It’s been more than a year since the publication of “Mandate for Leadership,” the 900-page book of policy proposals also known as Project 2025. The book outlines how a future Republican president should navigate an administrative transition. Media has painted the book as a harbinger of what’s to come rather than the culmination of a decades-long plot to undermine democracy. 

A prime example of Project 2025’s true purpose is its winner-take-all approach to climate destruction, in which the poor and disinvested pay outright for the subsidies that support fossil fuel extraction and in-kind for all of the consequences. In effect, Project 2025 is an attempt to withhold political power from the classes of people who stand to benefit from accurate climate change information and who would otherwise be the most motivated to use that information to mitigate climate impacts. 

But you wouldn’t be able to tell that from most media coverage. 

Mainstream media’s feigned surprise at Project 2025’s policies that evince individualism and shun social welfare only aids the far-right’s hopes of being seen as both extreme and reasonable, hateful yet rational. 

And while Project 2025 may be new, its reverence for a Christian nationalist government isn’t. The agenda has brewed for more than four decades. Current media efforts to caution voters against the far-right’s plan to dismantle the “administrative state” paints Trump as the face of extremism without offering readers actionable analysis on how or why a neo-conservative, anti-immigrant, anti-transgender agenda might gain momentum in the first place. By only reporting on Project 2025 as a recent and distinct policy proposal—rather than a deeply seeded and ongoing conservative power grab—mainstream media has missed the point: much of Project 2025 is already here. 

A long time coming  

Project 2025 policies are split into five sections, in which authors—former Trump administration and Heritage Foundation staff, conservative politicos, and individuals from the more than 100 partner organizations that signed onto the memo—make the case for a smaller government. Each section takes aim at a different element of government, from Departments of Agriculture and Education to the Federal Communications Commission. The central argument throughout is that government regulation is out of control and the heteronormative nuclear family is under attack—and the one largely to blame is the left’s “woke agenda” of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), transgender rights, and environmental protection. 

Perhaps most telling is the how of it all: Project 2025 calls for reinstating “Schedule F,” a rule that would allow a president to fire thousands of career bureaucrats and replace them with values-tested loyalists. The book is self-reflexive, a response to the administration’s transition in 2017 when it entered the White House with little to no planning about how to hire the thousands of bureaucrats needed to enact the Trump agenda. 

The message of Project 2025 is clear: This time, we’re organized. 

Despite the efforts of both former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, to distance themselves from both Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation conservative think tank behind many of the policy proposals, there’s no question that the two are linked. Lurking in the shadows of the conservative movement’s figurehead and policy factory is their ultimate inspiration: the Reagan administration, for which the very first “Mandate for Leadership” was written. It’s not just the usage of Reagan-era slogans like “happy warrior”—jolly loyalists who want to take back the country—repurposed for Trump-cronies, but that Project 2025, the most recent draft of the “Mandate for Leadership,” is a contemporary articulation of what Reagan himself wanted to achieve: global militaristic prowess, less government oversight of corporations, and a vaunting of the traditional family. What connects the two administrations is not just what they’re for, but what they’re against. 

Julie Millican, vice president of Media Matters, a nonprofit research center that monitors U.S. news and media, told Prism none of this is a surprise if you’ve paid any attention to right-wing media spaces over the years. 

“This is something that the right-wing media has been really fixated on for years,” Millican said. “Honestly, it starts back to political correctness [and] fear mongering in the ‘80s.” 

In Reagan’s time, it was “political correctness”—in Trump’s, it’s DEI. According to Media Matters, since 2021 Fox News and Newsmax combined have mentioned DEI over 3,700 times. Reagan deplored the “overregulation” brought about by federal environmental laws because in his view, it hindered economic productivity. Trump’s administration seated three conservative Supreme Court justices that, in a few years, have taken down bedrock environmental protections, allowing business even more free reign to pollute and destroy critical habitats. Reagan’s administration blended fact with fiction, relying on racist, homophobic, and pro-corporate strategies to foment fear of HIV/AIDS, poor Black communities, and to bury accurate and damning testimony regarding the harm of burning fossil fuels. Every time he speaks, Trump challenges listeners to pick apart what is “fake” news.

The media focus on the most sensationalistic parts of Project 2025—like a states’ rights approach to marriage equality—shields the public from understanding the most dangerous elements of Project 2025: namely, its attempt to control public knowledge, knowledge-making, and circulation of information. For example, consider the way conservative factions sought to restrict teaching of critical race theory and implementation of affirmative action. A field of study that problematizes whiteness and racial ordering, and a policy that, among other things, supports BIPOC access to education, are viewed as dangerous to the production of knowledge that centers white perspectives. 

