Authored by Ben Sellers via Headline USA,

Ken Cuccinelli, former Trump Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security , speaks at a media breakfast during the Heritage Foundation’s 2023 leadership summit. / PHOTO: Ben Sellers, Headline USA

The implosion of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign has been years in the making and highly anticipated.

Really, the biggest surprise, if any, has been how long the Left was able to milk the absurd notion that their political placeholder was a viable candidate.

As many have since noted, it speaks to the sheer toxicity that the corrupt conglomerate of corporations, information gatekeepers and partisan special-interests within the Beltway.

The Biden debate scandal and subsequent fallout effectively proved that not only has lying within the political Establishment become systemic, but it makes no difference if it is even a credible lie.

There is an almost taunting quality to putting forth something utterly implausible and challenging people to question it, knowing they lack the institutional power to hold the liars accountable.

GOING OVERBOARD

Most recognize that the current predicament is just another means to an ends—out with the old and in with the new: a candidate who must be capable of running on short notice with the existing funding sources and infrastructure needed to offset Trump’s advantage, and someone who both has the name recognition needed for a possible write-in campaign along with the perception of being a political outsider.

Nonetheless, it is somewhat satisfying to see the cockroaches scurrying away when the light switch gets flipped.

The Fools in this Learian tragedy have been the leftist media and members of Biden’s inner circle feigning shock and ignorance about the problem that everyone else has long been aware of.

Although some continue to double down, most have now pivoted to an entirely new “Big Lie” by pretending their sudden efforts to perform damage control will vindicate them.

From their half-deflated lifeboats, they point fingers at the other Biden loyalists who are going down with the ship and insist that their prior complicity was a function of fear.

Those who have spent the past three-plus years interacting with the 81-year-old president have suddenly begun sharing their stories of red-flags that now seem clear in hindsight. But they insist that if they had waged a Trump-like Resistance campaign to undermine him they would have faced severe consequences for it by becoming blacklisted rather than celebrated for their public service.

A MAGA MAKEOVER?

Ironically, their face-saving efforts only help build the case for the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which has become a boogeyman for the so-called Blue MAGA movement (a hashtag term coined by one group of leftists to attack those they see as conspiratorial and irrational).

The underlying objective of Project 2025 is to highlight key areas of reform needed within the corrupted deep state and to articulate a series of policy expert-endorsed proposals through the 880-page Mandate for Leadership in order to prevent another sabotage effort without losing any time trying to fight the bureaucracy.

“The new conservative movement that America needs is right here, right now in this room,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts said during the conservative think-tank’s 2023 leadership summit at Washington, D.C.’s National Harbor.

“No more bringing butter knives to gunfights—we’ve learned that,” Roberts continued. “The old Washington red team of free marketers, neoconservatives and evangelicals is simply not enough.”

In effect, it was intended to be an inward-looking movement to retrench the conservative movement and root out the RINOs, learning from the mistakes of the first Trump administration.

‘NOTHING TO DO WITH THEM’

Since then, unhinged and TDS-afflicted conspiracy theorists have pushed allegations that Project 2025 is Trump’s authoritarian dogwhistle in order to justify their own efforts to calcify the weaponized deep state with measures that would make it more difficult for the next administration to fire disloyal civil servants.

The propagandist Associated Press even pushed the suggestion that it was a guidebook for “revolution,” carping on some of Roberts’s rhetoric to distort the context of his statements.

Yet, as former President Donald Trump recently said in distancing himself from the initiative, it was never specifically coordinated with his campaign.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on Truth Social on Friday.

“I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he continued. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Once again, the truth will eventually get out.

America, you’ve been lied to again.

Project 2025 was just a think tank paper.

It wasn’t a Trump “master plan” to become a dictator.

