MAGA World Melts Down Over Fears Trump Is Abandoning Project 2025

After one of the heads of Project 2025, Paul Dans, stepped down on Tuesday, there was an immediate backlash from the right against Trump campaign staff.

The conservative manifesto has drawn a lot of criticism and attacks from Democrats, with Trump even taking issue with some of its extreme policy items, particularly its restrictions on abortion rights. But several right-wing personalities are directing their aim at Trump advisers for pushing out Dans, concerned that the move is a signal Trump is abandoning the project.

Mike Cernovich specifically targeted Chris LaCivita, one of Trump’s campaign managers, in several posts on X (formerly Twitter).

Mollie Hemingway, editor in chief of The Federalist, and Chris Lonsdale, a Missouri state representative, also jumped in to attack Trump staff. 

The gleeful email that LaCivita and Trump’s other campaign manager, Susie Wiles, sent out Tuesday celebrating “Project 2025’s demise” appears to have provoked anger from many on the right. They are refusing to believe reports that Trump himself is annoyed that the project has received so much attention, or that he resents the implication that the project is behind his policies and choosing his presidential staff.

None of this can change the fact that Trump and his campaign have extensive ties to Project 2025. Vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance even wrote the foreword to a book by one of its lead architects, Kevin Roberts, who was very happy when Trump chose Vance as his running mate. Meanwhile, all of the infighting over how much influence the project actually has will only make Republicans look weirder.

January 6 defendant David Brian Howard claims that Fox News played a significant role in his radicalization and eventual participation in the January 6 Capitol riot.

Howard was arrested on charges of breaching the Capitol and is set to face sentencing on Friday. According to court documents shared by CBS’s congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane, Howard is “seeking mercy at sentencing” by noting that he was influenced by Fox News’s lies about the 2020 election.

The defendant “is/was simply a small-town man who between the years of 2014 and 2020 followed the media and news which much of his small community seemed to follow—Fox News,” the document read. While Howard “bought the lies sold to him and millions of others for many years and especially in the wake of the 2020 election,” the defense noted he has since had a change of heart, and is now “horrified by their ongoing misinformation, influence and affect and veers away from any of that.”

“Mr. Howard had no intention, ever, of engaging in the actions which led to his arrest. He came to Washington, DC, from Dallas (via Miami), on January 6th alone because he was led to believe—from his local media and large swaths of the community around him at home—that his vote for Mr. Trump in 2020 had been stolen; that the election had been stolen.”

Howard’s argument echoes that of critics who have placed some of the blame for the events of January 6 on Fox.

Media journalist Brian Stelter, for example, has argued that the Capitol riot was the culmination of “something that actually built up for months and months,” fed in no small part by the Big Lie narratives peddled by the conservative network. “We know that some rioters bought plane tickets and flew to Washington because of what they were being told on television, because of the lies that were being spread on television. I think it’s an underappreciated part of the story,” Stelter said on MSNBC in January.

Donald Trump was losing it over the “lunatics” behind Project 2025 long before the right-wing policy program’s director, Paul Dans, stepped down amid the backlash created by Trump himself.

Before issuing his first unconvincing attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 in July, Trump privately railed about the “lunatics” linked to Project 2025, who pushed for unpopular, sweeping abortion bans, two sources familiar told Rolling Stone.

Since Project 2025’s debut, Trump has attempted to appear more moderate on abortion, inspiring a huge shift in the Republican Party’s platform away from a federal abortion ban (and toward embracing the dozens of cruel state-level ones). The 900-plus plan document, which had been tailor-made for a Trump presidency, couldn’t follow the whims of the decidedly fluid Republican candidate.

Project 2025’s policy roadmap suggests a slate of horrifying hard-line rules on abortion, including withholding federal approval for abortion pills, restricting access to emergency contraception, using federal agencies to expand “abortion surveillance,” and of course, resuscitating the right-wing dream of a federal abortion ban.

