In 2004, actress Lindsay Lohan, then a teen megastar, appeared on MTV’s Total Request Live video countdown show. She had just broken up very publicly and messily with her boyfriend Wilmer Valderrama, who played the character “Fez” on the popular sitcom That 70s Show. Her shirt had a message: You were never my boyfriend, it read, resulting in a collective gasp from the audience. What a burn!
The public falling out between the Heritage Foundation and Donald Trump over Project 2025, a policy framework for a second Trump administration that takes extreme rightwing positions on democracy, education, the role of government, and LGBTQ+ rights, has followed a similar dramatic arc. After publishing their 900-page framework and shamelessly promoting their plans to “institutionalize Trumpism,” the Heritage Foundation found themselves in the awkward position of being publicly ghosted by the former president, who began to distance himself from the project as public scrutiny–and backlash–increased. Ultimately Trump disavowed the project after vacillating on whether or not he’d actually read it. The Heritage Foundation responded by sniping that the Project 2025 document isn’t linked to any political candidate and that its recommendations are nonpartisan. Because of the bad press for all parties, Project 2025 Director and former top Trump advisor Paul Dans stepped down and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts will delay the release of his Project 2025-fluffing book Dawn’s Early Light until after the election.
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Nobody thought Lindsay Lohan hadn’t actually dated Wilmer Valderrama, and nobody is buying the claim that Trump wasn’t Project 2025’s #1 guy. Journalists have highlighted the scores of people within Trump’s orbit who contributed to the project, many of whom would likely hold key positions in the administration if Trump wins in November. Critics have uncovered other damning links, notably JD Vance’s extensive ties to the Heritage Foundation, including his red meat foreword to Dawn’s Early Light.
The links between Donald Trump and the Heritage Foundation matter; journalists and other commentators are correct to highlight them. The overall scariness–and deep unpopularity–of the policy plans contained in Project 2025 also matter. Journalists and other commentators are correct to highlight that information as well. People need to know what is in the 2025 document and how it could upend American democracy and public life.
But there is another document that warrants similar scrutiny, one that Trump absolutely cannot disavow and which contains an even more direct promise–and threat–about what a second Trump administration would look like. That is the Republican Party Platform, Trump’s platform, unveiled at the Republican National Convention in July.
Compared to Project 2025, the Republican Platform might seem less extreme. But ultimately it’s saying the same demonological thing as Project 2025. Its efforts to frame its positions as mainstream common sense in fact makes it more insidious than Project 2025, reflecting the conclusion in our last post that cooler and calmer articulations of demonology are always the most rhetorically slippery–and the most dangerous.
Given these overlaps, Trump could bellow I DON’T KNOW HER–another early 2000s performative insult–every time the words “Project 2025” are uttered. And he could mean it. The specific relationship Trump does or does not have with the Heritage Foundation or Project 2025 has no bearing on the fact that the Republican Party has approved a policy agenda that rejects democratic pluralism in favor of a moral-apocalyptic minoritarianism centered on an imagined liberal threat. Even the best Project 2025 coverage misses that part of the story.
Common Sense, Or Else
At first glance, Project 2025 and the Republican Party Platform look like very different documents. Project 2025 is as professionally slick as it is tonally brutalist. The Republican Platform includes strange syntax, irregular capitalization, and an all-caps SHOUT LIST in the style of a Truth Social post. Despite these stylistic differences, the two proposals are steeped in the same anti-liberal demonology–even as the relative prominence of the frames differs in each.
To recap our last post, these frames are conspiracism, which accuses liberals of hidden nefarious schemes, anti- frames, which denounce vague categories of coded liberal threats, and pro- frames, which exalt categories aligned with traditional (read: conservative) values said to be under attack by liberals. Separately and together, these frames assert that the shapeshifting category of “liberal,” used synonymously with “the left” and the Democratic Party, is a threat to God, the family, conservatives, and America.
Project 2025 leads with its anti-. Its stated purpose is to “rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left,” which it blames early and often for “America’s decline.” Conspiracism is never far behind; even the bipartisan pushback against the project is framed as a leftist plot on the project website and by former project director Paul Dans, who described the “Left-wing smears” of Project 2025 as “probably the greatest misinformation campaign since the Russia hoax.” (“Russia hoax” refers to the federal investigation into alleged collusion between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign.) Project 2025 uses pro- frames as well, though they very quickly yield to anti-. For example, its harsh anti-trans language is teed up by pro-family, pro-parent, and pro-child rhetoric (P25, p. 5).
The Republican Platform, in contrast, uses pro- frames much more pointedly, centered around a litany of “core” values of American truth and justice. It also appeals to “common sense,” repeating the phrase “Common sense tells us clearly” multiple times in the preamble. By focusing on allegedly self-evident truths, the Platform establishes a boundary between “good” Americans and the bad Americans (“But are they even Americans then?” the Platform implicitly asks) who have no sense.
For readers who were around for–or otherwise are students of–1994’s Republican Revolution, which saw a dramatic restructure of political power favoring Republicans, this language might sound familiar. It echoes the spirit and some of the exact language included in the Christian Coalition’s “Contract with the American Family,” which served as a companion piece to the “Contract with America,” the Republicans’ legislative agenda presented in the run-up to the ’94 midterms.
