As the hardworking child of academically focused parents, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dreamed of reaching the highest levels of the legal profession. She even wrote in her college application to Harvard about becoming the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.

But when the Biden administration called in 2022 with news that she was being vetted for that exact role, Jackson hesitated. She worried about the harsh spotlight on her family and the potential impact on her older daughter, Talia, who is on the autism spectrum.

Jackson and her equally driven type-A husband had initially struggled to grasp their child’s neurological differences, and Jackson wanted to be sure her daughter was comfortable with the possibility of the diagnosis becoming public.

“They had not asked for their lives to be raked over, simply because their mother dreamed of entering a realm where no one with her background and experiences had ever been before,” Jackson, 53, writes in her new memoir, “Lovely One.” Both Jackson’s daughters and her husband encouraged her to pursue her dream.

The story of Talia Jackson’s diagnosis was not widely known until now and is one of the biggest revelations in Jackson’s highly personal memoir, published this week. The book does not touch on the current cases or controversies before the Supreme Court, where Jackson is one of three liberals on a bench with a conservative supermajority that has dramatically shifted the law to the right in recent years.

Nor does Jackson write about the oral arguments in which she has become known for her extensive questioning, or her sharp separate dissents, including when the court majority in July granted Donald Trump broad immunity from prosecution for official acts. She spends just four of nearly 400 pages on the grueling Senate hearings ahead of her confirmation in April 2022, when she was narrowly confirmed despite Republican efforts to paint her as a left-wing lower-court judge who coddled criminals and terrorists.

Instead, Jackson reflects on her groundbreaking path and the impact of key experiences, including her mentors, her uncle’s incarceration and the pain of being overlooked as a Black woman in the corporate legal world despite her sterling résumé.

“No one arrives at the highest of heights on their own, and there were lots of contributing factors — people, circumstances — that prepared me for this job, and I thought that needed to be recognized,” Jackson said in an interview Wednesday night before a book talk.

Jackson received an $893,750 advance from Penguin Random House for the book, according to her financial disclosure report. She is one of at least four Supreme Court justices — the others are Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — with forthcoming or just-published books about their lives and the law.

The justice has embarked on an extensive media tour, speaking with Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show” this week and giving more than a dozen book talks this month, including in California, Illinois, Seattle and Florida, ahead of the court’s new term that begins in October. At the Kennedy Center on Wednesday, an audience of nearly 2,000 people gave her a lengthy standing ovation, with many participants clutching copies of her book.

Jackson says she was compelled to tell her story because of intense public interest in her nomination. She shares the reality of her balancing act as a working parent and partner to her husband, Patrick Jackson, a prominent surgeon, recalling quick naps she took in a grocery store parking lot on her way home from work years ago when she was seven months pregnant with their second child. And she details what it took to rise through the ranks of the legal profession, especially “as a woman of color with an unusual name.”

Even though Jackson had graduated with top honors from Harvard Law School and worked for three federal judges, she says, there were instances during her stints at corporate law firms when she felt her views were ignored at meetings — even though she was the only one in the room who had clerked at the Supreme Court.

More than once, Jackson writes, she would be standing near the copy machine or waiting for an elevator only to have an older law partner walk up and, assuming she was a secretary, ask which of his colleagues she assisted.

Such encounters, she writes, “reinforced for me that due respect for my talent, intellect, and legal abilities would not be automatically extended in some private-sector settings.” She recalls wanting to yank her two Harvard degrees off the wall to carry around with her.

Jackson first learned about the inner workings of the Supreme Court while clerking for the man she would eventually replace on the bench. Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who retired in 2022, was constantly on the move, she writes, leaving his chambers to talk with and try to persuade other justices on various issues.

In the interview, Jackson said she finds herself thinking about how Breyer might have handled areas of disagreement among the current justices — who, unlike trial judges, must hash out their decisions together. He has told her that it takes time to acclimate to the ways of the court and encouraged her to build bonds by eating lunch with her colleagues.

“Collective decision-making is really a challenge. I think it’s been, not an easy transition from when I was my own person in the courtroom,” Jackson said, referring to her eight years as a judge in D.C. federal court. The steepest learning curve, she said, is “trying to deal with incorporating other people’s thoughts and ideas and getting their feedback. And how did how do you manage that in terms of what you would like to say and what they’re saying. That’s hard.”

