This is Literally the Job

Political journalists need to stop pretending they don't know what Republicans are going to do.

We are now one year into Donald Trump’s second term, and something strange is happening in political media. A lot of people who spent years insisting that the so-called “alarmists” were being hysterical have started, tentatively, to admit that maybe they got it wrong.

Last April, David Brooks published a long essay in The Atlantic titled “I Should Have Seen This Coming,” in which he acknowledged that he’d underestimated how much conservatism had become pure anti-liberal reaction. Jon Stewart, who spent the early weeks of the second Trump administration chiding liberals for being too quick to use the word “fascism,” eventually conceded on air: “I did not think we would get this authoritarian this fast. I really didn’t. I’m sorry. Who could’ve known? Maybe if somebody out there had yelled at me on Bluesky about this, I would have known. But no one did. Except every day. In all caps.”

Political scientist Corey Robin, who had spent years dismissing those who called MAGA fascist, admitted on an October podcast: “I was skeptical coming into this second administration that they would be able to wield the kind of power that people feared they would wield. I have since turned out to be wrong.”

And then there are the journalists who covered the 2024 campaign, who are now looking back at their own work with what might charitably be called discomfort. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially after listening to a recent podcast that crystallized something for me.

On the one-year anniversary of Trump’s return to power, Reuters dropped the latest episode of its “On Assignment” podcast. The guest was Sally Buzbee, the outlet’s North American editor, who joined Reuters in December 2024 after leaving the Washington Post. Host Jonah Green asked her about covering the first year of Trump’s second term, and Buzbee offered this reflection:

“I think it is actually, many presidents are very, very active in their first year in office. But I think, it is fair to say that this is sort of historically ambitious, energetic, and just a real agenda. I don’t think in those first few days, we understood what an organized agenda they had for his second term, but now we understand that.”

We didn’t understand.

Now we understand.

I found myself rewinding that part of the episode a few times because I wasn’t sure I’d heard it correctly. Buzbee, who spent years running one of the country’s most important newspapers and now oversees political coverage for one of the world’s largest news agencies, was saying that the press didn’t grasp how organized Trump’s second-term agenda would be. That it took watching the administration in action for journalists to finally get it.

But then, later in the same interview, Buzbee said this:

“We all sort of knew that we knew about Project 2025. We knew that they were going to come into a second term more organized. I think the level of organization and the level of like methodical action has surprised me.”

So which is it? Did “we” not understand the organized agenda, or did “we” know about Project 2025 and know they’d be more organized this time around?

Project 2025, for anyone who somehow missed the discourse, is a nearly 900-page policy document published by the Heritage Foundation in April 2023. It lays out, in exhaustive detail, exactly what a second Trump administration should do: gut the civil service, stack agencies with loyalists, restrict abortion access, roll back LGBTQ protections, dismantle the Department of Education, and dramatically expand executive power. The document was publicly available. You could download it. I have a copy on my computer right now. Anyone who wanted to know what Trump’s allies were planning could simply read it.

And yet Buzbee describes herself as “surprised” by the methodical action. Surprised by the organization. Surprised, apparently, that the people who wrote a detailed manual explaining what they intended to do went ahead and did those things.

I reached out to Reuters’ media relations department to ask Buzbee about this. I wanted to understand the disconnect between knowing about Project 2025 and not understanding the organized agenda. I asked what it would have taken for major outlets to treat the document as a roadmap rather than speculation. I asked how the press should handle situations where Trump’s denial of involvement with something is treated as more credible than the documented evidence of his involvement.

I haven’t heard back as of publication, but I’ll update this piece if I do.

But the question I’m asking isn’t really about Buzbee specifically. She wasn’t at Reuters during the 2024 campaign. She’s speaking in the collective “we” of political journalism, taking on the institutional voice of a profession that, by its own admission, failed to understand something that was written down and handed to them. She’s saying out loud what a lot of journalists seem to believe: that the organized nature of Trump’s agenda was somehow unknowable until it started happening.

But it wasn’t unknowable. It is literally the job of political journalists to know what politicians are planning to do. It is the job to read policy documents, to track personnel, to notice when a candidate praises an organization on video and then claims to know nothing about it. This is the work. And yet, when advocates and experts did that work and tried to warn people about what was coming, they were dismissed as partisan or alarmist. When Trump lied about his involvement with Project 2025, that lie was treated as a fact that needed to be carefully weighed.

And now, a year in, with more than two-thirds of Trump’s week one executive orders tracking closely with Project 2025’s proposals, with the man who directed Project 2025 now running the Office of Management and Budget, with Trump himself publicly referencing Russell Vought as being “of Project 2025 fame” after months of denying any connection, the press is offering us its surprised Pikachu face.

Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought testifies before the House Appropriations Committee. (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

We didn’t understand, they say.

But understanding was always possible. The information was right there. The question is why so many journalists chose not to use it.

The track record they ignored

If you wanted to predict whether Trump would follow the Heritage Foundation’s playbook in a second term, you didn’t need a crystal ball. You just needed to look at what happened during his first term.

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In February 2018, the Heritage Foundation published an analysis of how many of their policy recommendations Trump had adopted in his first year. The number was 64 percent. Nearly two-thirds of the 334 proposals in Heritage’s “Mandate for Leadership” series had been, according to their own assessment, “included in Trump’s budget, implemented through regulatory guidance, or under consideration for action.”

Trump was so pleased with this that he tweeted about it: “The Heritage Foundation has just stated that 64% of the Trump Agenda is already done, faster than even Ronald Reagan.”

Thomas Binion, Heritage’s director of congressional and executive branch relations, told the Washington Examiner at the time: “We’re blown away. He is very active, very conservative, and very effective.”

By mid-2018, more than 66 Heritage employees or former employees were working in the Trump administration. This wasn’t a secret. Heritage was proud of it. They put out press releases. They updated their website. The relationship between Trump and the conservative think tank was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most successful partnerships between a president and an outside policy organization in modern American history.

So when Heritage announced Project 2025 in April 2022, the question wasn’t whether Trump would adopt their recommendations. The question was how many.

One week after Heritage formally announced the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, Trump flew to Florida to deliver the keynote address at a Heritage Foundation dinner. He took a private plane with Heritage president Kevin Roberts. The Washington Post later published a photo of the two of them together on that flight.

At the dinner, Trump said this:

“Because our country is going to hell. The critical job of institutions such as Heritage is to lay the groundwork. And Heritage does such an incredible job at that. And I’m telling you, with Kevin and the staff, and I met so many of them now, I took pictures with among the most handsome, beautiful people I’ve ever seen... But this is a great group. And they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America. And that’s coming.”

“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”

That’s Trump, in April 2022, describing the work that would become Project 2025. He called it “our movement.” He said Heritage would provide the details. He flew on a private plane with the guy running the operation and gave a speech praising the whole endeavor.

The video of this speech was available online. Snopes fact-checked it. Journalists could watch it anytime they wanted. When Trump later claimed he knew “nothing” about Project 2025 and had “no idea” who was behind it, there was readily available footage of him describing the project as the blueprint for “exactly what our movement will do.”

None of this was hidden. The first-term adoption rate was in Heritage’s own promotional materials. The 2022 speech was on video. The photo of Trump and Roberts on the plane was eventually published by one of the country’s major newspapers. The revolving door between Heritage and the Trump administration was documented in real time.

If someone had asked me in 2023 whether Trump would follow the Heritage Foundation’s recommendations in a second term, I would have said: of course he will. He did it last time. He bragged about doing it last time. He gave a speech saying he’d do it again. What more do you need?

Apparently, for a lot of newsrooms, quite a bit more.

The denial, and who believed it

In July 2024, as Project 2025 started getting mainstream attention, Trump posted on Truth Social: “I know nothing about Project 2025. 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. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

At a campaign rally that same month, he called the plan “seriously extreme” and said it was conceived by people on the “severe right.”

Then, at the September 2024 debate with Kamala Harris, Trump repeated the denial: “I have nothing to do with Project 2025. That’s out there. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it.”

So there you have it. Trump said he had nothing to do with it. Case closed.

Except, of course, for the 2022 speech where he praised Heritage for laying the groundwork for “exactly what our movement will do.” And the private plane ride with Kevin Roberts. And the track record. And the 140 former Trump administration officials who contributed to the document, including six former cabinet members. And the fact that Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, had served as chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management during Trump’s first term. And the fact that the document mentions Trump hundreds of times.

But Trump said he had nothing to do with it. And for much of the political press, that denial carried enormous weight.

In July 2024, someone on social media wrote that “Trump has made his authoritarian intentions quite clear with his Project 2025 plan.” USA Today’s fact-checkers rated the statement “false,” with the headline: “Project 2025 is an effort by the Heritage Foundation, not Donald Trump.”

When Harris, at her first campaign rally after becoming the presumptive nominee, said that Project 2025 showed Trump “intends to cut Social Security and Medicare,” CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale wrote that this was “false” because “the Project 2025 document does not show that Trump intends to cut Social Security.” Which tells you something about how this worked: because the document wasn’t literally authored by Trump, claims about what Trump “intends” to do based on it were deemed inaccurate.

After the September debate, the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler reported in bold text that “Project 2025 is not an official campaign document.”

