Last week, House Democrats launched a task force to counter Project 2025, a blueprint put together by conservative groups for President Trump's presidency if he wins in November. Led by the Heritage Foundation and supported by more than 100 right-wing organizations, this far-right tome is a terrifying road map for destroying checks and balances, creating new authoritarian powers for the president, and empowering political appointees to Christianize the federal government.
Rather than addressing the substance of the lawmakers' concerns, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Society, called them “unserious and misleading.” He accused Democrats of using taxpayer funds to ” wage a smear campaign against a united effort to restore self-governance to ordinary Americans.”
These policies are deeply unpopular with voters.
It is a bold deception that Roberts describes the goal of Project 2025 as restoring “self-government.” When it comes to reproductive freedom, for example, Project 2025 wants a government that bans abortion pills, limits access to contraception, and gives Christian conservatives broad powers to impose their beliefs on others.
But as Roberts's deception suggests, these policies are deeply unpopular with voters, so Trump and the Republican Party are desperately trying to downplay the strong opposition to reproductive freedom among their extremist base and hide their true intentions from other voters. This duplicity is not only aimed at swing and independent voters who may not realize that Trump's attempts to “moderate” abortion are deliberately confusing their true intentions; it is also aimed at keeping many Republicans who may hold less extreme views in the dark.
Even Fox News is shielding its viewers from Republican attacks on IVF and birth control. According to a new report by the watchdog group Media Matters, the network spent just two minutes discussing the Southern Baptist Convention's approval of a resolution condemning IVF, a fleeting report that prompted former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway to assert that Trump supports IVF and that “so does every Republican senator running this year.” Yet within about an hour of Conway's assertion, all but two Senate Republicans had blocked a Democratic bill that would have protected access to IVF. Media Matters reports that Fox News was silent about the proposal and the Republicans' killing of the bill.
This is part of a pattern for Fox News: The network spent just three minutes reporting on a similar Republican filibuster earlier this month blocking a Democratic bill to protect access to contraception, and has given little or no coverage at all to various Republican state efforts to restrict abortion or contraception.
But while Fox News was downplaying the IVF bill of rights last week, leaders of the Christian right were rallying their supporters to oppose any attempt to defend reproductive freedom. For example, FRC Action, the political arm of the Family Research Council, called on its supporters to oppose the IVF bill of rights. The organization described the bill as part of Democrats' “unnecessary crusade to defend IVF (which is under threat in the United States)” and argued that it could lead to a range of horrific acts, including human cloning and “human-animal chimeras and other forms of human embryo experimentation.” Students for Life denounced the bill as a “eugenics bill,” and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America called it “laissez-faire for the fertility industry.”
It's now clear that the Republican Party's 2024 strategy relies on evasions and whitewashing about the right's ambitions to restrict reproductive freedom.
The contrast between the Fox News ban and the Christian Right's moral panic shows how worried Republicans are about the American public learning about the radical policies of the Christian Right. Republicans know that the majority of Americans accept contraception and IVF as a given part of everyday life. A recent Gallup poll found that IVF is one of the “most morally acceptable practices in America,” with 82% of Americans saying it is “morally acceptable,” second only to contraception at 90%.
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That's why Republicans and their Christian Right allies are trying to get their core supporters to forget about their friends and family who have joyfully become parents through IVF. Instead, they are trying to focus their attention on the possibility of an embryo being destroyed, rather than its potential to bring a child into a loving family life, as part of a long-running campaign to give the embryo the status of a “person” with constitutional rights.
Trump boasts of his central role in appointing the Supreme Court justices that sealed the end of Roe v. Wade. At the same time, Trump and his allies are trying to hide the results. They are doing everything they can to satisfy their base of radical believers, while fooling everyone else into believing that Trump and the Republican Party’s views are no different from those of most Americans. It is now clear that the Republican 2024 strategy relies on evasions and whitewashing about the right’s ambitions to restrict reproductive freedom. The claim that Project 2025 envisions a Republican plan for American “self-government” is yet another rhetorical bait-and-switch in this cynical misleading campaign.