Trump has been having a prolonged meltdown over the potential damage this plan could cause to his campaign for weeks. But he couldn’t help but get in his own way: During the RNC in late July, Trump tapped J.D. Vance to be his running mate.

For Trump, the Ohio senator was a chance to shore up support among white male voters. Instead, it seems Vance is a one-two punch of campaign destruction. Vance previously advocated for a federal abortion ban, not to mention he has his own shocking links to Project 2025.

Vance wrote a particularly violent foreword to a forthcoming book by Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025. Roberts was fawning over Vance as soon as he was picked.

The swirling clouds of internet mayhem have parted, and the user behind the rumor that J.D. Vance once got sexual with a sectional has finally broken his silence.

In an interview with Business Insider, “Rick,” or @rickrudescalves (he’s since changed his username for privacy), explained why exactly he was inspired to invent a semi-believable lie that Donald Trump’s running mate had made love to a loveseat.

The day that Trump announced that Vance would be joining his ticket, Rick tweeted, “can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an Inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).”

The story? A work of fiction by a disappointed guy from a working-class background. Rick, a desk worker who said he had a similar upbringing to that which Vance described in his bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy, said he regarded the Ohio senator from “a place of irreverence if not outright disrespect.”

The page numbers? Plucked from thin air. Rick was referring to authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and John Fowles, who cooked up phony citations to lend literary credibility to their fictional works. “It’s something I’ve found funny my entire life,” Rick said.

Rick’s reasoning for this particular fabrication? He was inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s anecdote in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 about former President Lyndon Johnson starting a rumor that his opponent had sex with his livestock.

“Christ, we can’t get away with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”

“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

When the rumor took off, Rick was surprised and a little overwhelmed. He hid the post within a week, but by then, the idea had already spread like wildfire, with news organizations rushing to fact-check and then subsequently backing off.

Rick pointed to director Werner Herzog’s “ecstatic truth,” which Herzog describes as “a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual.” During an interview on Late Night With Seth Meyers in 2022, Herzog admitted that in capturing his protagonist he “would invent a few things to make the essence of the man visible.”

By inventing a story about Vance having sex with a couch, this anonymous internet user had made the vice presidential nominee’s essence as a “couch-fucker” all the more visible.

For his part, Vance hasn’t exactly dodged the baseless rumors and appears to be making absolutely no effort to avoid the gaffe. At a rally on Tuesday, Vance made an awkward joke about getting in trouble with his wife, Usha, and being banished to the couch for the night.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham Tuesday veered into a bizarre exchange on gender pronouns, in a moment that’s now making the rounds online.

“Kamala Harris, in her Twitter bio, which I’ve never noticed until this morning, states her pronouns as she/her,” Ingraham said. “What are your pronouns?”

“I have no—I don’t want pronouns,” the former president replied. “I don’t want pronouns, I saw that.”

“So you’re fluid?” Igraham joked.

“Nobody even knows what that means,” Trump replied.

The clip is circulating widely online, with some embracing the reactionary Fox News host as an “accidental ally,” and others jokingly interpreting Trump’s response as a brave rejection of gender conformity. One X user posted, “This is the first time Laura Ingraham has been funny and I applaud her for it.”

The exchange shows that right-wing figures are committed to their yearslong performative bafflement about the existence of gender pronouns. Ingraham asked, “What is that? Why are people doing that?” but her question and admittedly quick-witted follow-up about gender fluidity betray the act. And Ingraham’s claim that she hadn’t noticed Harris’s bio on X (formerly Twitter) previously shows just how unnewsworthy the subject is.

The exchange may be best understood, then, as an attempt on Ingraham’s part to offer a riposte to Democrats’ latest line of attack against Trump, J.D. Vance, and Republicans’ off-putting social agenda—calling them “weird”—which was the subject of the interviewer’s next question. To that point, Vance used a clip of Harris saying her pronouns at a 2019 CNN town hall to deflect from the “weird” charge on X Sunday.