Yes, RFK Jr. and Charles Eisenstein were 1000% WRONG about Trump and Project 2025 (i.e., his Entire Agenda)
Why do you ask? Were the stakes high or something?
During the critical, crucial, crucible, crux of the past presidential election—just weeks before Election Day—RFK Jr. and Charles Eisenstein were doing everything they could to reassure their many, impressionable followers that voting for Donald Trump was an acceptable choice; in fact was the best choice.
“Another Democratic administration” would be ‘catastrophic,’ Eisenstein wrote to his audience.
Well, folks, you’ll NEVER GUESS what happened next…
Before the Election, (i.e. When It Mattered), RFK Jr. and Eisenstein PROMISED their Followers that Trump Would NOT Do Project 2025.
“Trump tooooooold us he doesn’t even know that Project 2025 guy,” they said.
They were 1000% WRONG.
In his latest essay, “Seabed Mining, Health Mining, and Health/Enviro Unity,” Charles Eisenstein writes, “I was on the scene as Kennedy’s advisor and speechwriter during his presidential campaign.”
In the essay, Charles asserts that the campaign that he and RFK Jr. ran, and the work their movement did to get their followers to Vote Trump, indeed, had the effect of electing Donald Trump.
Eisenstein writes,
“Under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., this [MAHA—Make America Healthy Again] movement was instrumental in getting Donald Trump elected, though Kennedy is having a significant influence on healthcare policy.”
Perhaps the fuzziness, self-conflict, and pretzeling in Charles’s thinking is reflected in the awkward writing and stilted grammar in his sentence above. The second part doesn’t quite relate to the first. ‘Though Kennedy’ what? He never says. The immediately following sentence is,
“However, in other areas the Trump administration is implementing policies, especially environmental policies, that contradict the MAHA mission.”
Oh, ya think?
But let’s keep it real. I mean, Job One of the MAHA mission was to ELECT Donald Fucking Trump, am I right?
So? …
Heckuva a job, Kennedy?
Now, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a whole ball of wax who has been covered powerfully by Rachel Maddow, John Oliver, Lawrence O’Donnell, and many others…
… so I will focus the rest of this on a proclamation in one of Charles’s pre-election polemics that worked harder than a duck underwater to normalize Trump, and thereby, a vote for Trump, even as Trump and his minions were holding Reich-curious Rallies at Madison Square Garden.
Two months before Election Day, in an essay titled, “Shades of Many Colors,” Eisenstein wrote,
“Few people today have been more caricaturized than Donald Trump. I hate to disappoint any of my readers who demonize or lionize the man, but, having at this point something of a backstage pass, I can tell you that neither pole stands anywhere near the truth. It is almost impossible to see the real man through the fog of today’s information war.”
This paragraph above gets into the strain of Charles’s rhetoric that I describe as “epistemological nihilism.”
Despite four years as president, how can we really know or say anything about that mysterious cosmic process we, in our inadequate language, call “Donald John Trump.”
Likewise in Eisenstein’s oeuvre, how can we really tell conspiracy from myth; Sith from Jedi; fact from fantasy; expertise from intuition; Left-wing from Right-wing?
Apparently, the “fog of today’s information war” means that no one can know anything, …
… but also, let me tell you what I know about Trump from being backstage with Bobby…
Before the election, Eisenstein assured his readers and followers about Trump.
He made pains to soothe any anxieties or trepidation they might have about Voting Trump.
“[Trump] is not a strategic genius out-maneuvering the deep state in a match of 4D chess. Nor is he a Mussolini figure, a bigoted fascist marshaling resurgent far-right forces to elevate him into dictatorial power. He is not even particularly right-wing.”
“He is not even particularly right wing,” wrote Charles, just as his impressionable, fawning followers were weighing their vote in the final weeks before Election 2024.
And, plus, Trump has been changed by his brush with death, Charles revealed.
“From what I can see, Trump has changed a lot since he was last in office.”
(To be fair, Charles does not specify here for better or worse; lol!)
Then, in the CRITICAL PASSAGE that is the central topic of this post, Eisenstein cited the Most Pathological Liar in the History of Politics as if he were a credible source that his followers should uncritically trust.
Despite Donald Trump being the same dude who, according to the Washington Post, told 30,573 LIES while in office, or an average of 20 per day, Charles exhorted his followers to TRUST DONALD’S GOOD WORD.
Yes, Trump truly is the kind of gent with whom one can do business on a handshake.
When it Mattered Most, RFK Jr. and Eisenstein went to bat for Trump.
They vouched for him, claiming inside insight.