Jackson is a prolific writer, tied with Justice Clarence Thomas for the most overall opinions in the last term and often writing a separate dissent or concurring opinion. She said that it’s not easy to figure out when to go it alone but that she thinks it is important to do so in some instances. “I want people to know what’s going on in the court and I want people to appreciate the issues,” she said. “And if we have differences of opinion, I think it’s fine to have people understand that and see what the different ideas are.”

The title of Jackson’s book is a reference to her given name — Ketanji Onyika. It translates to “lovely one,” and was chosen by her parents from a list sent to them by Jackson’s aunt, then a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa.

The memoir traces the backgrounds of her grandparents, who had only grade school educations, and her parents, who went to racially segregated schools and were the first in their families to go to college. Jackson contrasts their stories with the history of her husband’s Boston Brahmin family, whose ancestors include King Edward I of England, four Mayflower passengers and a signer of the U.S. Constitution.

Jackson’s parents, Johnny and Ellery Brown, began their careers as teachers and had high expectations for their firstborn. They filled her bedroom with encyclopedias, atlases, and magazines with stories of famous African Americans. That was where Jackson first read in detail about Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to argue at the Supreme Court and serve on the federal bench. Motley shared a birthday with Jackson and, the justice writes, inspired her childhood dreams.

Coached by her grandmother and parents, Jackson learned not to dwell on encounters with racism in her predominantly White world in Miami, and to revel in her success as a class president and a champion public speaker on the high school debate circuit.

“I came to enjoy catching people off guard, disarming their conscious or unconscious stereotypes about Black people with my intelligence, articulation, preparation and ability to function well in a world that I knew expected me to fail,” she writes.

In tracing her career through the legal profession, Jackson writes for the first time about the life sentence her uncle received for a nonviolent drug offense. Jackson was a federal public defender in D.C. when Thomas Brown Jr., her father’s brother, called from a Florida prison asking his niece for help in seeking leniency — an episode first reported by The Washington Post when she was under consideration to become a justice.

“My heart raced and my hands shook as I sifted through the files, and my brow felt clammy as I studied each sheet of paper,” Jackson writes of reviewing Brown’s case files. “The tiny pilot flame of hope that I had nursed since I’d spoken with my uncle slowly bloomed into righteous anger — then died — as I realized that there was nothing in the files that either justified a life sentence or warranted a retrial or a resentencing in his case.”

After a referral from Jackson, a private law firm eventually took her uncle’s case pro bono, and President Barack Obama years later commuted his sentence. He was released in 2017. The case brought questions of sentencing policy and fundamental fairness into sharp relief for the young public defender.

“It’s one thing to read about cases and their outcomes,” she writes, “but I now had firsthand experience of the myriad ways in which criminal justice policy can destroy the lives and livelihoods of real human beings.”

The book also details her courtship and marriage to Patrick Jackson, whom she met in history class at Harvard, and the initial concerns expressed by their friends and families about their interracial relationship. Eventually, Jackson writes, the couple’s loved ones fully embraced them.

But perhaps the biggest challenge they faced was the struggle to understand their older daughter’s troubles in school.

“Unfortunately for Talia, her well-meaning, utterly devoted parents had some blind spots, likely stemming from a heightened work ethic that Patrick and I had internalized to an almost ridiculous degree,” Jackson writes.

“We took far too long to understand that Talia wasn’t neurologically wired like Patrick or me, and although she was indeed extraordinarily bright, we couldn’t simply parent her as we ourselves had been parented.”

Talia’s diagnosis with autism — in 2012, when she was 11 — was devastating, but also a relief, Jackson writes: “We could at last accept that her life was likely to be fundamentally different from the one we had envisioned for her when she was a newborn.”

The memoir includes some lighter moments as well, following Jackson as she shops in New York’s Garment District for her first judicial robes after her 2013 confirmation to the U.S. District Court in D.C., and recounting the day she discovered her signature hairstyle — tightly coiled sisterlocks.

Even in the glare of public life after her Supreme Court nomination, Jackson writes, her low-maintenance, chin-length locs “freed me to show up in the most formal legal settings wearing a neat, precise style that I love and one that also communicates my appreciation for my God-given hair texture.”

