The shocked response to the barrage of Donald Trump’s Day One executive orders fails to connect the dots to the critical underlying story—the pervasive influence of Project 2025 on this administration. Understanding this throughline is fundamental to reporting what a governmental shift to autocratic rule looks like, and how to respond to its overreach and threats to the rule of law.
The blitz of executive orders will impact all aspects of the federal government and include, for example, closing the border, controlling the federal workforce, reducing worker protections, creating the Department of Government Efficiency as an above-the-law agent of government, eliminate diversity initiatives, rollback measures to address climate change, increase oil drilling, and eliminate clean energy programs.
The response to their issuance demonstrates, however, that at the outset of this new administration, the media has exposed two major weaknesses in its ability meet this moment.
First, there should be no surprise at the scope of the actions. Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership described them in meticulous detail in advance. But the media never fully covered the depth of its proposals to upend government from the outset.
Project 2025 made clear its intent to dismantle the federal government: “Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”
Obediently, the President has begun to dismantle the federal workforce—those who enforce our laws, administer social security, protect the environment, and ensure that the public can fly and otherwise travel safely. All of these federal employees took an oath of allegiance to the Constitution. Their fidelity is to that oath, not to a particular government official, a fact that may explain Project 2025’s dripping contempt for federal workers.
Project 2025’s vow to uproot protections against discrimination went largely unnoticed: “The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity…, diversity, equity and inclusion…, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights…out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
The reference to these legal protections as “hard targets for woke culture warriors” is an affront to a civilized society. Yet, by his signature, the President now seeks to implement Project 2025’s vow to erase the right to be protected from discrimination and abolish the safeguards that have developed for decades to affirm legal rights.
The media also ignored Project 2025’s contempt for science, research, and the importance of checks and balances in our government, now buried under Executive Orders. Consider this language: “The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch…. Success in meeting that challenge will require…boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will and self-denial to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.”
The idea that we should let America’s families, faith communities, and local governments develop regulations and policies now researched and implemented by such agencies as the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission, or the Securities and Exchange Commission is preposterous.
Throughout, Project 2025 revealed itself as a blueprint for amassing total power in the presidency. Expressions of surprise at the executive action blitzkrieg represent a failure of preparation. It is now imperative to replace the shock with demands to know the legal basis for each action and the remedies that exist for those who will be deeply harmed by the measures.
And this leads to the media’s second significant failing—to see all of government through a partisan lens. When dealing with profound changes to law and questionable legality, coverage like this is irresponsible: “Many of Trump’s orders are likely to be challenged in court by Democrats and liberal advocacy groups.”
That sentence is as treacherous to the rule of law as many of the executive orders themselves. Characterizing those who would challenge these executive actions as party-affiliated or liberal advocacy groups diminishes the substance of the challenges, ignores the underlying threats to democracy, and relegates legitimate legal challenges to mere partisan behavior.
Reflexively describing valid concerns about threats to our democracy as a partisan fight gives the advantage to those seeking to undermine it and weakens the function of journalism as a bulwark for a free society.
Maybe that is what media owners today want, but our country needs more. The people now running the government told us all exactly what they planned to do. The media must stop being surprised, school themselves on Project 2025, and focus on fundamental principles of democracy and the rule of law.