FFrom running a business to doing the same to our country, Donald Trump does a lot of things wrong. But if we’re honest, your marketing instincts are usually pretty good. In recent weeks, however, he has made a colossal marketing mistake.
On July 5, Donald Trump took to his social media platform Truth Social to declare that he “knows nothing” about Project 2025, a 920-page guide to a second Trump presidency by the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation. And he tried again this week. He thought he could distance himself from the reaction to his project. But Donald Trump claiming not to know about Project 2025 would be like Jeffrey Dahmer claiming to be an introvert who has never met people before.
More than just not believing, Trump did something he never expected: he increased interest in Project 2025. On June 24, researchers at the Browser The survey found the favorability of Project 2025 underwater at 9 points (10-19%), with the majority of people completely unaware of the plan. Less than a month later, favorability dropped to negative 32 points (11-43%) after Trump made the issue a bigger topic of conversation. When people find out about this, they react as if they were watching a horror movie: they hate every minute of it, but they can’t stop watching what comes next.
In fact, on July 11, more people were looking for for information about Project 2025 than looking for Taylor Swift or the NFL. People ranging from John Oliver to Taraji P. Henson have called attention to this. Vice President Harris even referenced this in her announcement that she was running for president last weekend.
Project 2025 describes how a second Trump administration would take over the government and give the MAGA movement more power than any president has had in United States history. The detailed plan meticulously outlines all the freedoms the Trump administration plans to take away from the American people and the threat they pose to working families and the elderly, including allowing the government to monitor women’s pregnancies while passing a national abortion ban; overturn health protections for people with pre-existing conditions while removing the $35 cap on the price of insulin; and eliminating the Department of Education, Head Start, clean energy, and the National Weather Service.
See more information: Project 2025’s plan to eliminate public schools has begun
There is real power in having a national conversation about Project 2025. As people hear more about the plan, they change from opposing by 13 points to opposing by 48 points. The biggest growth comes from non-MAGA-affiliated Republicans and independents, especially non-college-educated women under 55. All of these are fundamental to building an electoral coalition in 2024 and beyond.
There are three main things people need to know when it comes to communicating about Project 2025.
Not your typical political BS
Most voters think that a politician’s “plan” or “agenda” is meaningless and largely disconnected from what will actually happen. While this is sometimes true, Project 2025 is not like that. Twelve years ago, Republicans were caught on the defensive because they actually passed a budget (the Ryan budget) that would privatize Medicare. Over the past two years, they have had to advocate for the actual overturn of Roe v. Wade. Wade. It wasn’t theoretical. It was real. People will know that this meticulous 920-page plan to take control of the government is equally real and represents an equally present danger.
Confirms people’s worst fears about Republicans, especially Trump
People are afraid of what another Trump presidency would mean – chaos, crime and the destruction of the Constitution. Americans start with a pre-existing belief that Trump and his MAGA allies are power-hungry, but Project 2025 proves they intended it and shows how. For example, they will remove the Department of Justice and replace it with hand-picked loyalists who report to them. It’s clear that this is exactly what people presented: they sought absolute power.
It’s mysterious and sinister
If we look at the huge increase in online conversation about Project 2025, one theme consistently emerges: curiosity. People view a 920 document written in secret by a group of Trump operatives as mysterious and probably sinister. So they want to read. They want to understand this. They want to reveal this. It plays on the conspiratorial notion of how people think and the conspiracy theory attributes that drive many of the algorithms that dominate social media. In fact, as Trump discovered from his July 5 tweet, the more his team denies ownership of the plan, the more convinced people become that they own it.
But Democrats can’t just abandon the plan and expect it to have the intended impact. We must frame the plan as the extreme project that it is and explain its consequences. We need to tell a common story and not just use a common set of magic words.
Project 2025 is more than a white paper, a policy proposal or an agenda. It’s an instruction manual for a takeover – eliminating protections for people and strengthening their ways of controlling people. We have to treat it as such.
Trump’s team made the mistake of writing their playbook, giving everyone the opportunity to see what the future would look like under his administration. So they told everyone not to look at it. Predictably, now everyone wants a peek.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