Both contracts emphasize “common sense” proposals that claim to be nonpartisan affirmations of shared American values. What they offer instead is a masterclass in demonology. As we explain in The Shadow Gospel, each of the pro- frames contained in the “Contract with the American Family” are thinly-veiled anti- claims that very easily dovetail into conspiracism. For example, the Contract’s pro-family, pro-parent, and pro-child support for local control of education can be demonologically decoded as the claim that “traditional values taught in the home are under attack by liberals in government and teachers’ unions that support teaching gay rights and sex ed in the classroom” (SG, ch. 4). This line of attack fed directly into conspiratorial fervor around the “gay agenda,” which during the early 1990s became a go-to Christian Right talking point against the alleged “indoctrination” of children in American schools. The “gay agenda” wasn’t directly discussed in the Contract itself, but it helped normalize and institutionalize the link between professed support for (a very narrow framing of) families, parents, and children and a rampant, paranoid style of hom*ophobia–all in the name of “common sense.”
The 2024 Republican Platform plays a similar game. It focuses on cultivating “great schools,” promoting “knowledge and skills” and championing parents’ rights. The pro- veneer might be thicker than in Project 2025, but it can’t hide what’s underneath: the plank “Knowledge and Skills” includes the assurance “Not CRT and Gender Indoctrination.” The Platform also calls for defunding teachers and school districts that engage in “inappropriate political indoctrination,” butting up against the same conspiracism that animates the cultural pugilism of Project 2025, particularly its calls to end the “toxic normalization of transgenderism” (P25, p. 1). Similar claims about the queer dangers allegedly lurking in schools–even when the classroom materials under question didn’t include gay and lesbian themes–were central to the beige-toned bipartisan posturing of the Contract with the American Family.
Moderation, Not Centrism
A similar demonological analysis could be done for other issues addressed by the Republican Platform and Project 2025, including crime, the environment, and immigration. And yet very little attention has been given to the overlap between the two documents. The Platform itself has received minimal coverage. News and other analysis of a possible second Trump term have instead focused on Project 2025.
This omission is understandable; it’s simply not obvious that the documents should be read and decoded side by side. The Trump camp’s efforts to distance itself from Project 2025 is one basic reason why. But there is another more subtle reason, and that is the successful effort on the part of the Trump campaign to moderate its message. Most notably, the campaign cut Platform language regarding a federal abortion ban and even removed anti-abortion activists from the Platform committee, frustrating many rightwing, and particularly Evangelical, Trump supporters. The campaign similarly excised from the Platform opposition to same sex marriage. Both positions have been mainstays of Republican politics for decades. Both positions also happen to be incredibly unpopular with voters.
This is a form of moderation. But it is not a form of centrism. The removal of abortion ban language and same-sex marriage from the party Platform shifts the demonological frames but not the underlying anti-liberal message.
Consider the “softening” of the Republican stance on abortion. Focusing on what was taken away–calls for a federal abortion ban, the Holy Grail of the religious right–obscures where the demonology was redirected: to the family, like a blast from the 1990s past (which itself was a blast to the 1950s past-that-never-was). Tellingly, women are barely acknowledged in the revised Platform, save for brief mentions in an anti-trans context of “protecting women and girls” (an opaque claim that likely refers to the alleged risks posed by trans or genderfluid people in women-only spaces) and “keeping men out of women’s sports,” as well as concerns over the “anti-Christian bias” said to threaten men and women of (one particular) faith. Otherwise, women are described only in terms of motherhood, helping explain the demonological method to the weirdness of JD Vance’s preoccupation with families and having children.
The Platform’s removal of language opposing same sex marriage reflects a similar demonological redirect. That specific anti- is gone, but accelerated phobias, particularly transphobia, fuel family-focused concerns about LGBTQ “indoctrination” in education, dovetailing with its stance against gender-affirming care, framed by a section header that reads “Republicans Will End Left-wing Gender Insanity.” Compared to Project 2025, the Platform keeps its claims that “queer people are bad” to a minimum. But it makes up the difference in its insistence that the family is good–and that Republicans are the only ones who can protect it.
Moderate conservatives who encounter such ideas would likely stop short of a full-blown demonological conclusion: that our families and children need protection from the liberal devil (who full-blown demonologists might believe is actually Satan). But this is the rhetorical sophistication of the pro- frame: by not saying what they are saying, pro- messages are able to bring more people along, or at the very least, are able to soothe their concerns. Who doesn’t want to side with common sense?
Journalists and other critics miss this sleight of hand, and in fact risk reinforcing it, when they highlight the apparent compromise and moderation reflected in the Platform revision. In the game of “normal” politics (and by that we mean non-demonological politics, though we argue in the book that demonology has become its own stealthy political norm in the US), moderating a platform has meant actually tempering what is being proposed, with the goal of appealing to the widest possible swath of the electorate. That’s not what the Trump campaign is doing. By foregrounding ideas that don’t sound too objectionable, certainly in comparison to the anti-liberal howls emanating from Project 2025, the campaign has made it more difficult for voters to understand what their platform is advocating.
It should go without saying: voters need and deserve to know what’s actually on the ballot in 2024. Hiding anti-liberal demonology in “common sense” ideas like the family and parents’ rights is a subtle and extremely effective way of ensuring that they can’t–which is all the more reason to emphasize what is hiding in plain sight.
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