Just like we told you. Here’s an idea: Stop listening to liars. pic.twitter.com/S8Au8K0nfU

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) July 5, 2024

‘CANDIDATE AGNOSTIC’

Having been present for the grand unveiling at the leadership summit—which featured a speech by then-candidate Ron DeSantis in its top billing (along with what would be Tucker Carlson’s last speech as a Fox News host), I can attest that the resurgence of Trump in such sweeping fashion was the last thing on the minds of many of the Heritage Foundation’s policy writers.

Indeed, it is more likely that many of them feared his candidacy might hold back the sort of grand reinvention of Republicanism that they envisaged.

When I asked, point blank, during a media breakfast with some of the Mandate‘s lead editors what would happen if Trump won and proceeded to disregard all their painstakingly crafted proposals, they struggled to find a suitable answer, with some seeming to suggest in their aghast reactions that a Trump comeback seemed unfathomable at the time.

Nonetheless, they were diplomatic at the time in their insistence that the initiative was intended to be for whoever might emerge as the favored Republican candidate.

Lead editor Paul Dans, the former chief of staff in Trump’s Office of Personnel Management, said that the book sought to be “candidate agnostic” and serve as a resource to any future leader, regardless of who prevailed.

The Mandate authors did “such a good job that you cant help but embrace [it],” Dans said. “You kind of ignore this a little bit at your peril.”

A VISION OF HIS OWN

That Trump has his own plans, of course, should surprise few—especially not the cadre of ex-staffers and advisers who contributed to the Heritage project.

It was clear from the former president’s recent disavowal that he took umbrage with the notion that anyone would prescribe to him a set of “expert” policies to follow after his hard-fought climb back to White House contention.

Moreover, it seems as if Project 2025 runs parallel, in many ways, to the efforts of his own, Trump-endorsed America First Policy Institute.

Trump assures his supporters that he has learned his own valuable lessons.

“I’ve been through it. I know the good people, I know the bad people. I know weak people and strong people,” he said last year at the North Carolina Republican Convention in Greensboro. “I know the people that are losers that we don’t want, I know the people that are winners that a lot of people don’t know or understand.”

Nonetheless, the presumptive GOP nominee—whose current odds of becoming the next president are around 70% by some mainstream media estimations—should not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

If there was one weakness in Trump’s prior presidential experience, it was his misjudgment of character and investment of trust in the wrong people based on their ability to flatter him to his face while undermining him behind his back.

Thus, he should regard Project 2025 and its Mandate for Leadership as a valuable second opinion, a sort of grounding influence that he can use as the baseline for making his decisions.

PROOF IS IN THE PROTEST

Following Trump’s comments dismissing Project 2025 as “ridiculous and abysmal” one of those who came forward in an effort to ridicule him was former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele—the epitome, if ever there were one, of a traitor to conservative values and ideals.

“Since #Project2025 is designed to institutionalize Trumpism and you know nothing about it, then why do you echo some of its policy priorities during your rallies?” said the former Maryland lietenant governor, whose own efforts to seek higher office failed miserably.

Ok, let’s all play with Stupid for minute…so exactly how do you “disagree” with something you “know nothing about” or “have no idea” who is behind, saying or doing the thing you disagree with? Since #Project2025 is designed to institutionalize Trumpism and you know nothing about… pic.twitter.com/z3irzidWP6

— Michael Steele (@MichaelSteele) July 5, 2024

If the same people in the permanent bureaucracy who spent the past several years laying cover for the dubious 2020 election—and the senile geriatric they installed into power as an empty-suit figurehead for the corrupt oligarchy—are devoting this much energy to trying to distort the facts about Project 2025 and misrepresent its motives, then, ipso facto, it is worth a second look.

While Trump is justified in his apprehension about any and all unsolicited advice from D.C. think-tanks and career civil servants, the indications that so many Democrats (and disloyal right-wing denizens of the Swamp) seem panicked about its proposals should be a telling indication itself that Project 2025 is hitting its mark.

As Roberts noted at the Heritage leadership summit, “The Left started this culture war; we’re gonna finish it.”

Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.