Trump’s Reelection Agenda Was Set by Actual Hate Groups

Project 2025, the short name for the 180-page ultraconservative plan for a second Donald Trump presidency, has some frightening minds developing its schemes to oust civil servants and severely roll back civil rights, among other authoritarian plots. 

Behind the expansive playbook is its advisory board, made up of dozens of think tanks and advocacy groups, including three that are designated hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the substack Decoding Fox News reported Monday. And despite Trump’s recent attempts to distance himself from the plan, these group’s fingerprints were all over his last administration and will likely be all over his next one. 

The first group is that old standard the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy group that brought the very case that overturned Roe v. Wade, sought to recriminalize sex acts between LGBTQ+ adults, and pushed heinous lies about gay and transgender people. 

It’s worth noting that House Speaker Mike Johnson worked at that law group for nearly a decade and former Trump attorney John Eastman was also allied with the group. While in the White House, Trump worked with them too, it seems. In 2018, he invited the group’s senior counsel Tyson Langhofer to speak at a youth outreach event about free speech. 

The second designated hate group is the Center for Immigration Studies, or CIS, a conservative anti-immigration think tank. Its website sports the tagline, “Low Immigration, Pro Immigrant.”

While Trump claims not to be affiliated with those behind Project 2025, CIS has long had its hands in the immigration policy of the Trump administration. While sketching out some of Trump’s harshest immigration policies, former senior White House adviser Stephen Miller heavily relied on data from CIS and would often pass reports from the group on to the president’s desk, as well as to his affiliates at Breitbart for publication, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

The Trump administration reportedly spoke regularly with Jessica Vaughan, who is the think tank’s director of policy studies, according to NPR. The group’s executive director, Mark Krikorian, also said he met with Trump officials to discuss immigration policy, per The New York Times.  

The think tank mostly publishes its own studies and blog posts for the purpose of fearmongering about immigration in the United States. One of its most recent posts posits that Joe Biden’s new immigration policy, which will grant protections to millions of undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, will equate to a “marriage fraud mill.”

CIS has repeatedly shared links to VDARE, a site that publishes the drivel of white supremacists. The group also lists Jason Richwine—a public policy analyst who once suggested that his research had found that Hispanic people were less intelligent than whites—as its resident scholar. 

The CATO Institute has debunked much of the so-called research produced by CIS, including a report that allegedly used double-counted data on murders committed by undocumented immigrants in Texas. It’s likely that many of the group’s dubious studies have served as fuel for the fire of Trump’s, and the entire Republican Party’s, insistence on an immigrant crime wave. 

As a member of the Mandate for Leadership’s advisory board, CIS’s connections to the previous Trump administration should surprise no one, because despite what the former president may claim, he can be found in every corner of Project 2025 and its “abysmal” policy points, as he called them. 

The third designated hate group is the Family Research Council, which published anti-LGBTQ+ studies based on debunked science, opposed same-sex marriage, bashed laws against hate crimes, and undermined anti-bullying programs. 

Trump also has ties to this group. Last year, he spoke at an event for the group’s Pray, Vote, Stand conference, urging them to back off painting him as pro-life, wanting to distance himself from the position that proved unpopular among voters in the midterms. Trump recently spoke in a prerecorded message at a luncheon co-sponsored by the Family Research Council. 

Project 2025’s advisory board was originally announced on the same day that Roe v. Wade was overturned, as if to present the cast list for the Republican Party’s plan to proceed with the obliteration of civil rights. It would be a mistake to see Project 2025’s policies as anything but essential to Trump’s potential presidency, regardless of what he’d have you believe. 

One of the founders of LinkedIn, billionaire Reid Hoffman, is backing a voting technology company that is suing Fox News and Newsmax for defamation.

The Washington Post reports that Hoffman has invested millions of dollars into the company partly to help it finance the lawsuits. Smartmatic says that the two conservative news outlets hurt the company’s image with their claims of electoral and vote-counting fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

“Smartmatic built a global business by using technology to better engage citizens, regardless of party or ideology, by making voting simple and trustworthy,” Hoffman said in a statement. “After Donald Trump lost in 2020, however, Smartmatic became a target of the defamatory campaign to overturn his defeat.”

Smartmatic CEO Antonio Mugica issued a statement refuting the right-wing attacks against it.

“Smartmatic’s technology has counted seven billion votes on six continents with zero security breaches,” Mugica said. “Voters, candidates, and election officials in all of those elections are watching to see if we still stand up for the truth against lies. Rest assured, we do.”

Billionaires have attempted to aid lawsuits for ideological reasons in the past. Right-wing tech mogul Peter Thiel infamously backed a series of lawsuits against Gawker Media after it published a story outing him. This isn’t the first lawsuit that Hoffman has backed against conservative figures, either: He also helped fund E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit accusing Trump of rape and defamation.

There’s no trial date as of yet for Smartmatic’s lawsuit against Fox. The media network settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems in April 2023 to the tune of $787.5 million, nipping what would have been an unprecedented trial process in the bud. Will Hoffman want Smartmatic to seek a settlement, or will he want to get his money’s worth and force Fox News to trial?

While the world was digesting examples of President Joe Biden’s faltering health, Donald Trump was quietly having his own terrible, no-good, very bad week.

The former president had a relatively bonkers week on the campaign trail, thoroughly illustrating in his own right that he’s just another candidate unfit to retake the White House. In the span of a matter of days, the 78-year-old demonstrated poor impulse control, a thirst for revenge, an unwavering God complex, and his affinity for dangerous QAnon conspiracy theories that stroke his ego.