Manipulating public discourse and controlling what can be put in the public record have proven to be winning strategies for gaining political power. “They have a track record of success, and they have already tried to implement these policies in several states,” Millican said. Florida is a clear example, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed his name on legislation banning books, prohibiting teachers from even mentioning sexual orientation, and banning DEI on college campuses. 

“All of this stuff is very much mirrored in the ‘Mandate for Leadership,’” Millican said. 

Project 2025 is a policy proposal that advocates for less public awareness about the world around us, which portends less public input and participation in addressing issues that affect the public. The right-wing authors, politicians, and funders behind Project 2025, who would also be responsible for overseeing the implementation of like-minded policies at the state level, know that information is power.

Project 2025 wants to take this information control further when it comes to climate. The section on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calls for reevaluating what’s called the “endangerment finding,” a 2009 Clean Air Act ruling that states greenhouse gases are a threat to public health. This and other EPA rules allow the agency to cap emissions and penalize polluters, something the Koch brothers-funded climate change disinformation think tank Heartland Institute has fought for years. 

In what is perhaps the most explicit example of corporate climate opportunism supported by the right, Project 2025 also calls for cutting the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, replacing both with privately owned companies instead. Broadly, Project 2025 routinely conflates climate change mitigation policies with harmful restriction: fewer jobs, less freedom, and less money in the bank because of the higher taxes people will be asked to fork over. All of this belies what the public actually pays. Estimates of the government subsidies that flow to fossil fuel industries is at least $20 billion per year.

As many others have pointed out, what we have now is a political bribery network that flourished during Republican administrations, one that even Democrats now have no substantive plan to course-correct for. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris appears just fine with the fossil fuel-based economy that portends unending catastrophe should we fail to lower global temperatures drastically and fast. 

This political bribery network has been in effect for decades, largely since National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientist James Hanson’s 1988 testimony to Congress that a “greenhouse effect” would raise global temperatures and destabilize the earth’s climate system. In the decades since, a privately funded anti-information campaign has made sure that even if we agree that climate change is happening, neither party has the political will to do anything about what and who is causing it and what needs to be done to address it. It is both by design and for profit that their constituents are now equally distracted by the spectacle of a book that outlines a partisan takeover of the U.S. government. 

Media coverage that disempowers

It’s not entirely surprising that most media organizations tiptoe around the very real fascistic threats of Project 2025. Media often favors the sensational over that of the slow creep. 

But Victor Pickard, professor at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the failure of coverage around Project 2025 isn’t just about one media outlet. 

“The root cause of many of our problems, whether we’re talking about the climate crisis or the collapse of local journalism, [is] really these capitalist logics that go far beyond there being just some bad corporate media outlets out there,” Pickard said. Identifying those logics “brings into focus what the incentives are—and the incentives are to cover things in ways that will attract audiences [and] basically deliver audiences to advertisers.”

Despite being unified around the ethos of objectivity, fairness, and accuracy, warnings of climate disaster have escaped most newsrooms. Reading about climate collapse isn’t that fun, and anxiety over climate change is increasingly the source of pervasive and concerning psychological distress. Climate mental health aside, treating news as a product encourages a kind of efficiency of sales where the most digestible information is front and center. Nevermind that readers are then unable to draw a deeper structural analysis of why a political power grab, a climate disaster, or a contested election is happening.

These problems are serious, Pickard said. A lack of accurate information leads to a lack of actionable information. In his words, the media rarely describes “what we as members of a purportedly democratic polity can do about these problems.”

“It’s not a simplistic cause and effect, but years and years of this kind of media coverage … does disempower us,” Pickard said.

As with its reporting on climate change, mainstream media’s analysis of the underlying machinations of Project 2025—those being the same ones that allowed climate change denial, apathy, and fearmongering to flourish—comes too late. A large part of the problem is the media’s habit of responding to the news, rather than “creating” it. This dynamic means that journalists largely refrain from analyzing threats to democracy, including climate change, as they happen. 

Even a desire to demonstrate “objectivity” is based on a “profit calculation,” Pickard said. “It was a way to make sure that [newspapers] didn’t alienate two swaths of the audience that advertisers wanted to reach.” 

The mainstream media is only now giving Project 2025 air after decades of germination. Let this be a lesson: Media can—and should—play a role in directing attention to threats to democracy as they happen, not just the aftermath. 

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.