The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the Biden administration to strip millions of health-care dollars from Oklahoma over its refusal to direct patients to information about abortions — a federal requirement that the state says would be at odds with its strict ban on terminating pregnancies.

Last year, the Biden administration diverted $4.5 million from Oklahoma’s family planning program, which primarily serves low-income or uninsured patients.

In challenging that decision, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond told the Supreme Court that state health-care organizations cannot be punished for not advising patients about ending their pregnancies. The Health and Human Services Department, the state said, is illegally imposing conditions on funding that are not specified in the half-century-old nationwide family planning program known as Title X.

After the Supreme Court eliminated the nationwide right to abortion in 2022, Oklahoma was one of more than a dozen states to broadly prohibit the procedure. State law also makes it a crime for any person to try to persuade a woman to terminate a pregnancy or to procure an abortion for any woman.

In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld the federal government’s right to deny the funding. A divided three-judge panel noted that the Health and Human Services Department had told the state that it could meet its obligation by giving patients a phone number for a national hotline that provides neutral information about pregnancy options, including abortion.

Oklahoma then asked the Supreme Court to intervene, seeking action by Aug. 30 to stop the Biden administration from withholding another year’s worth of the health-care funding.

As is typical in emergency orders, the Supreme Court majority did not explain its reasons for refusing Oklahoma’s request to immediately intervene. Conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito, Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch said they would have granted the state’s request.

While the federal government has long prohibited organizations from using Title X money to pay for abortions, the rules for implementing the statute and distributing about $286 million in annual federal funds have differed depending on the administration in power — and have repeatedly been subject to litigation.

In 2019, the Trump administration rewrote the rules, barring clinics that receive federal family planning aid from referring patients for abortions. That sparked a long-running legal battle with Planned Parenthood Federation of America and other groups over what opponents criticized as an “abortion gag rule.”

The Biden administration reversed course in 2021, saying it would no longer ban clinics from receiving funding. It later began to withhold funds from organizations that refused to make referrals.

Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, defending the administration, told the court that there was no reason for the justices to take emergency action while litigation over the matter continues. The Oklahoma legislature has already provided substitute funding to make up last year’s shortfall, she wrote in a court filing, “and there is no reason to doubt that it can do the same this year.”

The court, she added, “should not encourage the invocation of its emergency docket in cases with such modest practical stakes.”

In a filing, Oklahoma’s attorneys said the Biden administration’s position also is not compatible with the Supreme Court’s decision in June to get rid of the 40-year-old legal doctrine known as Chevron. The high court’s ruling means judges no longer have to automatically defer to a federal agency’s reasonable interpretation of ambiguous language in a statute — which is what Oklahoma says is at issue with sections of Title X.

Oklahoma and 11 other states initially challenged the administration’s new rules requiring them to make referrals. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled against the states, in part because the federal government said providers with religious or moral objections would not be required to refer patients for abortions.

That case is still pending in the lower courts, and the issue could eventually return to the Supreme Court.

Separately, the 6th Circuit on Aug. 26 rejected a similar challenge from Tennessee after the federal government stripped $7 million in Title X funds from that state. As it had with Oklahoma, HHS told Tennessee officials that they could meet the conditions for funding by providing patients with the phone number for a hotline that offers counseling about prenatal care, adoption and abortion as well as information about where those services can be obtained if a patient requests it.

The appeals court said Congress made clear that complying with the federal government’s requirements is a “clear and unambiguous condition of receiving a Title X grant.”

The late Sen. John McCain’s youngest son, Army 1st Lt. Jimmy McCain, told CNN on Tuesday that he’s changed his voter registration to Democrat and plans to support Vice President Kamala Harris in November.

McCain’s endorsement — which the Harris campaign promoted in a news release and on social media Tuesday — is the latest in a long line from Republicans who have come out against voting for Donald Trump. As Democrats make the case for Harris with independent voters and disaffected Republicans, the push for the party’s big tent was recently on display at the Democratic National Convention, which included several Republicans and former Trump officials in the lineup of speakers.

McCain explained the change after years as a registered independent and expressed outrage over a recent altercation involving Trump campaign staff at Arlington National Cemetery. He called it a “violation” and “a painful experience.”

