Last April, David Brooks published a long essay in The Atlantic titled “I Should Have Seen This Coming,” in which he acknowledged that he’d underestimated how much conservatism had become pure anti-liberal reaction. Jon Stewart, who spent the early weeks of the second Trump administration chiding liberals for being too quick to use the word “fascism,” eventually conceded on air: “I did not think we would get this authoritarian this fast. I really didn’t. I’m sorry. Who could’ve known? Maybe if somebody out there had yelled at me on Bluesky about this, I would have known. But no one did. Except every day. In all caps.”
And then there are the journalists who covered the 2024 campaign, who are now looking back at their own work with what might charitably be called discomfort. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially after listening to a recent podcast that crystallized something for me.
I think it is actually, many presidents are very, very active in their first year in office. But I think, it is fair to say that this is sort of historically ambitious, energetic, and just a real agenda. I don’t think in those first few days, we understood what an organized agenda they had for his second term, but now we understand that.
Now we understand.
But then, later in the same interview, Buzbee said this:
So which is it? Did “we” not understand the organized agenda, or did “we” know about Project 2025 and know they’d be more organized this time around?
And yet Buzbee describes herself as “surprised” by the methodical action. Surprised by the organization. Surprised, apparently, that the people who wrote a detailed manual explaining what they intended to do went ahead and did those things.
I haven’t heard back as of publication, but I’ll update this piece if I do.
But it wasn’t unknowable. It is literally the job of political journalists to know what politicians are planning to do. It is the job to read policy documents, to track personnel, to notice when a candidate praises an organization on video and then claims to know nothing about it. This is the work. And yet, when advocates and experts did that work and tried to warn people about what was coming, they were dismissed as partisan or alarmist. When Trump lied about his involvement with Project 2025, that lie was treated as a fact that needed to be carefully weighed.
We didn’t understand, they say.
If you wanted to predict whether Trump would follow the Heritage Foundation’s playbook in a second term, you didn’t need a crystal ball. You just needed to look at what happened during his first term.
Trump was so pleased with this that he tweeted about it: “The Heritage Foundation has just stated that 64% of the Trump Agenda is already done, faster than even Ronald Reagan.”
By mid-2018, more than 66 Heritage employees or former employees were working in the Trump administration. This wasn’t a secret. Heritage was proud of it. They put out press releases. They updated their website. The relationship between Trump and the conservative think tank was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most successful partnerships between a president and an outside policy organization in modern American history.
One week after Heritage formally announced the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, Trump flew to Florida to deliver the keynote address at a Heritage Foundation dinner. He took a private plane with Heritage president Kevin Roberts. The Washington Post later published a photo of the two of them together on that flight.
Because our country is going to hell. The critical job of institutions such as Heritage is to lay the groundwork. And Heritage does such an incredible job at that. And I’m telling you, with Kevin and the staff, and I met so many of them now, I took pictures with among the most handsome, beautiful people I’ve ever seen.… But this is a great group. And they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America. And that’s coming.
That’s Trump, in April 2022, describing the work that would become Project 2025. He called it “our movement.” He said Heritage would provide the details. He flew on a private plane with the guy running the operation and gave a speech praising the whole endeavor.
None of this was hidden. The first-term adoption rate was in Heritage’s own promotional materials. The 2022 speech was on video. The photo of Trump and Roberts on the plane was eventually published by one of the country’s major newspapers. The revolving door between Heritage and the Trump administration was documented in real time.
Apparently, for a lot of newsrooms, quite a bit more.
At a campaign rally that same month, he called the plan “seriously extreme” and said it was conceived by people on the “severe right.”
So there you have it. Trump said he had nothing to do with it. Case closed.
But Trump said he had nothing to do with it. And for much of the political press, that denial carried enormous weight.
When Harris, at her first campaign rally after becoming the presumptive nominee, said that Project 2025 showed Trump “intends to cut Social Security and Medicare,” CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale wrote that this was “false” because “the Project 2025 document does not show that Trump intends to cut Social Security.” Which tells you something about how this worked: Because the document wasn’t literally authored by Trump, claims about what Trump “intends” to do based on it were deemed inaccurate.
In October 2024, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell interrupted Harris during a Face the Nation interview when the vice president tried to warn about Project 2025. “You know that Donald Trump has disavowed Project 2025,” O’Donnell said. “He says that is not his campaign plan.”
See the pattern? Trump denied involvement. Therefore, claims tying him to Project 2025 were labeled misleading, lacking context, or outright false. The denial functioned as a fact in itself, one that journalists felt obligated to present as a counterweight to the documentary evidence of his involvement.
The asymmetry is staggering. On one side: a 900-page document, written by 140 former Trump officials, explicitly designed to guide “the next conservative president,” praised by Trump himself two years earlier. On the other side: Trump saying “nuh-uh.”
A Common Dreams report from October 2025 summarized the situation: “In the critical months leading up to the election, many media outlets took Trump’s denial at face value, publishing fact checks and other commentary that painted Democrats’ warnings about his connection to the plan as alarmist or misleading.”
Ron Filipkowski, editor in chief of MeidasTouch, put it more bluntly: “All those 2024 media fact checks that said, ‘Donald Trump and the Trump campaign deny any connection to Project 2025’ look pretty ridiculous right now. A Trump denial is not a fact. You just used his lies to ‘debunk’ a reality that was obvious to anyone paying attention.”
While major news outlets were busy treating Trump’s denials as counterweights to documented reality, other people were doing something different. They were reading the document and taking it seriously.
GLAAD, the LGBTQ media advocacy organization, identified dozens of specific provisions in Project 2025 that called for rolling back LGBTQ rights, including marriage equality and nondiscrimination protections in federal agencies. GLAAD president Sarah Kate Ellis warned that Project 2025 “would create an America where the freedoms that are a hallmark to our Democracy are replaced with authoritarianism and the progress we have made for LGBTQ people, people of color, women, and other marginalized communities is stripped away.”
These organizations weren’t guessing. They weren’t speculating. When the ACLU said a second Trump administration would try to exclude gender-affirming care from federal health care programs, that was in the document. When GLAAD said Project 2025 would target marriage equality, that was in the document. These weren’t predictions based on vibes. They were descriptions of stated intentions.
There’s a version of this story where you could almost sympathize with political journalists. Republicans, as a general rule, do not like to tell voters what they actually plan to do. Their policies tend to be unpopular when described plainly, so they campaign on vibes and grievances instead. Remember the 2020 debate when Trump pretended not to know whether Amy Coney Barrett would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade? “You don’t know her views on Roe v. Wade,” he said. She’d been on every shortlist for years specifically because of her views on Roe v. Wade. Everyone knew. But Trump understood that actually saying it out loud would be a political problem, so he played dumb, and the press dutifully shrugged on the question of whether his nominee would overturn abortion rights.
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.
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.
The ACLU, GLAAD, HRC: they all turned out to be right. The press, by and large, did not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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