PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — The think tank behind Project 2025, the conservative blueprint linked to President-elect Donald Trump, is launching an effort to back Trump's imperiled selection for secretary of defense in its latest attempt to wield influence in the incoming Republican administration.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said Thursday that his group will spend $1 million to pressure senators unwilling to back Pete Hegseth, whose nomination to lead the Pentagon has come into question due to his views on women serving in combat and reports about his personal behavior. A number of Republican senators have declined to commit to backing Hegseth or have asked for more information about his drinking and treatment of women.
“It’ll be messaging right now with their constituents about how out of step they are with the Trump agenda,” Roberts said in an interview, who argued that criticism of Hegseth was being driven by “the establishment.”
Roberts’ announcement that he will support Hegseth is the latest sign that Project 2025, which Trump disavowed amid Democratic criticism during his campaign, is newly ascendant as Trump returns to the White House. The president-elect has picked several of its authors and contributors to key positions.
Roberts spoke to The Associated Press during an event at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, after he said he saw Trump at another event Wednesday also attended by other incoming members of the president-elect’s cabinet. Roberts did not say whether he met privately or would meet privately with Trump.
Project 2025 includes proposals to reclassify thousands of federal workers so they could be fired and eliminate or curtail several government agencies. Facing Democratic criticism over the blueprint, Trump sought to distance himself from it and denied knowing who was behind it, even as the proposal was drafted by longtime allies and former officials in his administration.
The event at Mar-a-Lago was to launch an exchange-traded fund, or ETF, called Azoria U.S. Meritocracy that is looking to target companies with diversity, equity and inclusion practices by excluding them from the fund. Its CEO, James Fishback, is close to Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate in charge of the new Department of Government Efficiency with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
Roberts introduced himself on Thursday as someone from Project 2025, and the small crowd laughed.
He noted he is good friends with Brooke Rollins, president and CEO of the America First Policy Institute, another group that laid the groundwork beforehand for a second Trump administration. Rollins has been nominated to serve as Trump's agriculture secretary.
Roberts said groups like the Heritage Foundation and America First Policy Institute were “close collaborators on the Trump agenda.” He called the second Trump term the “beginning of the golden era of America’s next chapter.”
“I think we’re in the middle of a re-founding of this country,” he said.
FILE - A copy of Project 2025 is held during the Democratic National Convention, Aug. 21, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
FILE - Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, speaks at The Heritage Foundation, Wednesday, April 12, 2023, in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — As a Democrat who immersed himself in political news during the presidential campaign, Ziad Aunallah has much in common with many Americans since the election. He's tuned out.
“People are mentally exhausted,” said Aunallah, 45, of San Diego. “Everyone knows what is coming and we are just taking some time off.”
Television ratings — and now a new poll — clearly illustrate the phenomenon. About two-thirds of American adults say they have recently felt the need to limit media consumption about politics and government because of overload, according to the survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Smaller percentages of Americans are limiting their intake of news about overseas conflicts, the economy or climate change, the poll says. Politics stand out.
Election news on CNN and MSNBC was taking up too much of Sam Gude's time before the election, said the 47-year-old electrician from Lincoln, Nebraska. “The last thing I want to watch right now is the interregnum,” said Gude, a Democrat and no fan of President-elect Donald Trump.
The poll, conducted in early December, found that about 7 in 10 Democrats say they are stepping back from political news. The percentage isn't as high for Republicans, who have reason to celebrate Trump's victory. Still, about 6 in 10 Republicans say they've felt the need to take some time off too, and the share for independents is similar.
The differences are far starker for the TV networks that have been consumed by political news.
After election night through Dec. 13, the prime-time viewership of MSNBC was an average of 620,000, down 54% from the pre-election audience this year, the Nielsen company said. For the same time comparison, CNN's average of 405,000 viewers was down 45%.
At Fox News Channel, a favorite news network for Trump fans, the post-election average of 2.68 million viewers is up 13%, Nielsen said. Since the election, 72% of the people watching one of those three cable networks in the evening were watching Fox News, compared to 53% prior to election day.
A post-election slump for fans of the losing candidate is not a new trend for networks that have become heavily identified for a partisan audience. MSNBC had similar issues after Trump was elected in 2016. Same for Fox in 2020, although that was complicated by anger: many of its viewers were outraged then by the network's crucial election night call of Arizona for the Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, and sought alternatives.
MSNBC had its own anger issues after several “Morning Joe” viewers became upset that hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski visited Trump shortly after his victory last month. Yet while the show's ratings are down 35% since Election Day, that's a smaller drop than the network's prime-time ratings.
CNN points out that while it has been suffering in the television ratings, its streaming and digital ratings have been consistent.
MSNBC can take some solace in history. In previous years, network ratings bounce back when the depression after an election loss lifts, When a new administration takes office, people who oppose it are frequently looking for a gathering place.
“I’ll be tuning back in once the clown show starts,” Aunallah said. “You have no choice. Whether or not you want to hear it, it's happening. If you care about your country, you have no choice but to pay attention.”
But the ride may not be smooth. MSNBC's slide is steeper than it was in 2016; and there's some question about whether Trump opponents will want to be as engaged as they were during his first term. People are also unplugging from cable television in rates that are only getting more rapid, although MSNBC believes it has bucked this trend eating away at audiences before.
The poll indicates that Americans want less talk about politics from public figures in general. After an election season where endorsements from celebrities like Taylor Swift made headlines, the survey found that Americans are more likely to disapprove than approve of celebrities, large companies and professional athletes speaking out about politics.
Still, Gude is among those discovering other ways to get news to which he does want to pay attention, including on YouTube.
MSNBC is also in the middle of some corporate upheaval that raises questions about potential changes. Parent company Comcast announced last month that the cable network is among some properties that will spin off into a new company, which will give MSNBC new corporate leadership and cut its ties to NBC News.
Some of the Americans who have turned away from political news lately also had some advice for getting them engaged again.
Gude said, for example, that MSNBC will always have a hard-core audience of Trump haters. But if the network wants to expand its audience, “then you have to talk about issues, and you have to stop talking about Trump.”
Kathleen Kendrick, a 36-year-old sales rep from Grand Junction, Colorado, who's a registered independent voter, said she hears plenty of people loudly spouting off about their political opinions on the job. She wants more depth when she watches the news. Much of what she sees is one-sided and shallow, she said.
“You get a story but only part of a story,” Kendrick said. “It would be nice if you could get both sides, and more research.”
Aunallah, similarly, is looking for more depth and variety. He's not interested “in watching the angry man on the corner yelling at me anymore,” he said.
“It's kind of their own fault that I'm not watching,” he said. “I felt they spent all this time talking about the election. They made it so much of their focus that when the main event ends, why would people want to keep watching?”
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The poll of 1,251 adults was conducted Dec. 5-9, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.
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Sanders reported from Washington. David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.
FILE - Jim, left, and Tamara Hamilton watch former President Donald Trump speak on television on Thursday, July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart, File)
FILE - People watch as television screens show Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump addressing supporters on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024, at Comet Tavern in Seattle. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson, File)
FILE -Supporters of former President Donald Trump drink beers as they watch him speak on television on Thursday, July 18, 2024, in Seal Beach, Calif. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis, File)
FILE - People watch TV screens showing a debate between Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, right on screen, and Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump, at Sports Grill Kendall, where the Miami-Dade Democratic Hispanic Caucus had organized a watch party, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Miami. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)