Trump was at the cemetery last month to mark the third anniversary of a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops during the evacuation of Afghanistan. Trump and his staff defied requests from cemetery officials to avoid taking photos or videos among the gravestones, with the aim of adhering to a federal law that forbids campaign activities at military cemeteries. A female cemetery worker was “abruptly pushed aside” by male Trump aides as she sought to enforce the guidelines, cemetery officials said.

“It just blows me away,” said McCain, who has served in the military for 17 years. He added that “these men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice” of whether to be a backdrop for Trump’s political campaign.

“I just think that for anyone who’s done a lot of time in their uniform, they just understand that inherently — that it’s not about you there. It’s about these people who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the name of their country,” McCain remarked.

Representatives for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump on Tuesday claimed that there was “no conflict” or “fighting” when he visited Arlington National Cemetery last week. In a post shared on Truth Social, the former president falsely claimed that reports of the altercation were “made up” by Harris, who had no involvement in the Republican candidate’s visit. The altercation has been confirmed by Arlington National Cemetery — which in a statement said “there was an incident, and a report was filed” — and Army officials.

Meghan McCain, John McCain’s daughter, said Tuesday that she does not plan to support either Harris or Trump.

“I greatly respect the wide variety of political opinions of all of my family members and love them all very much,” Meghan McCain wrote on X. “I however, remain a proud member of the Republican Party and hope for brighter days ahead. (Not voting for Harris or Trump, hope that clears things up).”

While other members of the McCain family have distanced themselves from Trump, Jimmy McCain is the first to publicly join the Democratic Party. It follows years of tension between the late senator’s family and the Republican presidential nominee.

Jimmy McCain told CNN that he feels that Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), “embody a group of people that will help make this country better, that will take us forward.” He also said he “could never forgive” Trump for what he said about his father.

John McCain, a senator for Arizona who was the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, was a U.S. Navy captain who was shot down over Vietnam and held as a prisoner of war for 5½ years. Trump has for years mocked McCain, saying he was not a war hero because he was captured by the North Vietnamese and asserting after McCain died that the late senator’s book “bombed.” Trump also complained during this campaign cycle about the senator’s vote against repealing the Affordable Care Act, and earlier claimed that the McCain family did not thank him for approving the senator’s state funeral.

Despite political differences, McCain maintained a close bond with Joe Biden, with whom he served in the Senate.

The late senator’s widow, Cindy McCain, crossed party lines and endorsed Biden in 2020. After becoming president, Biden appointed her the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Agencies for Food and Agriculture, and she has been serving as the executive director of the World Food Program since last year.

“We didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then they took over that disaster.”

— Former president Donald Trump, in a video of him at Arlington National Cemetery speaking to the families of U.S. troops killed at Abbey Gate in Afghanistan, posted on TikTok, Aug. 28

This TikTok of Trump’s controversial visit to Arlington, where he marked the third anniversary of a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops during the chaotic evacuation of Afghanistan overseen by President Joe Biden, has been viewed more than 11 million times. Federal law prohibits election-related activities at military cemeteries, but Trump’s entourage pushed past a cemetery employee who tried to prevent Trump’s aides from bringing cameras, according to the Army.

Those cameras appear to have recorded Trump saying these words to the Gold Star families. (The TikTok shows him talking to families as the words are spoken as a voice-over.) In his phrasing, it sounds as if no troops were killed in Afghanistan during the last 18 months of his presidency. That’s false, though as we will show, there was an 18-month gap with no fatalities across Trump’s and Biden’s combined presidencies.

The Facts

A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to queries about why Trump says there were no fatalities over 18 months. Using the Defense Casualty Analysis System, we first reviewed every 18-month period in Trump’s four years as president, looking only at deaths in hostile action in Afghanistan during Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, not accidental deaths such as a in a vehicle or helicopter crash. There was no such period.

Then we focused on the last 18 months of his presidency — July 20, 2019, to Jan. 20, 2021. That makes the most sense since Trump referenced Biden’s taking over. The Defense Department database showed 12 deaths from hostile action in that period. We double-checked with the news releases issued by the Pentagon in that period and confirmed the 12 names.

