‘The Blueprint for a Fascist Regime’ (VIDEO)

The cohosts of daytime TV’s most political hour followed suit of their late-night counterparts by turning their attention to “Project 2025,” the far-right agenda created by the Heritage Foundation (with ties to over 200 of Donald Trump’s political allies) that has had Democrats sounding the alarm for its deleterious impacts on democracy. On Friday’s (July 12) edition of The View, cohosts Joy Behar, Sara Haines, Ana Navarro, Sunny Hostin, and Alyssa Farah Griffin all shared what they think audiences should know about the 900-page screed.

“It’s a far-right plan for destroying democracy that Trump’s team wants to implement on day one,” Behar said. “Let me count the ways: They want to ban abortion, starve schoolchildren — eliminating breakfast and lunch for school kids… They want to have mass deportations of immigrants. They want to gut healthcare. This is all just for starters, okay, and this is part of their platform. It was co-written by Trump minions like Peter Navarro, another convicted felon.”

“No relation!” Ana Navarro interrupted, drawing a laugh from the live audience.

“Also this guy, the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, who wants you to accept your fate or else,” Behar continued. “And if you think they won’t do it, just think about the Supreme Court. They just said that Trump has immunity. They’re dismantling a lot of stuff about the environment already. God knows what else they’re going to come up with… So don’t think that this won’t happen. It’s the blueprint for a fascist regime.”

Behar then invited her co-hosts to chime in, and it was Hostin who jumped in first. After some crosstalk banter about how Trump possibly hasn’t read the entire document since it’s 900 pages long, Hostin said that the part of this story that disturbs her most is that while Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, “CNN found that nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and ties to Trump. Many of them worked in his in his administration.”

After playing footage of a 2022 appearance by Trump at a Heritage Foundation dinner in which he said the group would “lay the groundwork in detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America,” Hostin said, “He knows exactly what it’s about.”

Griffin, the resident conservative on the panel, said what was “frustrating” to her is “it’s not a conservative policy document at all.”

“The Heritage Foundation was once the premier policy institute for conservative policy. Now it’s become this nationalist, populist fever dream. Shame on Kevin Roberts,” she added. “I just saw a stat that Google searches for ‘Project 2025’ have outpaced the NFL and Taylor Swift because people are tuning in. The thing I’ve warned about in this is that there’s an executive order Trump already had in place that basically would eliminate civil servants. It would change all civil servants, like a Dr. Fauci, subject matter experts into political appointees, meaning he gets to choose them. They’re loyal to him, and he can fire them at will. So when you’re thinking about things like natural disasters, terrorist attacks, pandemics, you’re not going to have the most qualified people. You’re not going to have nonpartisan people who just want to serve the public. You’re going to have the loyalists he put there. That, to me, is the scariest part.”

Haines then warned about the Heritage Foundation’s prior successes with getting their agendas achieved during the prior Trump Administration, saying, “Heritage Foundation created a mandate for leadership in 2015 and two years later, two years into the Trump presidency, they had accomplished 64 percent of what was laid out in that mandate.” She then went on to say that it was the attack on reproductive freedoms that scared her most.

“One of the things that scared me was dismantling the Department of Education,” Hostin then added.

“I’ll tell you the one that should scare the hell out of Republicans,” Navarro then said. “They’re criminalizing pornography,” drawing applause and laughter from the crowd.

“You know what else I think is also very scary is that they want to end birthright citizenship, which is just fundamentals of this country,” Hostin continued. “So you’re born here in the United States, but you’re not a citizen. They want to raise the price of prescription drugs, and they want to end the Affordable Care Act.”

“And raise taxes on the middle class while billionaires are getting tax cuts!” Behar added. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

TRUMP DENIES TIES TO ‘PROJECT 2025’: As former Pres. Trump attempts to distance himself from a sweeping plan to overhaul the federal government titled ‘Project 2025,’ #TheView co-hosts take a look if his own words tell a different story. pic.twitter.com/9piaVVs3Yl

— The View (@TheView) July 12, 2024

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