Fox's chief political anchor interviewed the architect of Project 2025. Here are some of the details he failed to mention.

Written by Jane Lee

Published

On September 18, Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier hosted Heritage Foundation president and architect of Project 2025 Kevin Roberts for a seven-minute softball interview.

Baier teed up questions for Roberts to communicate his preferred talking points, chiefly that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has no direct connection to the agenda and that Democrats are lying about its contents. 

Here are some details of Project 2025 that Bret Baier failed to address in his interview with Kevin Roberts.

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  • Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier interviews Heritage Foundation president and architect of Project 2025 Kevin Roberts

    From the September 18, 2024, edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier

  • Trump is inextricably linked to Project 2025 and Roberts

    • Baier teed Roberts up to repeatedly deny that there were any links between Project 2025 and Trump, not covering the full extent of the widely reported connections Trump has to the agenda. Baier did ask about Trump previously embracing much of Heritage’s manifesto in his first term and how that would project onto a second term but didn’t go much further. [Fox News, Special Report with Bret Baier, 9/18/24]

    • Project 2025 was developed by former Trump administration officials, and Trump encouraged the development of the agenda two years ago, stating, “They are going to lay the groundwork in detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do.” [CBS, Evening News, 7/12/24]

    • Roberts has said that Project 2025 and the Trump campaign’s policy plans overlap on “all of the priority issues.” Roberts has also stated that Trump’s attempts to create distance from Project 2025 are a “political tactical decision” and that Heritage still has a “very good” relationship with Trump and his team. [The Daily Signal, The Daily Signal Podcast, 7/12/24; Media Matters, 9/4/24]

    • Baier asked Roberts if Trump vice presidential pick JD Vance’s authorship of the forward to Roberts’ book indicated “linkage” between the campaign and Project 2025, and Roberts downplayed the connection as one of “friendship.” But “friendship” doesn’t quite convey the extent to which Vance and Roberts are in political lockstep. As The New Republic explains, Vance’s forward “describes Roberts’s ideas as an ‘essential weapon’ in the ‘fights that lay [sic] ahead.’” Vance also wrote the introduction to a 2017 Heritage Foundation report that promoted a national abortion ban and attacked IVF and surrogacy. [Fox News, Special Report with Bret Baier, 9/18/24; The New Republic, 7/30/24; Mother Jones, 9/3/24] 

    • Trump praised Kevin Roberts in a 2022 speech: “He’s going to be so incredible.” The Washington Post also reported about Trump and Roberts flying on a private plane together in 2022. [Media Matters, 7/8/24; Washington Post, 8/7/24]

    • In an interview with The New York Times, Trump adviser Steve Bannon cited “Project 2025 and others” in response to what a second Trump administration would look like in the first weeks and months. When asked about “the inner circle” and chief of staff, Bannon said,  “You’re going to have somebody that knows what’s going on,” and mentioned Roberts. [The New York Times, 7/1/24]

  • Roberts said the country is in the midst of a “bloodless” revolution

    • Roberts appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast to declare that the country is “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.” Baier didn’t mention this comment. [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 7/2/24; Fox News, Special Report with Bret Baier, 9/18/24]

  • Project 2025 would target reproductive rights from several angles

    • When Baier asked about Project 2025’s suggestion to reinstate the Comstock Act to criminalize the mailing of abortion pills, Roberts denied that Project 2025 calls for a national abortion ban and claimed the project’s playbook merely discusses the history of the law. The New Republic explains that the playbook says the president should enforce the and that right-wing groups see it“as a way to ban abortion nationally because it outlaws the use of the mail for the purposes of sending or receiving any object that could be used for an abortion.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 7/2/24; The New Republic, 2/8/24]

    • Project 2025 aims for the next conservative administration to attack reproductive rights from several angles, including by removing the term “abortion” from all federal laws and regulations, reversing abortion pill approval, punishing providers by withdrawing federal health funding, and restricting clinics that provide contraception and STD testing. [Media Matters, 3/20/24] 

    • Many Project 2025 partner organizations have also leveled other attacks on reproductive rights. These groups have called for massive restrictions on access to contraception, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and abortion drugs such as mifepristone — which are now used in 63% of abortions in the United States. [Media Matters, 6/24/24; Guttmacher, March 2024]

    • Project 2025 levels a fundamental attack on abortion access. The 19th reports (emphasis added):

    In Project 2025, a fundamental premise is that abortion is not health care — and the CDC would be banned from promoting it as such. The document’s authors want the renamed Department of Life to collect data on people who have abortions, using “every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.” They urge the agency to rescind Biden administration guidance that EMTALA, a decades-old emergency medicine law, requires that hospitals provide abortion care in emergency situations. They also call to eliminate the agency’s Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force and replace it with an anti-abortion task force. [The 19th, 7/16/24]

  • Project 2025 would replace civil servants with MAGA loyalists and let Trump use the Justice Department to carry out his personal agenda

    • When Baier asked if Project 2025 suggests “a scouring of the bureaucracy” to replace civil servants with pro-Trump acolytes, Roberts dodged the question, accusing “the left” of having done so for 50 years and declaring that “Project 2025 is the corrective.” [Fox News, Special Report with Bret Baier, 9/18/24]

    • One of the key elements of Project 2025’s administrative goals is to reinstate an executive order known as Schedule F, which would reclassify thousands of federal employees as “at-will” workers and give the administration the ability to fire employees who don’t agree with or follow the extremist policies suggested by Project 2025. To replace the civil servants, Project 2025 has created a training “academy” for potential employees of the next administration, which “provides aspiring appointees with the insight, background knowledge, and expertise in governance to immediately begin rolling back destructive policy and advancing conservative ideas in the federal government.” [Media Matters, 3/20/24]

    • Project 2025 makes it clear the Department of Justice is not independent from the executive branch and implies the agency will be used to take legal retribution against whomever Trump decides to investigate. [Media Matters, 3/20/24; The Nation, 2/8/24]

    • Then-Project 2025 Director Paul Dans appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast and explained how they plan to staff the federal bureaucracy with Trump loyalists, telling listeners how to apply for jobs and sign up for trainings. [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 2/29/24]