Originally by Alex Henderson at www.alternet.org
2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, have been claiming that Project 2025 has nothing to do with them — including Project 2025’s widely criticized proposals on abortion and birth control.
Project 2025 is the Heritage Foundation’s detailed 920-page blueprint for a second Trump Administration, and Trump and Vance clearly see it as a political liability. But many Democrats, including presidential nominee Kamala Harris, have been calling out Trump and Vance’s efforts to distance themselves from Project 2025 as wildly disingenuous — as it was put together by many of Trump’s top allies. Harris, in fact, has an entire anti-Project 2025 section on her campaign website.
In a blistering article published on September 18, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte slams the Trump-backed Christian nationalist Mark Robinson — North Carolina’s GOP gubernatorial nominee — as a poster child for the Project 2025 agenda, arguing that his campaign underscores the hypocrisy of Trump and Vance claiming that Heritage’s document doesn’t represent them.
“North Carolina’s Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, now running to be governor of the Tar Heel State, rose to fame in the GOP by channeling the id of the typical MAGA voter,” Marcotte explains. “His speeches and social media presence channel a D-list shock jock mentality, filtered through a Christian nationalist lens, that’s grown in popularity in the Trump era. He calls LGBTQ people ‘filth,’ ‘maggots,’ and ‘flies,’ insisting they should be forced to ‘find a corner outside’ rather than be allowed to use public restrooms.”
The Salon journalist adds, “He’s denounced women’s suffrage and argued that once a woman is pregnant, her body belongs to ‘the daddy.’ And before Tucker Carlson was embracing Holocaust denialism, Robinson was raving that it was ‘hogwash’ to believe the Nazi genocide of Jews happened.”
Marcotte notes that although Trump’s campaign is trying to convince voters that Robinson’s views don’t reflect “what Trump intends to do if he wins office,” the former president has praised Robinson as “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
Robinson, she adds, has expressed a strong “opposition to birth control” — and Project 2025’s Emma Watters has said, “I’ve been very concerned with just the emphasis on expanding more and more contraception.”
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Marcotte also points out that “Project 2025 has language in it that subtly lays the groundwork for an eventual ban on nearly all forms of female-controlled contraception.”
“The truth is this hostility to contraception is baked right into Project 2025, which was developed by hundreds of past and future Trump advisors as a replacement for a traditional policy agenda,” Marcotte warns. “Along with schemes to use executive orders to pass abortion bans without going through Congress, Project 2025 contains radical schemes to drastically restrict — and eventually outright ban — female-controlled contraception methods. This is why Republicans in Congress continue to block efforts to enshrine contraception rights into law. The end goal is to take birth control away.”
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Amanda Marcotte’s full Salon article is available at this link.
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