The last two deaths occurred on Feb. 8, 2020. Javier Jaguar Gutierrez of San Antonio and Antonio Rey Rodriguez of Las Cruces, New Mexico, both 28, were fatally ambushed by a rogue Afghan policeman. Trump, along with Vice President Mike Pence, flew to Dover Air Force Base when the bodies arrived in the United States.

That was 11 months before Trump’s presidency ended. The suicide bombing at Kabul’s airport that killed the 13 troops took place on Aug. 26, 2021 — seven months into Biden’s presidency. The last 11 months of Trump’s presidency and the first seven of Biden’s add up to 18 months.

In March 2020, Trump approved an agreement with the Taliban (not the Afghan government at the time) for all U.S. forces to leave the country by May 1, 2021. He sealed the deal with a phone conversation with Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban and head of its political office in Qatar. “We had a good long conversation today and, you know, they want to cease the violence,” Trump told reporters at the time. “They’d like to cease violence also.”

Despite abandoning many of Trump’s policies, Biden honored this one, just stretching out the departure by a few months in 2021.

Trump even celebrated Biden’s decision to stick with the withdrawal. “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible,” he said in a written statement after Biden announced he would continue the departure set in motion by Trump.

At a political rally on June 26 that year, weeks before the collapse of the Afghan government, Trump bragged that he had made it difficult for Biden to change course. “I started the process. All the troops are coming back home. They couldn’t stop the process,” he said. “Twenty-one years is enough, don’t we think? Twenty-one years. They [the Biden administration] couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process.”

In about a half-dozen campaign rallies and media events last month, Trump mentioned his conversation with the Taliban leader and tied it to the 18-month period without deaths in hostile action. But often Trump left the impression — as in the TikTok with the Gold Star families — that this only happened on his watch. Here are some examples:

• “Abdul was not playing games with me. You know, they were executing a lot of our soldiers. And I spoke to him, I said, ‘Abdul, don’t do it anymore. There’ll be no more.’ Anyway, I said it pretty tough. And you know what? For 18 months, we didn’t have one American soldier killed in Afghanistan. And then I left, and then I left, and there’s a bunch of incompetent people took over, and it all started up again.” (Rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Aug. 17.)
• “We had no soldiers killed for 18 months while I was there because they knew — don’t play around with our soldiers.” (Rally in Asheboro, N.C., Aug. 21.)
• “I dealt with Abdul, and he’s still the leader, strong man, smart man, but he understood that if he did anything because we were losing a lot of people to the snipers. … And he understood. And he said, ‘Yes, Your Excellency, I understand.’ He called me Your Excellency. I wonder if he calls that to Biden. I doubt it, right? But he understood that and he respected us. And for 18 months, not one American soldier was killed, not one.” (Remarks at a news conference in Bedminster, N.J., Aug. 15.)

But on occasion, Trump gets it close to correct, such as in these remarks during a news conference in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 8: “You know, if you go back and check your records, for 18 months, I had a talk with Abdul. Abdul was the leader of the Taliban, still is. But I had a strong talk with him. For 18 months, not one American soldier was shot at or killed, not even shot at, 18 months.”

The Defense Department determined that the suicide bomber, Abdul Rahman al-Logari, was not a member of the Taliban but part of the Islamic State-Khorasan, a regional branch of the Islamic State terrorist group. He was one of several thousand ISIS-K members released by the Taliban in mid-August 2021 and one of several possible suicide bombers the group had available for the attack, according to a review of the investigation completed in April.

The Pinocchio Test

Trump has a basis for citing 18 months without a death from hostile action in Afghanistan. The period of relative quiet began with his deal with the Taliban. A case could be made that the seeds of the collapse of the Afghan government — and the chaotic withdrawal of Americans that accompanied it — stemmed from the same deal.

But Trump errs in suggesting — as in the TikTok with the Gold Star families gathered in Arlington — that those 18 months took place entirely during his presidency. He earns Two Pinocchios.

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No one expected the 922-page policy document to go viral.

The conservative Heritage Foundation quietly began working on Project 2025 in 2022, pulling together a wish list of far-right policy proposals the group hoped former president Donald Trump would enact if he won back the White House. The report was published with little notice in 2023.

