Trump’s new Big Lie that he doesn’t know about Project 2025 might take him down

The turning point in a presidential campaign is often the last place you’re looking for it. As the media feeding frenzy over the health of President Joe Biden was reaching its sustained fever pitch last weekend, a most unlikely player — the award-winning actress Taraji P. Henson — in a particularly unlikely setting, the Black Entertainment Television (BET) Awards, fired the political equivalent of a drone strike that changed the chaotic 2024 election, for good.

Henson’s role as MC for the annual awards show offered her access to millions of viewers, especially young African Americans, who at this point have been largely checked out from what pundits are calling the most important election in at least 164 years. And so she used her incredible platform to issue a warning and to repeat it again and again throughout the night: that a Donald Trump GOP win in November will undermine our fundamental rights.

The coming showdown, Henson warned, is “about making decisions that will affect us as human beings. Our careers, our next generations to come. Did you know that it is now a crime to be homeless? Pay attention. It’s not a secret: Look it up. They are attacking our most vulnerable citizens. The Project 2025 plan is not a game.

“Look it up!”

Those last three words hit like a bombshell. Because in recent days, more and more everyday voters are starting to do exactly what Henson had asked. They are learning the truth about Project 2025, the 900-plus-page blueprint for a 47th presidency under Trump that’s been published by the Heritage Foundation, the Washington, D.C., think tank powering Trump’s MAGA movement, with help from dozens of other right-wing groups and an all-star lineup of past and future White House aides.

An electorate that largely rolled its eyes when Biden or other Democrats told them that “democracy is on the ballot” in November suddenly has an ominous, TikTok-friendly two-word catchphrase for the very real and growing fears that a cult-like GOP, aided by the corrupt U.S. Supreme Court it imposed on America, has a scheme for dictatorship. Indeed, “Project 2025” sounds a lot like the kind of conspiracy theory about a run-amok government that goes viral in the Age of Disinformation — except it’s not a conspiracy. It’s real and set in type for anyone to read.

Henson’s alarming warning to her BET audience that Project 2025’s authors are talking about a movement toward reinstating the military draft? It’s real. So is a plan to eliminate the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — ironic when a dangerous hurricane is bearing down on the Texas coast. Indeed, all the major underpinnings of an American autocracy — firing thousands of nonpolitical civil servants and replacing them with fanatical Trump loyalists, invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to call up the military to round up undocumented immigrants and place them in mass detention camps, or direct White House control of a U.S. Justice Department that would pardon friends and prosecute enemies — are carefully laid out in this Trump-friendly plan for a presidential transition.

The nationally televised attack on Project 2025 by Henson signaled nothing less than a major vibe shift. At the start of last week, Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation and the scheme’s chief mastermind, went on the far-right’s favorite podcast, the Steve Bannon-created War Room, to brag that the nation is “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Much like the BET Awards, Roberts’ bravado went viral — and suddenly Project 2025 was triggering a massive panic attack among Team Trump. What was meant to be a somewhat stealthy plan for a “Red Caesar” autocracy now threatened to move the national conversation away from the only place the GOP wants it focused: on the Democratic meltdown over Biden’s mental state.

At 9:39 a.m. on the Friday of the July Fourth weekend, Trump himself took to his Truth Social website to make a stunning claim. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” the presumptive GOP nominee insisted. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

I wish Trump luck in getting a single person, on either side of the political divide, to believe he knows nothing about Project 2025, yet somehow knows that he disagrees with most of it. Indeed, this is Trump’s 2024 version of the Big Lie, demoting his absurd debate statement that — contrary to his real-time boasts — “I didn’t have sex with a porn star” to only his second-biggest falsehood of the summer. The tangled web between Project 2025 and Trump’s deepest inner circle is too public and too improbable to explain away.

» READ MORE: Project 2025 is GOPers’ blueprint for destroying the planet. It must be stopped. | Will Bunch

In fact, Trump’s campaign press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, even appears in a video for Project 2025 as it seeks to recruit would-be government employees for a second Trump administration. Other highest-level Trump advisers involved with Project 2025 include a potential Trump 47 chief of staff, Russell Vought, who was Trump 45′s final budget chief, and John McEntee, who was Trump’s White House chief of personnel and architect of the plan to install MAGA loyalists. One report found that 25 of the 36 Project 2025 authors have ties to the Trump White House or his current campaign. Trump himself has twice lauded the Heritage Foundation’s Roberts at public events this year, making a mockery of the candidate’s claim that he has no idea who is really behind Project 2025.

Here’s the simple truth behind Trump’s new Big Lie: Just like Stormy Daniels or E. Jean Carroll or so much else from his sordid past, he got caught. Another truth is this: Project 2025 never really made any sense. Has America gone so far off the deep end that a carefully crafted blueprint for a Trump dictatorship could be published and bragged about on the right, and no one would notice? The answer, it turns out, is no. The usually too-silent majority of Americans who actually like living in a democracy have discovered the two-meter exhaust hole in the Trumpian Death Star, and suddenly the Evil Empire is devolving into a full-blown panic that it’s all about to blow up.

The Project 2025 unraveling unfolded during a week when much of the elite mainstream media remained fixated on that other story: the never-ending fallout from Biden’s awful, no-good debate performance in Atlanta late last month. From the nonstop speculation over whether POTUS 46 will end his troubled reelection campaign and whether Vice President Kamala Harris might replace him, it would be logical to think the Democratic ticket is cratering support. But the actual polls have been all over the map; several well-regarded surveys show Trump, not Biden, losing folks. The Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll released on Saturday showed Biden has even passed Trump in two of the most critical swing states, Michigan and Wisconsin.

For the umpteenth time, the regular people are smarter than the pundits. It seems two events — the surge in Project 2025 publicity, and the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity projecting king-like powers onto the White House — have finally focused voters on the real stakes. Voters of all stripes are also concerned about the current president’s health, and rightfully so. But watching Trump lie more than 30 times on that debate stage, in an atmosphere that increasingly reeks of autocracy, has millions of voters more fearful for the health of the republic.

On the Biden dilemma, I still remain an agnostic. I will support whatever approach appears to be the best way forward for keeping Trump out of the White House again, full stop. In fact, as a newspaper columnist, I promise I mostly am not going to write about the Democrats’ drama going forward, because the Republican threats to our democracy are so much more important. To be sure, I’m headed to Chicago in August for the Dems’ convention, and I’ll opine if there’s a major change at the top. But I’ll regret it if I waste one word on any other subject that’s not stopping dictatorship.

I’m delighted to see millions of other voters are looking at this the same way. I hope they won’t just google “Project 2025,” but talk to their neighbors, or organize community teach-ins, or take to the streets to let America know that the Trumps and the Kevin Robertses of the extreme right can’t impose this on the people without a fight. How ironic that their plan for authoritarian rule could be its undoing. Project 2025 — look it up!

» READ MORE: SIGN UP: The Will Bunch Newsletter