Donald Trump may have set an unenviable world record during his recent Mar-a- Lago news conference. National Public Radio documented 162 untruths, half-truths and distortions during the 64 minutes he spoke.
Among them was his insistence that he had once shared a harrowing helicopter ride with Willie Brown, former House speaker in California.Brown said it never happened. Trump’s actual companion in the 1990 incident was another California politician, Nate Holden, who remembers it well, and who resembles Brown only in that both are Black.
“But, as they say, we all look the same,” Holden remarked sarcastically.
If the question is whether Trump lied deliberately, maybe it’s appropriate to give him some benefit of the doubt. An aging mind can easily conflate memories. Moreover, his public remarks, often nonsensical, increasingly suggest serious cognitive issues.
He’s not all there
The torrent of falsehoods should trouble even Trump’s most devoted admirers. It’s the future of the world as well as of the nation that they would submit to someone who doesn’t seem to be all there.
One important issue Trump failed to mention or misrepresent that day had to with his knowledge of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 922-page blueprint for transforming America into a far-right paradise.
Trump has persistently denied knowing how it came to be and posted on social media last month, “Have no idea who is in charge of it.”
The Washington Post has reported on a 45-minute flight Trump took in April 2022 with Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. The article came with a photograph taken on the flight to a Heritage conference where Trump spoke warmly of Project 2025.
“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump said.
According to the Post, Roberts told the newspaper in April that “I personally have talked to President Trump about Project 2025, because my role in the project has been to make sure that all of the candidates who have responded to our offer for a briefing on Project 2025 get one from me.”
Trump’s campaign denied that he was briefed. But it’s clear that he knows just enough about Project 2025 to recognize its toxicity.
A Trump blueprint
Whether he’s forgotten or chooses not to remember, many of its authors are people who worked for Trump in prominent positions. Others are regulars in the Republican Party’s government-in-waiting. Its prescriptions are meant for a Republican Congress as well as for another Trump presidency. Throughout, they call for restoring Trump administration executive orders and policies that President Joe Biden repealed.
Heritage, bankrolled from the start by personal and corporate fortunes, is what Jane Mayer, the author of “Dark Money,” defined as a think tank-disguised political weapon. Heritage claims that less than 2% of its supporters are corporate, but won’t disclose them.
Project 2025 incorporates virtually every current Republican economic and cultural trope, from mocking climate change, critical race theory and diversity programs to abolishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to replacing career public servants with political operatives throughout the government.
Although there’s too much in the book for a single serving here, a vivid example is Project 2025’s prescriptions for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
“HHS should return to being known as the Department of Life,” states the preface to that chapter, “by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care.”
Author Roger Severino worked in the HHS under Trump where he distinguished himself by opposing mask and vaccine mandates on health workers.
Project 2025 proposes to eventually withdraw federal approval of the abortion drug mifepristone.
Dismantling Medicaid
“The Secretary,” Severino writes, “should pursue a robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology. From the moment of conception every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race or abilities.”
The chapter calls for converting Medicaid, the health insurance program for some 75 million low-income and disabled people, into block grants that would allow state governments to cripple it. It envisions scrapping rules that protect LGBTQ+ citizens because “Families comprised of a married mother, father and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.”
Project 2025 is fair warning of what a second Trump administration would do. Voters who cherish a different vision of America know what to do on Nov. 5.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email atletters@sun-sentinel.com.
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