Then, in March, the Biden-Harris campaign began attacking the conservative initiative through a coordinated push on social media timed to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, warning the public that Project 2025 was a blueprint for the extreme and dangerous agenda a second Trump term would usher in.

In June, comedian John Oliver devoted an entire episode of his popular HBO show to the policy initiative, and actress Taraji P. Henson used her high-profile role as host of the BET Awards to raise alarms about it.

“Pay attention! It’s not a secret: Look it up!” Henson told the audience, in a clip that was viewed more than 8 million times in 48 hours. “… The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!”

By the time Trump took to Truth Social on July 5 to personally disavow the initiative — “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote, adding that some of the proposals were “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” — the topic had already exploded on social media, and Democrats had alighted on a potent message that could damage Trump politically.

How an obscure Heritage Foundation policy tome emerged as a defining Democratic attack of the 2024 election is a story of fortuitous mentions, organic online momentum, an ominous-sounding name and a document that captures the myriad fears many Democratic voters have about what another Trump presidency could mean.

The sweeping policy document lays out how the next president could concentrate power in the executive branch and remove civil service protections for legions of federal workers to replace them with loyalists. It provides detailed plans for executing some of Trump’s most controversial ideas, such as eliminating the Department of Education; moving the Justice Department under presidential control; shuttering the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which forecasts weather and tracks climate change, and rolling back other environmental protections; and launching mass deportations, including of immigrants who came to the United States as children, often known as “dreamers.”

The document also includes other policies that Trump has not embraced, including a call for the elimination of the popular Head Start program, rescinding Food and Drug Administration approval of mifepristone — a key abortion medication — and using an 1873 law to prevent shipments of abortion medication through the mail, which he recently told CBS News he would not enforce.

A line-by-line review of the Project 2025 document by CBS News identified 700 policy proposals and found that at least 270 of them matched Trump’s past or current campaign proposals. The review also found that at least 28 of the project’s 38 primary authors — nearly 75 percent — worked in the Trump administration.

Jef Pollock, whose firm, Global Strategy Group, is one of the pollsters for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, said the forward-looking nature of Project 2025 — articulating in granular detail what a hypothetical second Trump term could look like — helped crystallize voter fears in a tangible way.

“Voters understand that this is an actual, written plan for extremist and dangerous ideas that are going to be implemented,” Pollock said. “We know that voters have some Trump amnesia. They don’t remember all the bad things he did as president. Now it’s like, ‘Well, even if you’ve forgotten about what he did before, what he wants to do now is even worse.’”

‘An unwelcomed distraction’

Despite the best efforts of the Heritage Foundation, there was little fanfare when the conservative think tank first published the Project 2025 document, titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” in April 2023.

But as soon as Project 2025 began getting a sliver of mainstream media attention months later, Trump and his campaign tried to distance him from the document, even though many of his former top aides — including former Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought and former personnel chief John McEntee — advised or contributed to the effort.

In November, Trump advisers released a statement saying that while such outside efforts were “certainly appreciated and can be enormously helpful,” they were merely “recommendations.”

Another statement came in December, when the same advisers wrote that the outside suggestions were not officially sanctioned and were “an unwelcomed distraction.”

Trump’s campaign has also redirected voters to the former president’s own Agenda 47 — a 20-point missive outlining his priorities — as well as the Republican Party platform, which his campaign carefully streamlined before adopting it in July.

“It’s literally the definition of the ‘big lie’ theory — that if you say the same thing over and over and over again enough times, you can persuade people it’s true and they’ve attempted that,” Trump spokesman Brian Hughes said.

“The only person deciding what President Trump will say or what President Trump will do as president is Donald Trump,” Hughes continued. “What’s most ironic is that while they are spending all this time trying to lie about what policies President Trump has or will advocate for as president, we still have a Harris website that has a half-dozen or more donate buttons but no policy tab.”

Heritage Foundation officials have also tried to counter what they view as misinformation, launching a new website “to counter the left’s worst lies about Project 2025,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts told members in an email Friday morning.

Privately, some Heritage members blame the Trump campaign for elevating Project 2025 by responding to Democratic attacks.