In October 2024, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell interrupted Harris during a “Face the Nation” interview when the vice president tried to warn about Project 2025. “You know that Donald Trump has disavowed Project 2025,” O’Donnell said. “He says that is not his campaign plan.”

FactCheck.org, in a piece titled “FactChecking Vice President Kamala Harris,” wrote: “She referred to Project 2025—a conservative plan for deeply cutting and overhauling the federal government—as Trump’s ‘extreme Project 2025 agenda.’ Trump has disavowed the project.”

See the pattern? Trump denied involvement. Therefore, claims tying him to Project 2025 were labeled misleading, lacking context, or outright false. The denial functioned as a fact in itself, one that journalists felt obligated to present as a counterweight to the documentary evidence of his involvement.

This is a man who, according to the Washington Post’s own count, made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his first term. Thirty thousand. And yet when he said he had “nothing to do with” a project conceived by his former staffers, aligned with his stated policy goals, and praised by him in a 2022 speech, that denial was treated as credible information that needed to be carefully weighed against the claims of his political opponents.

The asymmetry is staggering. On one side: a 900-page document, written by 140 former Trump officials, explicitly designed to guide “the next conservative president,” praised by Trump himself two years earlier. On the other side: Trump saying “nuh-uh.”

And the press, faced with this asymmetry, reached for the “both sides” playbook. They couldn’t say Trump was lying, because that would be taking a side. They couldn’t say the document was effectively his agenda, because he denied it. So they settled on a framing that treated the whole thing as a he-said-she-said dispute, with truth somewhere in the murky middle.

A Common Dreams report from October 2025 summarized the situation: “In the critical months leading up to the election, many media outlets took Trump’s denial at face value, publishing fact checks and other commentary that painted Democrats’ warnings about his connection to the plan as alarmist or misleading.”

After Trump won and promptly began implementing Project 2025’s recommendations, some commentators went back and dug up these old clips. Mehdi Hasan, founder of Zeteo, highlighted the CBS interview, saying Trump’s embrace of Project 2025 was “embarrassing not just for Norah O’Donnell but a whole host of leading American anchors and reporters who echoed Trump’s false denials.”

Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch, put it more bluntly: “All those 2024 media fact checks that said, ‘Donald Trump and the Trump campaign deny any connection to Project 2025’ look pretty ridiculous right now. A Trump denial is not a fact. You just used his lies to ‘debunk’ a reality that was obvious to anyone paying attention.”

A Trump denial is not a fact. That’s the thing. It never was. But for a significant portion of the political press, it functioned as one anyway.

The people who did their jobs

While major news outlets were busy treating Trump’s denials as counterweights to documented reality, other people were doing something different. They were reading the document and taking it seriously.

In June 2024, the ACLU released the first in a series of memos detailing what a second Trump term would look like for civil rights and civil liberties. The organization laid out, based on Trump’s own campaign promises and the proposals in Project 2025, exactly what advocates should expect: rolled-back protections for LGBTQ people, mandated discrimination against transgender people by the federal government, and the weaponization of federal law to force states and private actors to discriminate. The ACLU’s Project 2025 explainer page described the document as “a roadmap for replacing the rule of law with ideas that undermine the protection of civil rights and liberties.”

GLAAD, the LGBTQ media advocacy organization, identified dozens of specific provisions in Project 2025 that called for rolling back LGBTQ rights, including marriage equality and nondiscrimination protections in federal agencies. GLAAD president Sarah Kate Ellis warned that Project 2025 “would create an America where the freedoms that are a hallmark to our Democracy are replaced with authoritarianism and the progress we have made for LGBTQ people, people of color, women, and other marginalized communities is stripped away.”

The Human Rights Campaign called Project 2025 “a wrecking ball aimed at the very foundations of civil rights, LGBTQ+ rights, health care access, voting rights, and environmental protections.”

These organizations weren’t guessing. They weren’t speculating. When the ACLU said a second Trump administration would try to exclude gender-affirming care from federal healthcare programs, that was in the document. When GLAAD said Project 2025 would target marriage equality, that was in the document. These weren’t predictions based on vibes. They were descriptions of stated intentions.

So why were these groups able to see what so many political journalists couldn’t? Part of the answer is that they weren’t constrained by the same rules.

There’s a version of this story where you could almost sympathize with political journalists. Republicans, as a general rule, do not like to tell voters what they actually plan to do. Their policies tend to be unpopular when described plainly, so they campaign on vibes and grievances instead. Remember the 2020 debate when Trump pretended not to know whether Amy Coney Barrett would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade? “You don’t know her views on Roe v. Wade,” he said. She’d been on every shortlist for years specifically because of her views on Roe v. Wade. Everyone knew. But Trump understood that actually saying it out loud would be a political problem, so he played dumb, and the press dutifully shrugged on the question of whether his nominee would overturn abortion rights.

