans, Biden froze. When given the chance to outline the dangers of Project 2025, Biden was silent.
I think I still get triggered by memories of the last debate, particularly the most WTF moments.
Harris’s campaign has taken a different tack than Biden, aggressively tying Trump to the 920-page dystopian nightmare his former cabinet members and donors authored. Despite his attempts to distance himself from it, Harris’s campaign has deftly refused to let him avoid the topic, pointing out all the ways he’s tied to its policy proposals, and calling the document Trump’s Project 2025.
This summer, a wall of mainstream silence about Project 2025 cracked and then fell. Everyone is talking about Project 2025 now, and it’s not just eyed with suspicion, but deeply frowned upon by liberals and conservatives alike.
A poll for my congressional district, MT-01, revealed a starkly low favorability for Project 2025’s vision for the future of America. My congressional district in Western Montana leans red. MT-01, a new district in Montana that was created after the post-Covid growth brought the state population over the one-million mark. Western Montana elected Ryan Zinke, the Republican who Trump tapped to head the Interior Department until Zinke proved himself to be too corrupt for even Donald Trump and was fired.
The poll, which was conducted from July 30 through Aug. 4 by House Majority PAC and includes 1,253 likely voters, showed that Project 2025 in the First Congressional District has only a 10% favorability rating, while it garnered a 46% unfavorable rating.
So it seems there is a limit to the authoritarian overreach even Republicans will tolerate.
Therefore, I’m reviving my list of 7 Questions I Hope Debate Moderators Ask about Project 2025:
1. Would you honor the presidential limitations that are outlined in the Constitution?
Project 2025 states that Article II of the Constitution gives Trump unprecedented power to act as a dictator.
Trump himself has said, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Is this what we want in a leader? A man who subverts our checks and balances system and only serves himself? Debate moderators need to get Trump on record saying what we all know — he doesn’t care about the well being of America. Only enriching himself.
2. Will you protect a woman’s right to choose?
Of course, we know the answer to this question is no. Trump has told vicious lies about women choosing abortion in the 9th month of pregnancy in order to promote a national abortion ban, which is outlined in Project 2025.
The document not only declares that the “Dobbs decision was just the beginning.” It also wants to eliminate mifepristone and misoprostol, which are used to end a pregnancy at home. We’re seeing the consequences of Trump’s last presidency and the way he treated women’s reproductive care, and it isn’t good. Let’s not give him another chance.
3. Would you attempt to purge the federal workforce and replace them with the individuals being vetted on the Project 2025 website?
As we speak, MAGA right-wingers are collecting names in a database of potential sycophants. They want to eliminate as many as 50,000 federal employees and erase entire departments, like the Department of Justice and the Department of Education. Extremists learned during the last Trump presidency that he was ignorant and ill-equipped to lead the country into the dangerous territory they wanted. Now they want to get the barriers out of the way. Those “barriers” are tens of thousands of Americans who have dedicated their life to public service. They don’t deserve to lose their jobs to all the king’s men.
4. Do you plan to turn government offices against U.S. citizens and federal workers?
Trump has talked about utilizing his new Justice Department to go after some of his highest-profile critics in a second term.
“If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them,” Trump has said.
5. Will you protect LGBTQ+ freedoms?
People I know are most willing to credit Trump with limited attacks against queer Americans, but even if there’s some validity to that opinion (which I don’t think there is), Trump himself doesn’t need to directly sign laws against queer folks in order to harm them. During his first term, Trump installed hundreds of conservative judges that have stripped civic protections from LGBTQ couples, parents, and individuals.
Project 2025 takes those attacks even further, threatening to force queer service members back into the closet, removing trans health care, forcing people to become subject to junk science “conversion therapy,” banning evidence-based health care for trans youth, on and on and on. Read GLAAD’s synopsis of Project 2025 to learn more.
6. Will you uphold the far-right’s attacks on education?
In addition to eliminating the Department of Education and federal protections for racial minorities, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ educators and students, nearly every reference to education in Project 2025 contains the words “woke,” “leftist progressivism” or some other word or phrase they use to disparage learning. They’ve threatened to throw teachers and librarians in jail for “pornography,” however they define that.
7. Will you honor the separation of church and state model that our founding fathers established at the start of this country?
The attacks on separation of church and state have come fast and furious in recent weeks. Conservatives accuse secular lawmakers of ruining the country and plan to impose their interpretation of Christianity on private citizens. For example, in the Project 2025 chapter about Health and Human Services, the author writes that the United States “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.” Project 2025 doesn’t want to erode the separation of church and state. It wants to explode it.
In order to defeat Project 2025, we need a steady drumbeat of the dangers it holds. The moderators and Harris better not let Trump off the hook.
Onward, Democracy Defenders!