ABC’s Good Morning America devoted a lengthy segment during Wednesday morning’s episode to a doomsday report about Project 2025. Chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl presented a long-winded analysis of the Heritage Foundation’s initiative, drawing particular attention to the alleged threats to freedom it posed.
Karl introduced Project 2025 as “created by some of Donald Trump's most important advisers as a blueprint for what he could do if he gets back into the White House again” before transitioning to a clip of President Joe Biden’s denouncement of the plan. “Project 2025 is the biggest attack on our system of government and our personal freedom that–that's ever been proposed in the history of this country,” the president howled.
Karl further insisted that “the 920-page plan would dramatically remake the American government and American lives,” citing Steve Bannon’s explanation of the Project’s plan to dismantle the administrative state and emphasizing the points he viewed as most especially menacing to what Biden referred to as “our personal freedom”:
Dismantling the Departments of Homeland Security and Education, FEMA, and NOAA, the agency that tracks hurricanes. Giving the president greater control over the Justice Department and, with it, federal prosecutions. Banning access to the abortion pill and further restricting abortion rights. And creating a massive militarized force to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
Karl also villainized former White House Personnel Director John McEntee for his “effort to purge people from the Trump administration considered not loyal enough to Donald Trump.” McEntee continued his endeavor with the Heritage Foundation, working to secure loyal staff members for a possible second Trump presidency and, to Karl’s great consternation, “a plan to make it easier to fire millions of civil servants across the federal government.”
Karl ended his report by bemoaning the fact that conservatives were working to facilitate a second Trump administration and increase its effectiveness, quoting the former president’s declaration, in his Bloomberg Businessweek interview, that “We had great people, but I had some people that I would not have chosen for a second time. Now, I know everybody. Now, I am truly experienced.”
Of course, ABC knew that a unified and more prepared Trump administration, resulting from Project 2025’s efforts, would spell disaster for liberal agendas that had survived unchallenged for so many years, hence their panicked smear of the initiative.
The transcript is below. Click "expand" to read:
ABC’s Good Morning America
7/17/2024
08:13:07 AM ESTGEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: We’re gonna get more now on the race for the White House and Donald Trump's plans if he's elected again. The former president’s allies in a right-wing think tank are pushing Project 2025, a sweeping and, critics say, radical plan to transform the government. Chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl is back with the details. Good morning, Jon.
JONATHAN KARL: Good morning, George. Project 2025 was created by some of Donald Trump's most important advisers as a blueprint for what he could do if he gets back into the White House again.
It's a conservative, pro-Trump effort, but lately it's been Democrats who have been talking about Project 2025. The Biden campaign already declaring Trump/Vance the Project 2025 ticket.
[Cuts to video]
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Folks, Project 2025 is the biggest attack on our system of government and our personal freedom that–that's ever been proposed in the history of this country.
KARL: Amid those attacks, Trump is now saying he knows nothing about Project 2025, recently claiming, “I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it.” So what is Project 2025? Started by the conservative Heritage Foundation, it is billed as a ready-to-go plan for the next conservative president.
FEMALE VOICE: We are laying the foundation
MALE VOICE: For the next president.
KEVIN ROBERTS: To end Washington’s bureaucracy and restore American prosperity.
KARL: The 920-page plan would dramatically remake the American government and American lives. Just listen to how Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist, recently described it to me.
[Cuts to video]
STEVE BANNON: I think a whole big part of Project 2025 is actually going into the apparatus–the post-constitutional leviathan–and start–if you take it, hitting it from legal and you've got Congress on the legislative side, the executive branch, start to take apart the administrative state brick by brick. (transition) I have 900 pages, right here, of just–this is just Project 2025.
[Cuts back to live]
KARL: Among the specifics of the plan, dismantling the Departments of Homeland Security and Education, FEMA, and NOAA, the agency that tracks hurricanes. Giving the president greater control over the Justice Department and, with it, federal prosecutions. Banning access to the abortion pill and further restricting abortion rights. And creating a massive militarized force to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
Several key Trump allies have worked on the plan including Johnny McEntee, considered perhaps Trump's most loyal aide in the White House. In 2020, he ran an effort to purge people from the Trump administration considered not loyal enough to Donald Trump.
For the past two years, McEntee and Project 2025 have been compiling a massive list of names of people loyal to Trump to work in a second Trump administration. And with it a plan to make it easier to fire millions of civil servants across the federal government.
[Cuts back to live]
The idea behind Project 2025 is that if Trump gets back to the White House, he will be more effective in implementing those policies, than he was the first time, if he has a plan and if he has people that are truly loyal to him and his agenda. And in an interview, George, just last night published by Bloomberg Businessweek, Trump said this– “We had great people, but I had some people that I would not have chosen for a second time. Now, I know everybody. Now, I am truly experienced.” Guys?
STEPHANOPOULOS: Jon Karl, thanks.
(...)