Charles announced that ‘Bobby Told Me Trump WON’T DO Project 2025. Trump doesn’t know that guy. Trust Me.’
To be precise, Eisenstein wrote:
“Kennedy described to me a conversation he had with Trump about Project 2025, promulgated by the Heritage Foundation as a program for a conservative makeover1 of the United States. It has been widely associated with the Trump campaign, but when Kennedy asked him about it he said, ‘That thing? I didn’t even know about it until people started to complain. It was written by some right-wing asshole. There’s something crazy on every page. We’re not going to do any of that stuff.’”
“WE’RE NOT GOING TO DO ANY OF THAT STUFF,” Eisenstein said that Bobby said that Trump said.
(Were they right about that? See below to find out!)
Charles continued,
“I can share this anecdote because RFK Jr. has shared it publicly. There are many other anecdotes I cannot share without breaching personal confidences, but they confirm my long-standing belief that Donald Trump has been made into much worse and (much better) than he really is.”
Wait; what?
See what he did there?
Eisenstein claims, pre-election, that, were it not for keeping confidences, he could share many anecdotes which would confirm that “Trump has been made into much worse… than he really is.”
But he also can’t resist adding that “and much better” at the very end.
Charles confides to us that he has multiple backstage anecdotes that reveal Trump to clearly be both much better and much worse that he has been portrayed. Simultaneously.
Hello, Epistemological Nihilism, my old friend.
Trump truly is the Uncertainty Principle of politicians. A “cipher,” says Charles.
The cat in Schrödinger’s Box is neither alive nor dead. (But, if dead, Trump will blame immigrants.)
Eisenstein’s “Shades of Many Colors” essay rumbles on, coughing up billowing clouds of fantasy such as, electing Donald Trump could “heal… divisions.”
“That opportunity is not up to him. It is up to us, and we can choose it by cutting through the demonization and the valorization both to see the man beneath the Trump.”
If nothing is ultimately grounded in reality, or even probability, then yeah, I suppose that sounds as plausible as anything else? (eye roll emoji)
So, finally, after all that set up, we are, at last, prepared to ask the Key Question:
Were RFK Jr. and Charles Eisenstein correct when they assured their MAHA followers that Trump 2.0 would have NOTHING TO DO with Project 2025? (Potentially swinging the election?)
Reader, as you have guessed, they were not.
“THE PROJECT 2025 PRESIDENCY”
Below are some quotes from a recent article, “The Project 2025 Presidency,” published in The Atlantic by David A. Graham.
Also below is a Show-and-Tell of other tweets that lay out the (frankly predictable) reality… about the Trump–Musk–Stephen Miller–MAGA Regime’s blitzkrieg IMPLEMENTATION of Project 2025.
From David A. Graham in The Atlantic:
Describing the gathering that seeded the Project 2025 road map, Graham writes,
“Policy thinkers” were convened “from across the full sweep of the American right to write an aspirational agenda for the next Republican president.
The contributors [who were] gathered believed that the Christian, right-wing nation they desired could come about only if Republicans stopped doing politics the way they always had and refused to accept the structure of the executive branch as it existed. They also understood that the faster a new president moved, the more he’d be able to achieve as the courts, Congress, and civil society struggled to keep up.”
Hmmmmmnn. So extremist RightWingRepublicans are saying themselves that they have “stopped doing politics the way they always had.”
Well, that certainly sounds EXACTLY LIKE the Ruthlessness Gap analysis I’ve been ranting about since coining the term 15 years ago.
“The blueprint they produced for achieving that was Project 2025.
The agenda was endlessly dissected by the press and Democrats during the election, leading Trump to angrily distance himself from it.
Heritage forced Dans out in July 2024 as a sacrificial gesture. Yet these ideas have been key to the head-spinning first three months of the Trump administration, and they offer the best indications of where Trump’s attention will land next.”
—David Graham
David Graham continues:
“Many of the most shocking moments of the Trump presidency so far have actually come from less prominent ideas buried across Project 2025’s 922 pages. It foretold the sacking of top generals (see, for example, C. Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), branding these officials as ‘Barack Obama’s general officer corps’ (page 88), and it said military officers had ‘been advanced by prior Administrations for reasons other than their warfighting prowess’ (page 104). The repeal of Temporary Protected Status for people from Venezuela, and the targeting of academia by slashing student visas? Those are in there, too (pages 145 and 141).”
