Campaign official for the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris acknowledged Wednesday that the vice president is deliberately misleading voters about Project 2025.
CNN first reported the stunning admission as part of a fact-checking article accusing Harris of making false claims about Project 2025 and former president Donald TrumpSocial Security position. CNN's Daniel Dale revealed:
A Harris campaign official said the campaign “has made a deliberate decision to brand all of Trump's policies” as “Project 2025” because they believe it “has stuck with voters.”
Since entering the presidential race on Sunday, Harris and his campaign have repeatedly tried to link Project 2025 to Trump, despite the former president's pushback.
Hours before CNN published its fact-checking story on Wednesday, Trump called links to Project 2025 “Just misinformation put forth by radical leftist Democrat thugs. Don't believe them!”
Launched by The Heritage Foundation two years ago, The 2025 project has grown to a coalition of 110 conservative organizations developing a transition plan for the next presidential administration. Their work is nonpartisan and available to whoever occupies the White House in January 2025.
The CNN report is the first public admission by Democrats or the Harris campaign that their strategy is to deliberately mislead voters about Trump.
His attacks on Project 2025 escalated after that President Joe BidenThe performance of the June 27 debate, widely criticized. In response, several liberal outlets have published fact-checking articles disputing Biden's claims, and now Harris's.
CNN, for example, looked into Harris' comments at his first campaign rally Tuesday about Project 2025:
When you read it, you will see that Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare. He intends to give tax breaks to billionaires and large corporations and make working families foot the bill. They intend to end the Affordable Care Act. And to return us, then, to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with pre-existing conditions.
After reviewing the “Leadership Mandate,” the policy book of Project 2025, CNN concluded:
One of Harris' claims about Project 2025 is false, while another is at least misleading. The Project 2025 document does not show that Trump intends to cut Social Security; the document barely mentions Social Security and does not propose cuts to the program. Also, contrary to Harris' suggestion, Project 2025 does not call for “ending” the Affordable Care Act or removing its protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
Another fact-checking article, published Wednesday by VERIFY, a website dedicated to stopping the spread of false information, debunked a myth that Project 2025 called for the elimination of Individualized Education Plans, commonly known as IEPs.
“Neither Project 2025 nor The Heritage Foundation has specifically called for IEPs to be eliminated,” authors Megan Loe and Kelly Jones wrote. “IEPs are nowhere mentioned in 'Leadership Mandate: A Conservative Promise,' which outlines the plan for Project 2025.”
Earlier, a USA Today fact-check article called the Democrats' claim that “Project 2025 is a Trump plan” false.
Project 2025 is a political playbook created by the Heritage Foundation and dozens of other conservative groups, not Trump, who has said he disagrees with elements of the effort.
Despite these and other fact-checking articles, the Harris campaign and the Democratic National Committee continued to make false claims about Project 2025 as of the publication of this Daily Signal story. To combat misinformation, The 2025 project has been debunked the most prominent myths.