Projectile Varmint

 
A thing that has stood out the past week like the circus coming to town with lights shining on it and a marching band drawing attention to themselves is that Trump is trying to distance himself from Project 2025, the dystopian playbook put together by the Heritage Foundation for the MAGOP to make an extreme-right move even more fascist than they've been so far.  And taking their lead from Trump, other elected MAGOP officials now, as well.

In a laughable way reminiscent of Sgt. Schultz from the old series, Hogan's Heroes -- "I know nothing, noooothinggg!! -- Trump insists (now) that he supposedly doesn’t know anything at all about Project 2025, indeed that he hasn’t even heard of it, something that transcends ludicrous on the simple face of it because, despite insisting he knows nothing, nooooothingggg about Project 2025, he’s also said he knows enough about it to think that some of it is wrongheaded and goes too far.  And Republicans in Congress have now become public, too, in trying to distance themselves from it.  Like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) who claimed that he disagrees with some of it because it's too far-out, although he does agree with some – and insists it’s not a gameplan for the MAGOP at all, but just a report by a Think Tank, nothing more.
 
A Think Thank that serves as the foundational guidepost for the Republican Party.
 
Trump’s insistence that he knows nothing about Project 2025 is a standard Trump gambit when backed into a corner by his connections to deeply problematic matters (like when he claimed he had no idea who former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke was, despite him having run for the U.S. Senate from Louisiana and endorsing Trump, and claiming he didn’t know what white supremacist groups debate moderator Chris Wallace could possibly be referring to in 2020 when asking if Trump would condemn them,.  “What do you want to call them? Give me a name,” Trump flummoxed.)  His insistence of ignorance, valid in so many areas of public and political life, borders on comical here, given that most of those behind Project 2025 are former Trump officials in the White House, and his current national press secretary of his campaign did a recruiting ad for the Heritage Foundation.  And Trump himself has publicly raved about the Heritage Foundation and said how much he needs them.
 
Additionally, what leaps out from Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 and other Republican officials’ attempts is that whenever they say that they disagree with some of the things in the playbook…none of them ever say what exactly it is that they supposedly disagree with!  It’s too cute (and disingenuous) by half.  Let everyone guess what they think is great and what goes “too far.”  In fairness, there isn’t really all that much to guess here.  Given that his former officials oversaw the thing, it’s improbable that Trump dislikes any of it, even the parts he says goes “too far.”  Going too far has never been a problem for a guy convicted of 34 felonies, found liable of rape, found guilty of fraud, who says he wants to be a dictator, says he wants to rewrite some of the Constitution, echoes Hitler, tried to blackmail the president of Ukraine, tried to overthrow the U.S. government, wants to end NATO, tells Russia if it wants to attack our NATO allies he’s okay with that, and says he thinks despotic autocrats Putin, Kim and Orban are great guys and doesn’t trust the U.S. intelligence services.
 
Ludicrous, too, is that now, all of a sudden, Trump and Republican officials have supposedly discovered that there are a few, unnamed things that they supposedly don’t like and have to distance themselves from something that has been out for about a year.  Sorry, the time to say, “This goes way too far even for the extreme MAGOP” was when it was made public – or when they were involved with input – not a year later, as the Republican Party gets ready for its convention in just a few weeks.
 
So…no, Trump cannot distance himself from Project 2025 even if he went to the end of the flat Earth to denounce “some things” in it.  Nor can any Republican official, including the Marco Rubios of the world, if they’ve waited this long to pipe up about it – and refuse to say all the many things they find in it that supposedly go “too far.”
 
Too far.  Right.  It’s basically the blue print for the MAGOP platform.  It’s basically the programs that MAGOPs have been pushing for the past seven years.  It’s basically laws that Red states have passed since they went crazy after Trump lost re-election and they’ve tried to overthrow democracy.
 
Trump insists he the smartest man in the world, a very stable genius, only he alone can fix it, that all achievements passed – even by Democrats – are his.  So, when he says he doesn’t know about something, that he doesn’t know about Project 2025, that’s about as close to all the proof anyone needs to be sure that he not only knows all about it, but it’s in his dreams every night.

And at the moment, it's clear that Trump and Republican officials are getting the very scared concern that those dreams risk becoming a nightmare, because that's the only reason people distance themselves from everything they've pushed for and riled up the base about for the past seven years.  Because they've realized that now that it's getting attention, maybe they actually have gone "too far."  But it's one thing to excite the base into a hot religious fever over a national abortion ban and banning IVF and banning contraceptives and being against recreational sex (yes, that's actually a Heritage Foundation dream) and banning Muslims and building internment camps and banning books and banning the teaching Black history and banning gay marriage and making everyone pray to the Christian version of the Ten Commandments and banning giving water to people standing in line to vote and banning voting by mail -- and it's another thing entirely to convince the rest of America that all of that wrapped up in fascism in face of democracy is a great thing.  And so you try to flimflam people that, oh, no, I don't believe in all the things I've been relentlessly yelling at you over and over and over that I believe in, because it turns out that I just realized some of them go "too far."  I just won't tell  you which ones.  And pray that enough people aren't paying close enough attention and buy it.

When Trump tries to slam other people for things he himself is actually the one guilty of, they call it "projecting."  How deeply appropriate and almost whimsical that the MAGOP Heritage Foundation playbook is called Project 2025. 

As much as they try to distance themselves from Project 2025 and tell you, no, it's not them -- it just projects as loud as possible, THIS IS THEM.

And from the day the party nominated Trump to lead them eight years ago, it's who they've always been.
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