By pushing the Project 2025 agenda as Trump’s blueprint for a second term, Democrats have often inaccurately portrayed some of the document’s policy positions as Trump’s own. They also benefited from the former president’s muddled stances on issues such as abortion and from Trump’s comments that fueled the narrative — like his claim that he would be a dictator on “day one” or his frequent calls for retribution and vengeance on his enemies.

“The power here, again, is it confirms things that voters already suspected and had maybe hoped, ‘Well, maybe he’ll just focus on the stock market and business,’ and now it’s like, ‘He’s the same person he always was and surrounded by extreme people,’” said Patrick Toomey, a partner at BSG, a Democratic research and strategy firm.

Buoyed by social influencers and celebrities taking up the cause, the Biden campaign seized on the theme and hammered away.

In February and March, Democrats began more frequently blending their descriptions of Trump’s second-term agenda and the plans outlined in Project 2025 in their daily messaging, arguing at one point that the proposals outlined by both Trump and Project 2025 would create a modern-day “Handmaid’s Tale” in “Trump’s America” by rolling back LGBTQ rights and abortion access.

The Harris-Walz campaign has also held more than 60 volunteer trainings focused on Project 2025 in battleground states, a campaign official said.

As pieces of the document started circulating on social media, it caught the attention of voters like 27-year-old Tayla Cochran of Sterling Heights, Mich., a disappointed former Biden supporter who was at first “super undecided.” What she saw on her social media feeds about the threats Project 2025 could pose to birth control and abortion access reengaged her interest.

“The whole Project 2025 thing — I don’t know how true that is,” Cochran said in an interview this summer. “But it just sounds crazy. … They’re really relentless with trying to strip us of every bit of freedom we have.”

Democrats picked up on those themes and made them a through-line of programming at the Democratic National Convention last month in Chicago. Many of the prime-time speakers mentioned it — Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) joked that it was “Project 1825” and “Project 1925,” an allusion to its perceived regressiveness. Comedian Kenan Thompson and several Democrats, including Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, lugged oversize copies of a Project 2025 book onstage, with Thompson joking that it was the rare document that could “kill a small animal and democracy at the same time.”

Speaking in broader terms in her keynote speech on the final night of the convention, Harris said Americans “know what a second Trump term would look like. It’s all laid out in Project 2025, written by his closest advisers.”

And last week, Harris’s campaign released a 60-second ad in battleground states focused on Project 2025, featuring dark and grainy footage of Trump as a narrator ominously intones that the document argues for “overhauling the Department of Justice — giving Trump the unchecked power to seek vengeance; eliminating the Department of Education and defunding K-12 schools; requiring the government to monitor women’s pregnancies,” among other things.

‘It really took off’

Matt Canter, a Democratic pollster, said he and fellow Democrats were “stunned” this summer when voters in focus groups began mentioning Project 2025 unprompted.

“Every single focus group I’ve done since June, respondents have brought up Project 2025,” he said. “You have a significant majority of swing voters in these focus groups knowing what it is and having extremely unfavorable opinions of it. It is a very credible manifestation of what voters fear about the new face of the Republican Party and what Trump might do in a second term.”

In a poll by the Economist/YouGov in early August, 28 percent of adults said they had heard a lot about Project 2025, while 43 percent said they had heard “a little” about it. Nearly half — 46 percent — said they had an unfavorable view of the effort, while only 15 percent had a favorable view.

Nonetheless, it took the Biden-Harris campaign and outside Democratic groups several months of pushing this message before it finally took off.

John Oliver’s point-by-point, 29-minute HBO presentation in mid-June of many of the policies outlined in Project 2025 helped amplify the conversation. In his monologue, which has been viewed online at least 9.4 million times, Oliver described Trump during his first term as “a hamster in an attack helicopter” who wanted to “bathe the world in blood and terror” but didn’t “know what buttons to press.” The Project 2025 document, he said, would change that.

Two weeks later, on the last day of June, Taraji P. Henson drove another spike in Project 2025 search traffic with her BET Awards speech. Harris’s team had worked closely with her before the awards show to produce a scripted video call, paid for by the Biden-Harris campaign, featuring the vice president and Henson from her dressing room.

Searches for Project 2025 peaked between July 7 and July 13, according to Google Trends data, the same week Biden criticized Project 2025 during a rally in Detroit — accusing Trump of lying by trying to distance himself from it and highlighting the fact that the project’s authors would seek to criminalize the shipment of abortion medication.

