Perhaps taking inspiration from the Supreme Court, which last year decided a case about the imaginary gay threat to free speech of a website design business that didn’t exist, USA Today this week proudly brought America a detailed fact check of a thing nobody actually said.
In an article with the very factual headline “Project 2025 is an effort by the Heritage Foundation, not Donald Trump,” the Nation’s Newspaper carefully explained that no, dear, Donald Trump himself didn’t write the 900-plus page policy wet dream agenda for a second Trump term published by the Heritage Foundation.
Rather, the article makes clear, while Project 2025 is definitely the work of many former and potentially future Trump staffers, Donald Trump has abjured it! He says he knows nothing at all about what’s in Project 2025 or who’s behind it. Also, he simultaneously disagrees with several parts of the document he knows nothing about, and wishes the authors all the luck in the world with their endeavors, some of which he opposes.
OK, so what the hell is this “fact check” supposed to be debunking? In short, it’s absolutely destroying a Facebook post in which some guy used the possessive pronoun “his” to link Trump with the policy screed. Yes really. Here’s the lede.
The claim: Project 2025 is a plan from Trump
A July 5 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) includes nine slides describing supposed policy propositions from former President Donald Trump. The slides include an image of Trump along with the title "Project 2025."
“Trump has made his authoritarian intentions quite clear with his Project 2025 plan,” reads the post's caption.
It received more than 500 shares in four days.
Our rating: False
It sure was nice of USA Today to debunk a Facebook post that was shared by five hundred people, which on Al Gore’s internet is less than a fart bubble in a bathtub.
Also, let’s fact check that description of the post itself. It does indeed use the phrase “his Project 2025 plan,” but then USA Today muddies the facts by inaccurately describing the graphic the Facebook user copied from somewhere, claiming that the slides describe “supposed policy propositions from former President Donald Trump.”
I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your fact checking work, there, USA Today.
Here, look at a couple of the “slides,” which don’t say the proposals are “from” Trump at all. (I have embiggened and rearranged these two, to make them a bit more readable.) The text box headings simply say, in all caps, "Plan for Trump’s 2nd term” and “Project 2025,” without attributing them to Trump or the White House.
The rest of the fact check is accurate enough, though it does seem pretty credulous in reporting Trump’s fake-Twitter claim on July 5, saying, “he disagrees with elements of the effort” and noting a wholly coincidental July 5 post from Project 2025 on Twitter that insists that the project “does not speak for any candidate or campaign” and that it simply is a collection of policy suggestions for — nudge-nudge, wink-wink — the “next conservative president.” The tweet added that it’s “ultimately up to that president, who we believe will be President Trump, to decide which recommendations to implement.” Distancing achieved!
The rest of the fact check does at least briefly note the large number of once and future Trump acolytes who wrote Project 2025, as well as the remarkable congruence between proposals in Project 2025 and ideas that Trump has himself pushed, such as eliminating the Department of Education and Trump’s desire to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” But it could have gone much farther; there’s no mention of Project 2025’s call to reverse the Biden-Harris climate agenda, which Trump promised as a quid pro quo to oil executives if they’d donate a billion dollars to his campaign. (And honestly, even if they don’t.)
And of course there’s also the disturbing reality that where Trump’s announced plans vary from Project 2025’s “suggestions,” they tend to be far more extreme, as Yr Wonkette’s Marcie Jones has detailed extensively.
Still, thank you for the clarification, USA Today. Donald Trump definitely did not come up with Project 2025 himself. Hell, the lack of Randomly capitalized Words and ALL CAPS SCREAMING was all the Proof you need to know THAT!!!!!
[USA Today / ‘The Liberal Curmudgeon’ on Facebook / Archived image of Facebook post]
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Trump knows his platform is unpopular, so he denies it. Like the rest of his stupid tricks, it works on a surprising number of people.
Post: Hitler murdered over 6M Jews.
USA Today: Hitler was never seen at a single concentration camp. Factcheck: FALSE.