This is “The Big Lie” of this middle phase of the election cycle. Nobody in corporate media actually believes a Trump administration would even read the 900-pages of Project 2025, let alone implement any parts of it that weren’t already part of the Trump vision, Agenda47. But they will continue to pretend that the Project 2025 plan, built and promoted by the Heritage Foundation, is what Americans should expect if Trump wins.

It’s nearly as disingenuous as “The Big Lie” of late in the 2020 election cycle when corporate media echoed in unison that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. At least back then there was enough ambiguity regarding the laptop to allow them to pretend they didn’t realize it was real. With Project 2025 and Trump’s constantly renouncing, corporate media has no excuse for pawning it off to the American people as if Trump had written it himself.

Axios posted a lengthy piece today about how awful Project 2025 would be if implemented. The first sentence aligns perfectly with this being the latest variation of “The Big Lie”:

Democrats have warned of the damage that Project 2025 could do to the federal government and access to reproductive care if former President Trump wins in November.

The purpose of the sentence is to claim that a Trump victory would mean implementation of Project 2025. Author Jacob Knutson justifies associating Trump with Project 2025 by claiming that in 2016, Trump carried out roughly two-thirds of the Heritage Foundation’s recommendations. What the author failed to admit is that Trump did so because there was crossover between his platform and the Heritage Foundation’s ideas, not because he took any advice from them.

What’s worse is that Knutson went on to highlight the most “extreme” proposals of Project 2025, none of which are part of Trump’s Agenda47. In fact, Trump has actively and aggressively fought against many of the proposed ideas such as “shrinking the social safety net” and “capping funding for Medicaid.”

Back to the opening sentence, which captures the primary talking point being echoed by corporate media. Project 2025 calls for federal action against abortion. This is the biggest reason “journalists” like Knutson keep bringing it up. Trump has made it abundantly clear that he will not take any federal actions against abortion, opting instead to leaving it up to the states. Only a truly stupid person could write the first sentence of the Axios article unless their intention was to mislead the people.

There are only two possibilities. Either Knutson is extremely unintelligent and cannot make the distinction between what Trump will actually do versus what some think tank thinks he should do, or Knutson believes everyone else lacks the intelligence to see through his gaslighting.

It could be both. It’s probably both.

They can’t hit Trump over the economy. They can’t hit him over foreign policy. They can’t hit him on the border, LGBTQIA+ supremacy, or crime. In all of those cases, Independents and moderates on both sides favor Trump over whoever the Democrat nominee ends up being. All they have is abortion so they’re passing out dunce caps in hopes enough people will listen to corporate media instead of knowing the truth. It’s a hail mary, but it’s pretty much all they have left in their arsenal.