Subject: Re: John Oliver Weighs In
Arguing that opponents of Project2025's goals shouldn't devote time explaining its risks to America's future because it won't sufficiently taint Trump to block HIS election overlooks the fact that there is more than Biden versus Trump on the ballot.

I'm not disagreeing that Project 2025's goals are bad. Rather, it's that we shouldn't care about Project 2025 - because they're not really significant.

I mean, there's countless random right-wing pundits that spout those kinds of horrible ideas all the time. Heck, Steve Bannon has a whole media show where he exudes vile policy ideas. But we don't feel any particular need to massively educate all the voters about the terrible ideas of any random right-winger. Just because someone's out there publishing terrible policies doesn't make it worthwhile to spend resources telling everyone about that specific iteration of those terrible policies.

Why not? Because regardless of how terrible the ideas are, the people spouting them are pretty irrelevant. They don't personally have any power to put any of these ideas into action. What you need to do in elections is to defeat the people who are on the ballot, because those are the folks who (if they win) will have power. Even a right-wing think tank with delusions of grandeur isn't that. Kevin Roberts isn't some Trump whisperer who has the ear of the mighty and powerful. He's not even a Grover Norquist.

Heritage doesn't have the ability to implement Project 2025's terrible ideas. There's no indication that Trump cares about them at all. He's got his own compilation of terrible ideas - Agenda 47. That's the collection of ideas that actually have traction in the party, because they're Trump's terrible ideas. They're also fascist and authoritarian and scary. There's a lot of overlap between them (again, Project 2025 has copied a lot of Trump's policies) - but Agenda 47 is the policy document that is Trump's agenda for the second term.

It certainly seems like a waste of time to focus on what Heritage thinks the agenda for Trump's second term should be, rather than focusing on what Trump thinks the agenda for his second term should be. Because Heritage has no power, and not even a lot of influence right now - and Trump is almost certainly going to ignore them and just do what he wants to do, and there's no indication he secretly wants to do any of the stuff that's on their list that isn't already on his own list.