This is the usual dynamic. Republicans keep their policy intentions vague, journalists say they can’t predict what will happen, and then everyone acts surprised when the predictable thing happens.

But Project 2025 broke that pattern. For once, conservatives put their entire agenda in writing. Draft executive orders. Implementation timelines. Agency-by-agency restructuring plans. It was the rare case where the “we don’t know what they’ll actually do” excuse simply did not apply. The document was publicly available.

So Trump couldn’t do his usual vagueness routine. He had to just lie. He had to say he knew nothing about a project run by his former staffers, praised by him on video, and adopted at a nearly two-thirds rate during his first term. And even then, even when the lie was so transparently false, even when the documentary evidence was overwhelming, the press still found ways to treat Project 2025 as speculative rather than predictive.

But here’s what bothers me most. The ACLU, GLAAD, HRC, and similar organizations are advocacy groups. That’s not a slur; it’s a description of what they do. And in the epistemology of mainstream political journalism, that makes them suspect. Their warnings get framed as partisan, as interested, as coming from people who have a stake in the outcome. When the ACLU says a policy will harm civil liberties, that’s the ACLU doing what the ACLU does. It’s expected. It’s predictable. And because it’s predictable, it’s discountable.

Meanwhile, when Trump says something, that’s news. Even when what he says is a lie. Even when the lie contradicts documented evidence. Even when the lie contradicts his own previous statements. A Trump denial gets reported as a fact that must be weighed, while an ACLU warning gets filed under “advocacy groups say.”

The ACLU, GLAAD, HRC: they all turned out to be right. The press, by and large, did not.

What “surprised” means

Let’s go back to Sally Buzbee one more time.

In the Reuters interview, she rattled off a list of things that surprised her about Trump’s second term. She was surprised by the military adventurism. Surprised they bombed Iran. Surprised at his intensity around Greenland. Surprised that Susie Wiles couldn’t rein him in. Surprised by the “stick-with-it-ness” of the administration’s methodical action.

Surprised, surprised, surprised.

Sally Buzbee. (Celeste Sloman for the Washington Post)

At a certain point, you have to ask what it would take to not be surprised. Trump said he’d do mass deportations. He’s doing mass deportations. Trump’s allies wrote a document calling for the dismantling of the Department of Education. They’re dismantling the Department of Education. Okay, sure, the Greenland thing kind of came out of nowhere, I’ll give her that. But the Heritage Foundation outlined plans for aggressive use of executive power. Trump is aggressively using executive power. The very first page of Project 2025 bemoaned the “toxic normalization of transgenderism.” Trump declared on his first day that the official policy of the United States government is that there are only two genders.

What part of this was hard to see coming?

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I think the surprise is real, but I don’t think it’s an intellectual failure. I think it’s an institutional one. Political journalism has developed a set of practices that make surprise the default response to predictable events. Treat every denial as meaningful. Frame every warning from advocacy groups as partisan overreach. Insist on a both-sides structure even when one side is lying. Worry more about being called biased than about being accurate. Do all of this, consistently, for years, and you will be surprised when the things people warned you about come to pass. The surprise is built into the methodology.

There’s a cost to this.

Project 2025 was almost inconceivably unpopular with the American public. An NBC News poll from September 2024 found that 57 percent of registered voters viewed the plan negatively. Just 4 percent viewed it positively. Four percent. If voters had understood that Trump intended to implement this agenda, that knowledge might have mattered. Instead, the press kept telling them it was complicated. Trump says he has nothing to do with it. Critics say he does. Who can really know? The effect was to launder Trump’s lie into a legitimate difference of opinion, transforming a question with a clear answer into a murky dispute that voters would have to sort out for themselves.

Paul Dans, the guy who directed Project 2025, told CNN in January 2025: “This is exactly the work we set out to do.”

Exactly the work we set out to do. They told us what they were going to do. They published it. They put it on a website. And when it happened, the press was surprised.

The question isn’t whether journalists should have predicted the future. The question is whether they should have been willing to state the obvious: that the document existed, that it was written by Trump’s allies, that Trump had praised Heritage’s work on video, that his first administration adopted their recommendations at a nearly two-thirds rate — and that his denial was a lie. Not “disputed.” Not “contradicted by some accounts.” A lie, told by a man with a documented history of lying, about a project run by his own people.

The document wasn’t hidden. Knowing what was in it, knowing who wrote it, knowing what Trump had said about it: this is the job. This is literally the job.