“An obsessive focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs appears throughout Project 2025; that has become a recurring theme of the Trump presidency, leading to the removal of certain webpages about Black winners of combat medals and the purging of references to the Enola Gay, the atomic bomber whose name suddenly made it vulnerable to keyword-search deletion. Trump's attempts to fire agency officials, in defiance of the law, reflect a conviction by Project 2025’s architects that any restrictions on the president's hiring and firing powers inside the executive branch are unconstitutional.”
—David Graham
And here we have Congressman Greg Landsman with a list, enumerating the ways RFK Jr. was 1000% wrong (or lying? or careless enough to not care at all?) about Trump’s intention to implement Project 2025:
And another comment on Trump’s brazen implementation of Project 2025… “the media shrugged and here we are.”
If you think about it, Trump’s DENIAL of Project 2025, which, you’ll recall, was Absolutely Tanking in the polls as voters heard about it…
This was surely the Biggest and Most Consequential (and Most Obvious) Lie in the History of U.S. Presidential Campaigns.
And the press ate it up like Mikey finding Life cereal after intermittent fasting.
And the media printed Trump’s transparent lies, as if they meant a goddamn thing, on their front pages.
It reaaaaaally did not require Encyclopedia Brown to suss out that Trump was lying when he disavowed Project 2025.
So, who exactly are these Project 2025 jokers?
I mean, I come from Catholics who come from Catholics, and these Catholics scare me…
“The most surprising thing has been the pace of it: If you read Project 2025, a lot of what has transpired in the past three months was prefigured or suggested in there, but on a much more gradual timeline.”
—Matthew D. Taylor, senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, & Jewish Studies, and author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy. [From this article by Chauncey Devega.]
It is one thing to be wrong…
Hell, we all do it.
But it is another thing to be wrong about the Most Important Political Question of Our Time.
The Question that will decide whether our imperiled Multiracial Democracy—which, remember, is only 60-years-old—will limp along, for now, and, crucially, live to fight again another day, and for something much better.
Or… whether we might slide into an era of totalitarian lawlessness and billionaire-Titan-rule in which pursuing or organizing for a better world is greatly stifled, if not completely suppressed.
Like, for a thousand years, maybe. Who knows?
Interlude: EPISTEMOLOGICAL NIHILISM
This is what RFK Jr., and Bret Weinstein, and Charles Eisenstein, claim is happening, and, most importantly, try to CONVINCE their many followers is happening…
Meanwhile, back in Reality-Land, this is what is actually happening…
So, in conclusion, as we’ve seen, RFK Jr. and Charles Eisenstein were FLAT WRONG when they said Trump won’t implement Project 2025…
They misled their trusting MAHA followers.
Inestimable and historic damage to democracy itself has been done by RFK Jr., if, as Eisenstein states, their campaign, endorsement, and complicity tipped the election to Trump and the Republican Party.
But, hey; at least Charles was right when he assured us that President Trump is NOT “a Mussolini figure”?
Sadly, no.
Almost comically, no.
In just the first 100 days of Trump 2.0, as the tweets below note, it has already been shown that Eisenstein’s overconfidence ended up misleading his fawning followers about that too.
Look, I know my critique might sound harsh, but I truly feel the need to breach some bubbles of “Conspirituality,” Right-pilled, man-o-sphere, tech-bro, Intellectual Dark Web, Bannon-esque, Fox News, MAHA, nonsense and cult-ish-ness—before we lose our democracy irreparably.
Three more years of this assault on democracy, the Constitution, the Rule of Law, co-equal branches of government with checks and balances, and judicial review, is a long road. From the highest level of executive power, no less.
To RFK Jr., and Charles, and all those currently aligning with, or adjusting to, or apologizing for—to whatever degree—the Trump / MAGA Fascist Power Grab, I say again—we need you!
We need your heart and creativity back in the real world.
The world that understands the importance of Multiracial Democracy, for example. And why 500 years of North American and U.S. history make Multiracial Democracy especially important.
Eisenstein recently tweeted (above) that he does not understand
“how those who listen to moms instead of corporate-funded science are deemed fascists.”
I think I can break this down for you, Charles:
BY ALIGNING WITH FASCISTS.
That’s how.
If there is a Fascist Power Grab happening in my country called MAGA, the last place you will find me is voting for it, writing to normalize it, or standing with it in a movement called MAHA.
I mean, a “makeover” sounds kinda nice.
Here is the place for Charles to inform his readers of the nature, scope, and implications of Project 2025, and the most vivid description he feels like conjuring is “conservative makeover.” Yeah; I’ll say. To paraphrase George Orwell, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a ‘conservative makeover’ stepping on a human face—forever.”
THANK YOU DREW!!!