HERSHEY, Pa. – I hear it everywhere I go, in every corner and crevice of the country that I have covered during this election, menacing talk about Project 2025. Never mind that Donald Trump has nothing to do with Project 2025, never mind that the canard that he does is a coordinated lie between Democrats and the media, the fact is, it is working.

In this town of 15,000 known for chocolate, I met Mark and his service dog. He is retired military and told me, "Nobody does research, people just believe what they are told," adding, "I’m Gen X, we had actual libraries, we had to look things up with the the…"

TRUMP, HARRIS LOCKED IN TIGHT RACE IN CRITICAL BATTLEGROUND PENNSYLVANIA, POLLS FIND

"Dewey Decimal System?" I chimed in.

"Exactly, thanks," he replied. "Now people just accept whatever Google spits out at them."

Mark might have a point, because typically, in fact almost always, voters who bring up Project 2025 to me have no real understanding of what it is or what’s in it.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump during the debate in Philadelphia on Sept. 10, 2024. (Getty Images)

It may be the case that, aside from a handful of wonks at the Heritage Foundation where this Frankenstein monster of a policy project came to life, nobody on earth knows what’s in it.

"I’ve heard it’s like a list of rights that Republicans want to take away, like on abortion," a woman in Virginia recently told me. When I pressed for specifics, she admitted she was only relying on generalizations from the Democrats and the media.

But, far more important than what is or isn’t in the 900-page policy tome, which is mostly a set of Human Resources guidelines, is that it has absolutely, positively nothing to do with Donald Trump and never has.

At every turn since Project 2025 became a major campaign issue, Trump has disavowed it, said it will have no impact on his presidency, and frankly, that he doesn’t even know what is in it.

Mark, from Hershey, says people need to research issues and not take what the media says as gospel.

So on what basis do Democrats and their feckless media allies continue to try to tie this albatross around The Donald’s neck? Only through the worst kind of half-truths and prevarications our democratic system has to offer.

JD Vance wrote the forward! Trump’s critics insist, and he did, in 2022, not only long before anyone thought he would be Trump’s vice presidential nominee, but at a time when many people thought Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, not Trump, would be the presidential nominee.

Then we are told that dozens of former Trump officials are involved with the project, and yes, Heritage is a think tank, it doesn’t have a college draft or use Indeed dot com to hire, it is staffed with, gasp, former political policy officials.

An historic marker stands outside the original Hershey Co. chocolate manufacturing plant in Hershey, Pennsylvania. (Bradley C. Bower/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

You can’t shake a stick at liberal think tanks like Center for American Progress without pointing at a former Obama or Biden staffers, but nobody says Kamala Harris is planning to hand over the keys of the federal government to them.

No, Trump’s alleged connection and fealty to Project 2025 is simply a flat out lie, and probably the best argument why he should not accept a second debate with Kamala Harris, especially on CNN which pushes this particular prevarication daily.

In the first debate, when Harris brought up the nonsense claims about Trump and the project, neither of the moderators broke in to fact-check it, as they did over and over and over with Trump. It is almost as though the ABC anchors were in on it.

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This desperate and constant lying about Project 2025 from the Harris campaign and the other Harris campaign known as the liberal press has come about precisely because Harris is incapable of making a positive argument for her candidacy.

Fighting price gouging fell flat. On a host of issues, she refuses to say where she stands, except that it is closer to the center than where she used to stand, and she refuses to do serious interviews to clarify her positions.

So, what does that leave in the campaign arsenal? Basically, vice presidential nominee Tim Walz fixing old cars while lying about Project 2025.

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Sadly, from what I can tell in my travels and conversations it is working, something that rankles Gen X Joe who is voting for Trump. "It's just like the white supremacists, and everything else," he told me, "Trump denounces it over and over and it’s never good enough."

It was Mark Twain who said that a lie travels the world before the truth can get its pants on. If so, the Project 2025 is the heart print boxers shorts of the 2024 election, and time is running out to clothe the issue in the truth.

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