Republicans tell Trump to focus on issues, not "crowd sizes." Project 2025 shows that will backfire

Donald Trump beat Nikki Haley in the Republican primary by repeatedly calling her "birdbrain," and even driving home the insult by sending a birdcage and bird food to her hotel room. Yet she still wants to offer him advice on how to win the White House in November.

"I want this campaign to win," the former governor of South Carolina told Fox News Tuesday. She begged Trump to "quit whining" about Vice President Kamala Harris and instead "focus" on what she believes voters care about, policy. "The campaign is not going to win talking about crowd sizes. It’s not going to win talking about what race Kamala Harris is. It’s not going to win talking about whether she is dumb," Haley told Fox host Bret Baier. She added that the campaign "needs to focus."

Trump won't listen to a woman, of course, but Haley is speaking for a larger crowd of Republicans who are anxious that their candidate's odious personality will lose this election for them. Reports from across Capitol Hill quote GOP advisors and officials from all corners begging Trump to stop fantasizing about President Joe Biden rejoining the race or falsely claiming crowds at Harris rallies are AI-generated. Fox News pundits like Sean Hannity and even Jesse Watters are imploring Trump to stop "talking about [the] nationality or background" of his opponent and tell himself "it's not about her, it's about her policies."

All that is unlikely to happen.

The New York Times reported over the weekend that Trump told "rattled donors" he thinks "I was right" to mock Harris for being biracial. He shrugged off concerns about his gutter-style politics, saying, "I am who I am." Certainly, the Harris campaign is only too happy to let Trump continue confirming their accusation that he's "old and quite weird." But Republicans may be overly optimistic that a pivot-to-policy approach would do much better for Trump. If there's anything the majority of Americans hate more than Trump's vile personality, it's his policy agenda.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

We can see this in the reaction to Project 2025, which was set up to be a substitute for the usual policy arm and transition team that a presidential campaign would employ, with a separate website and funding from the campaign itself. It was structured this way because it wasn't too long ago that Republicans understood that voters hate their policies. The goal was for donors and advocates to know about Project 2025, but not most voters. The strategy backfired, however. The secretive nature of the project drew more journalists and public attention since people love uncovering hidden information. Soon far more people were talking about Project 2025 than would have ever spoken about an official Trump agenda.

Polling shows at least 7 out of 10 Americans now say they've heard of Project 2025 and they do not like it. Just based on the name, 43% of Americans oppose the program, and only 11% say they favor it, with the rest saying they don't know enough to decide. When respondents are asked about specific policy items in Project 2025, disapproval soars even higher, pollsters at the University of Massachusetts Amherst found:

Facing these numbers, the Trump campaign panicked, forcing the head of Project 2025 to resign and pretending the initiative was "disbanded." It's all a lie, of course. The people who put it together are still doing the work and secretively collaborating with the Trump campaign, even without the official banner of "Project 2025." As Sabrina Haake pointed out for Salon, the first phase of the plan is already in action, due to multiple far-right decisions by the Supreme Court. Over the weekend, ProPublica leaked training videos developed by Project 2025 to prepare Trump's potential appointments on how to get away with breaking the law if he gets into office. Photos of Trump hanging out with Kevin Roberts, a Project 2025 leader he claimed not to know, were also leaked.

Roberts was also set to publish a book this fall that is a shorter, more readable version of the Project 2025 playbook, complete with a foreword by Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. Realizing the last thing Trump needs is for more information about his policies to be in the hands of the voting public, Roberts delayed the release of "Dawn's Early Light" until after the election, but Media Matters got their hands on a galley copy anyway.

It's easy to see why Trump worries about people learning his policy positions. Roberts denounces contraception because it "made having a child seem like an optional and not natural result of having sex." He denies that workers have a right to unionize and demands the public school system be gutted. He even comes out against dog parks, echoing Vance's weird complaint about "childless cat ladies," positing that people get pets instead of having children.

Trump and Vance's strategy to hide these unpopular views is to lie about them. Lying has worked well for Trump in the past, so one can see why he thinks it would work. But he and Vance keep letting their true views leak out during interviews. When Vance is asked about his "childless cat lady" remarks, he can't help but let slip his belief that child-bearing should be compulsory. Trump insists he won't sign a national abortion ban (he would), but, in his babbling way, let on to reporters that he's fine with the Project 2025 scheme to create a back door ban by forcing the FDA to repeal approval of abortion medications. Even in the pseudo-interview Trump did with Elon Musk on Monday, the few times Trump mentioned policy views, they were unpopular, like his suggestions that employers should fire workers for joining unions and that nothing should be done to slow climate change.

Trump doesn't talk about policy because it bores him and he will never take the time to learn enough about it to say anything meaningful about it. Project 2025 was set up precisely because Trump doesn't care about such things, and will delegate all those decisions to the wild-eyed fanatics who populate the conservative activist world in the MAGA era. When Republicans beg him to talk about "the issues," the best they can hope for is that he will offer incoherent non-answers like "we're going to look into that" and "we'll have a policy in two weeks," or his other strategies to pretend he has answers while avoiding any actual details. But he'll get bored with that, inevitably. So there's almost no chance he doesn't return to his favorite well: being a loudmouthed, racist weirdo.