This week in Project 2025
For Media Matters' complete coverage of Project 2025, please visit this section of our website.
- Media Matters wrote this definitive guide to Project 2025. Anyone interested in this extreme right-wing initiative for the next Republican presidential administration should check it out.
- Project 2025 architect and Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts compared abortion access to slave auctions, lynchings, and the Holocaust.
- Media Matters received a galley copy of a now-delayed book written by Kevin Roberts. In the book, Roberts outlines the MAGA plans to remake American education and echoes Project 2025’s attacks on unions.
This week, Vice President Kamala Harris announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. Right-wing media responded by launching desperate, weird, and bigoted attacks against him.
- Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller highlighted a pro-immigrant and pro-refugee program in Minnesota, commenting: “Together, Walz and Harris will turn the Midwest into the Middle East.”
- Self-identified “proud Islamophobe” and Trump ally Laura Loomer absurdly asserted “Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is tied to ISIS.”
- Charlie Kirk claimed “Minneapolis is a war zone because” of Walz.
Right-wing figures and conservative cable news outlets are branding Walz as “Tampon Tim” for signing a bill to provide menstrual products in public school bathrooms. Fox’s Laura Ingraham, for example, claimed that “Tampon Tim” “believes kids who are too young to get a drink at a bar are mature enough to have their genitals mutilated by a twisted surgeon.”
Naturally, no right-wing smear campaign would be complete without a conspiracy theory. In this case, right-wing media are accusing Walz of “stolen valor” related to his 24-year service record with the National Guard. Specifically, right-wing media are claiming that Walz resigned and “abandoned” his National Guard unit and resigned after the unit received deployment orders to go to Iraq. In reality, Walz resigned two months before the unit received orders, and Walz likely submitted his retirement papers even earlier.
Already right-wing media are flailing to smear the presumptive Democratic nominee for vice president. These attacks only highlight their own desperation.
During a July 30 radio interview with host Sid Rosenberg, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump appeared to agree with Rosenberg’s comments that second gentlemen Doug Emhoff is a “crappy Jew” and a “horrible Jew.” Trump went on to say that “Any Jewish person that voted for her [Harris], or him [Biden], or whoever it’s going to be, I assume it’s going to be her; anybody that did that should have their head examined.” Trump further added that “If you’re Jewish, if you vote Democrat, you’re a fool. An absolute fool.”
Media Matters reviewed five of the top U.S. newspapers by circulation and found that only two print articles and six online articles referenced these antisemitic attacks. Meanwhile on Fox, hosts Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld laughed about the exchange, calling it “funny.”
Trump’s comments during the Rosenberg interview weren’t his only recent antisemitic attacks. In a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu on July 26, Trump said he doesn’t “know how a person who’s Jewish can vote for” Harris, echoing a previous comment from March, when Trump said that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion, they hate everything about Israel.”
On August 5, Trump was interviewed by streamer Adin Ross. The streamer is linked to white nationalist Nick Fuentes (who dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence in 2022) and has hosted other neo-Nazis on his stream.
Mainstream press outlets have a responsibility to adequately report on Trump’s history of pushing antisemitic attacks and friendly relations with white nationalists.
Hans von Spakovsky, a Heritage Foundation official who has played a key role in Project 2025, previously attacked Kamala Harris as someone who “resembles in attitude the slave owners of the old South” because she supports access to abortion.
Von Spakvsky is a significant figure in Heritage’s push for Project 2025. He authored a chapter of Project 2025 about the Federal Election Commission and has frequently appeared in media to promote the project.
Media Matters has documented Project 2025’s extreme agenda for reproductive rights and other key issues, like immigration and civil liberties. Von Spakovsky’s rhetoric on reproductive rights is hardly unique among Project 2025 partners. Last December, Young America’s Foundation, a right-wing group involved with Project 2025, hosted an event featuring anti-surrogacy and anti-IVF commentator Michael Knowles. During his speech, Knowles called surrogacy and IVF a “crime,” a “growing evil,” “ghastly,” “absolutely horrific,” and “just about the most rotten thing a society can possibly do to children.”
