This week in stupid

• Donald Trump Jr. called to “abolish” the FBI, CIA, and IRS.

This week in scary

• Fox’s Sean Hannity said Democrats will “play dirty” in “this election.”
• Fox’s Greg Gutfeld said Democrats will try to win the election with “shenanigans” and a “little funny business.”
• Trump “meme team” ally Brenden Dilley urged followers to “be guarding every mail-in drop box.”

Excuse me?

• The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles: “There is no such thing, for all practical purposes, as right-wing extremism in America.”
• In trying to defend Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes from Jordan Peterson, Candace Owens discussed how many Jews are in the Biden administration.
• Newsmax’s Sebastian Gorka on Vice President Kamala Harris: “She’s a DEI hire. She’s a woman. She’s colored.”

This week in Project 2025

For Media Matters’ complete coverage on Project 2025, please visit this section of our website.

• In 2022, Donald Trump praised Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who oversees Project 2025: “He’s going to be so incredible.”
• Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official and the director of Project 2025, told a right-wing podcast last year that his group has a “great” relationship with Donald Trump and “Trump’s very bought in with this.”
• Trump has claimed that he has “nothing to do with” Project 2025, but the initiative’s inner circle has a closely linked history to Trump and his previous administration.
• Project 2025 partners are laying the foundation for Donald Trump to ignore congressional spending in a major power grab.
• Project 2025 partners are trying to woo Black voters to the Republican Party, and some have used misinformation to argue that they’ll be better served by GOP policies than Democratic approaches, such as school choice and voter ID laws.
• Project 2025 lays out a legislative proposal that would upend Medicare as we know it, pushing seniors onto privately run Medicare Advantage plans instead of traditional Medicare.

After the GOP platform was revealed, Project 2025 partners and anti-abortion groups signal continued support for criminalizing abortion

On Monday, the Republican National Committee adopted a platform proposed by Donald Trump that changed language regarding abortion, removing calls for various forms of national abortion bans. Some of the partners of Project 2025 have split on the platform shift, but it is clear that the end goal of all parties involved remains the same— a national ban on abortion and federal recognition of “fetal personhood.” 

Just this past March, a majority of House Republicans endorsed a 15-week national abortion ban with zero exceptions. With personhood statutes and case law increasingly gathering strength across Republican states, the new platform language still tacitly recognizes this extremist end goal of the party. Additionally, the RNC platform committee is dominated by individuals whose organizations helped draft the Project 2025 blueprint, which advocated for, among other things, extreme rollbacks of reproductive rights and access to reproductive health.

Much of the strategy of Trump and right-wing media around abortion has been to obfuscate and downplay their position and policy goals as they reckon with the unpopularity of their abortion agenda. Mainstream media outlets shouldn’t lend them a hand.

Project 2025 would roll back protections for overtime pay — a longtime right-wing media priority

Right-wing media have long railed against rules requiring corporations to pay overtime workers for work done in excess of regular working hours. Project 2025 reflects this fixation, pushing for regulations and laws that would roll back overtime pay requirements — a move that’s wildly out of step with the sentiment of the American people.

The radical anti-labor agenda from Project 2025 calls for allowing employers to eviscerate overtime regulations and potentially withhold pay. One proposal is to allow workers to take vacation instead of time-and-a-half compensation (at least 40 percent of lower- and middle-income workers already don’t use their allotted pay time off) while another proposal would effectively incentivize predatory scheduling to coerce workers to give up overtime.

Right-wing media are again complaining about the Democratic administration’s efforts to protect overtime guarantees. Project 2025 would only enshrine that they get their way — no matter how many Americans disagree.

Project 2025’s plan for the economy would benefit the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us

The economic policy provisions outlined by Project 2025 are overwhelmingly catered toward benefiting wealthier Americans and corporate interests at the expense of average workers and taxpayers. The extremist staffing plan prioritizes redoubling Republican efforts to expand “trickle down” tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation across the economy. The authors of the policy book also recommend putting key government agencies responsible for oversight of large sectors of the economy under direct right-wing political control and empowering those agencies to prioritize right-wing agendas in dealing with everything from consumer protections to organized labor activity.

You can find the horrifying laundry list of consequences as a result of Project 2025 proposals here, but they include: increasing student loan costs; strangling the IRS’ budget; chilling labor unions’s ability to engage in political activity; making it easier for employers to classifying workers as “independent contractors”; and institutionalizing the “Judeo-Christian tradition” of the Sabbath.

In case you missed it

• Right-wing media figures have spent years attacking Vice President Kamala Harris with unfounded claims that she is a “DEI hire,” assertions that she is uneducated or sounds intoxicated, or other racist and sexist attacks.
• Only 4 percent of national TV news segments about Hurricane Beryl mentioned climate change.
• On July 11, the June Consumer Price Index report showed that headline inflation declined overall for the first time since May 2020. Fox & Friends spun this overwhelmingly positive inflation report as potentially bad news for the Biden administration. 
• Media Matters’ Matt Gertz wrote this great piece arguing that the most important story about Trump’s incipient pick for his vice presidential running mate is the reason he needs to replace Mike Pence.
• Fox News and broadcast news largely ignored Donald Trump promoting the prosecution of his political enemies on social media.
• Right-wing media figures are praising Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters’ mandate that the state’s public schools teach the Bible, including declaring that the government needs to “impose Christian values on the pagans” and encouraging other states to follow Walters’ lead. Walters also praised right-wing media figures as among “the best minds” to develop the “best history standards in the country.” Recently, he announced that a number of people — many of them key figures in right-wing media — would be rewriting the social studies curriculum in the state. We compiled this fantastic guide to these figures. 
• Right-wing media are recycling an election conspiracy theory, claiming that noncitizens are widely voting in elections. But it has long been illegal for noncitizens to make a false claim of citizenship on a voter registration form or to vote in federal elections.
• Former Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, now a candidate for U.S. Senate, is scheduled to attend a July 14 fundraiser with political commentator Rick Santorum, who has spent decades likening abortion to slavery.