The Media Malpractice That Sent America Tumbling Into Trumpism

But Project 2025 broke that pattern. For once, conservatives put their entire agenda in writing. Draft executive orders. Implementation timelines. Agency-by-agency restructuring plans. It was the rare case where the “we don’t know what they’ll actually do” excuse simply did not apply. The document was publicly available.

So Trump couldn’t do his usual vagueness routine. He had to just lie. He had to say he knew nothing about a project run by his former staffers, praised by him on video, and adopted at a nearly two-thirds rate during his first term. And even then, even when the lie was so transparently false, even when the documentary evidence was overwhelming, the press still found ways to treat Project 2025 as speculative rather than predictive.

But here’s what bothers me most. The ACLU, GLAAD, HRC, and similar organizations are advocacy groups. That’s not a slur; it’s a description of what they do. And in the epistemology of mainstream political journalism, that makes them suspect. Their warnings get framed as partisan, as interested, as coming from people who have a stake in the outcome. When the ACLU says a policy will harm civil liberties, that’s the ACLU doing what the ACLU does. It’s expected. It’s predictable. And because it’s predictable, it’s discountable.

Meanwhile, when Trump says something, that’s news. Even when what he says is a lie. Even when the lie contradicts documented evidence. Even when the lie contradicts his own previous statements. A Trump denial gets reported as a fact that must be weighed, while an ACLU warning gets filed under “advocacy groups say.”

The ACLU, GLAAD, HRC: they all turned out to be right. The press, by and large, did not.

Let’s go back to Sally Buzbee one more time.

In the Reuters interview, she rattled off a list of things that surprised her about Trump’s second term. She was surprised by the military adventurism. Surprised they bombed Iran. Surprised at his intensity around Greenland. Surprised that Susie Wiles couldn’t rein him in. Surprised by the “stick-with-it-ness” of the administration’s methodical action.

Surprised, surprised, surprised.

At a certain point, you have to ask what it would take to not be surprised. Trump said he’d do mass deportations. He’s doing mass deportations. Trump’s allies wrote a document calling for the dismantling of the Department of Education. They’re dismantling the Department of Education. OK, sure, the Greenland thing kind of came out of nowhere, I’ll give her that. But the Heritage Foundation outlined plans for aggressive use of executive power. Trump is aggressively using executive power. The very first page of Project 2025 bemoaned the “toxic normalization of transgenderism.” Trump declared on his first day that the official policy of the United States government is that there are only two genders.

What part of this was hard to see coming?

I think the surprise is real, but I don’t think it’s an intellectual failure. I think it’s an institutional one. Political journalism has developed a set of practices that make surprise the default response to predictable events. Treat every denial as meaningful. Frame every warning from advocacy groups as partisan overreach. Insist on a both-sides structure even when one side is lying. Worry more about being called biased than about being accurate. Do all of this, consistently, for years, and you will be surprised when the things people warned you about come to pass. The surprise is built into the methodology.

There’s a cost to this.

Project 2025 was almost inconceivably unpopular with the American public. An NBC News poll from September 2024 found that 57 percent of registered voters viewed the plan negatively. Just 4 percent viewed it positively. Four percent. If voters had understood that Trump intended to implement this agenda, that knowledge might have mattered. Instead, the press kept telling them it was complicated. Trump says he has nothing to do with it. Critics say he does. Who can really know? The effect was to launder Trump’s lie into a legitimate difference of opinion, transforming a question with a clear answer into a murky dispute that voters would have to sort out for themselves.

Paul Dans, the guy who directed Project 2025, told CNN in January 2025: “This is exactly the work we set out to do.”

Exactly the work we set out to do. They told us what they were going to do. They published it. They put it on a website. And when it happened, the press was surprised.

The question isn’t whether journalists should have predicted the future. The question is whether they should have been willing to state the obvious: that the document existed, that it was written by Trump’s allies, that Trump had praised Heritage’s work on video, that his first administration adopted their recommendations at a nearly two-thirds rate—and that his denial was a lie. Not “disputed.” Not “contradicted by some accounts.” A lie, told by a man with a documented history of lying, about a project run by his own people.

The document wasn’t hidden. Knowing what was in it, knowing who wrote it, knowing what Trump had said about it: This is the job. This is literally the job.