On Truth Social, Trump shared an image of himself and Melania Trump at the White House, superimposed with the QAnon catchphrase, “Where We Go One We Go All.” Trump has for years shared messages and iconography from the cultlike, fringe group that heralds him as a messiah against the pedophilic evils of the Democratic Party, including wearing pins and badges prominently featuring the letter “Q,” and elevating other phrases that originated in the group, such as “The storm is coming.”

Trump also used his social media platform to amplify an attack against billionaire financier George Soros and his family, vaguely accusing the investor and his connections of being “treasonous traitors.”

Trump extended that moniker to former Wyoming GOP Representative Liz Cheney,  baselessly claiming she was “guilty of treason” and deserved a “televised military tribunal.” Cheney was one of just a small handful of Republicans who criticized Trump’s tenure as U.S. leader following the events of January 6.

“Donald—This is the type of thing that demonstrates yet again that you are not a stable adult—and are not fit for office,” Cheney wrote in response on X.

Trump also shared an image of several other prominent lawmakers that he believed should be headed to prison instead of his far-right ally Steve Bannon, who began his federal sentence last week for defying a congressional subpoena. Those politicians include former Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who all committed the egregious crime—according to Trump—of hiding “the January 6 footage.”

The former president was riding such a high after the debate that he went so far as to claim that his candidacy was divine ordainment, resharing a post by another user that claimed “God has chosen him.”

Donald Trump helped draft a 2024 Republican Party platform that was adopted Monday, effectively cementing his extreme views as the de facto stance of the party.  According to Maggie Haberman with The New York Times, the policy platform was “overwhelmingly” adopted on Monday, despite initially scheduled meetings on Tuesday.

According to The Washington Post, Trump’s policy platform makes mass deportations the party’s official platform, calls to “deport pro-Hamas radicals,” seeks to build a “great Iron Dome” over the United States, and calls to “end the weaponization of the Department of Justice”—by which Trump likely means preventing the DOJ from prosecuting him and instead converting it into his personal attack dog.

The platform also targets transgender people, who make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. adult population, promising to “keep men out of women’s sports, ban taxpayer funding for sex change surgeries, [stop] taxpayer-funded schools from promoting gender transition, reverse Biden’s radical rewrite of Title IX education regulations, and restore protections for women and girls.” As the Post notes, the proposal doesn’t seek to ban gender-affirming care for minors. However, the threats toward schools “promoting gender transition” and “protections for women and girls” hint at policies akin to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” ban on classroom discussions of LGBTQ issues and appears to promise a reversal of the Biden administration rule that prohibits transphobic bathroom bans in schools.

The platform takes a much less extreme approach to abortion than Trump’s anti-abortion supporters would like, opting instead to support access to IVF and birth control while opposing late-term abortion and leaving abortion access up to the states. It also avoids taking a stance on same-sex marriage, which the Post notes scales back the party’s 2016 platform, which condemned the legalization of same-sex marriage and endorsed conversion therapy.

“Republicans will promote a culture that values the sanctity of marriage, the blessings of childhood, and the foundational role of families, and supports working parents,” the proposed platform says instead. “We will end policies that punish families.”

The 16-page platform was allegedly largely written by Vincent Haley, anonymous sources told the Post, with revisions and some portions written by Trump himself, according to Politico. Haley is a Trump campaign speechwriter who worked under Stephen Miller during Trump’s presidency and was Newt Gingrich’s policy director and campaign manager during his 2012 presidential campaign, according to Axios. The draft proposal circulated on Monday and was intended to be discussed on Tuesday night by members of the RNC’s platform committee, all of whom were handpicked by Trump, according to The Washington Post. According to Haberman, the policy “passed overwhelmingly.” It’s unclear whether any amendments or revisions were made.

Donald Trump doesn’t think Fox News is doing enough to help him.

The former president and convicted felon raged against the conservative news network on Truth Social on Monday, demanding that Fox “STOP PUTTING ON THE ENEMY!”

The post follows two posts on Sunday, where Trump gave more detailed complaints. It’s odd that Trump would take shots at Fox, especially just hours before Sean Hannity is set to air a major interview with him. The network has gone to great lengths to help Trump’s presidency and candidacy, even boosting his false claims of 2020 election fraud and having to pay a hefty legal settlement as a result. But Trump is apparently upset at Fox’s guests, whom he feels aren’t defending him or his claims strongly enough.

For example, he complained on Saturday about Wall Street Journal editor John Bussey, claiming that the journalist “refuses to say, even though he knows it to be true, that everything I got accused of is a Biden inspired HOAX for purposes of Election Interference.” Late last month, Trump was angry that a Fox poll showed Biden narrowly leading him by two points.

In short, Trump demands total loyalty from everyone around him, no matter what they’ve done for him in the past. Fox has a long record of going above and beyond to support Trump, whether it’s editing interviews to make him look better, pushing his blatant lie about the FBI plotting to kill him, and covering up whatever makes him look bad. The network has always pushed Republican goals and messages, throwing its weight behind Trump once he captured the GOP electorate, and is putting its thumb on the scale for Trump in this election.

Trump can continue to take shots at Fox without worrying about their support, as the network doesn’t want to risk angering his supporters. But ultimately, the voters he has to convince may not be hanging on the network’s every word.