Attention to the document only continued to climb. Project 2025-related posts averaged 2.5 million views total per day in June, 27.7 million views per day in July — a 10-fold increase — and 11.3 million per day in August through Monday, according to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal advocacy organization that has helped push warnings about Project 2025.

By then, Canter said Democrats had achieved the near-impossible: They made an attack against Trump stick.

“It’s the first time we’ve actually been successful in holding him accountable for his policy positions,” Canter said.

Project 2025 means different things to different voters, which is part of its power, according to Democratic strategists and campaign aides.

“One of the reasons it’s been so successful is because you can talk about every issue — abortion, housing, climate change, immigration,” said Navin Nayak, president of the Center of American Progress Action Fund. “Every group that has a threat they were worried about has been able to use Project 2025 to animate that threat.”

Last week, for instance, Latino groups launched a bilingual campaign against Project 2025, with more than a half-dozen Latino leaders and advocates convening a Zoom call to warn of the threat the plan poses to their communities.

“The cruel agenda of Project 2025 seeks to separate families, deport dreamers, and it undermines the economic security and opportunities for working-class people,” said Katharine Pichardo-Erskine, executive director of Latino Victory Project.

Democratic strategists and Harris campaign advisers testing these lines of attack said some messages have stood out as especially effective: the curtailing of reproductive rights and access to abortions; the idea that Trump would weaponize the Justice Department; tougher immigration policies that could include raids at playgrounds and churches; and allowing employers to cut overtime pay for hourly workers, among others.

More broadly, the voters who know about Project 2025 generally have negative views of it, perceiving the effort to be scary and shadowy.

“We’ve been telling people what MAGA would do if they got into power, and Project 2025 became the plot and it felt like something nefarious to the American people — that there is this somewhat secret D.C. document that is the game plan for how to take over the federal government for their own use,” Navin said.

The Heritage Foundation says on its new website that the document is “not partisan, nor is it secret” and that it “does not speak for any candidate or campaign.”

A key aspect of Project 2025 that has allowed Democrats to wield it as a cudgel is that it is a document that voters can read themselves. Toomey, who holds a lot of focus groups with undecided voters, described them as “the most skeptical people on earth,” whose first response to any potential political attack is, “Well, if that’s true, I don’t like it, but I’ll have to Google it for myself, I’ll have to do my own research.”

“And now we just get to say, ‘Google it. Do the research. Don’t take our word for it,’” Toomey said.

Parker Butler, director of digital rapid response for the Harris campaign, said the ability of voters to personally delve into the document helped launch it on social media.

“We saw this as a sticky thing really early on, especially on TikTok, and it was happening from independent creators who were just putting out content,” Butler said. “It really took off among the crowd that was very skeptical of the traditional news media, people who were very much the do-your-own-research type of people.”

One of those voters was Renee Richardson, a 28-year-old activity director for seniors from Sterling Heights, Mich., who discovered the document through social media this spring and read with alarm about proposals such as eliminating the Education Department — one of the suggestions Trump does agree with.

“They’re not talking about it, but if he was to take office, that stuff goes into effect. So people really need to read it over and see what they’re going to have to fall in line with,” she said during an interview earlier this summer. “Not many people know about it, and I’ve been trying to spread the word.”

Isaac Arnsdorf, Marianne LeVine and Jeremy Merrill contributed to this report.

Vice President Kamala Harris is traveling to New Hampshire on Wednesday to lay out another plank of her economic agenda, pitching small-business relief in a Democratic-leaning state ahead of her critical debate next week against Donald Trump.

Harris plans to visit a local brewery in North Hampton that benefited from President Joe Biden’s pandemic-era relief bill and other policies, an effort to highlight the Biden administration’s record of small-business growth while also laying out plans to bolster the economy by supporting entrepreneurs in the future.

While New Hampshire, which Democrats have carried in the last five presidential elections, has not been considered among the battleground states up for grabs in November, aides say Harris is visiting the Granite State in part to show that she is not taking any voters for granted and in part to woo the kind of moderate and Republican voters who dislike Trump.

“Our campaign is reaching voters of all political stripes — including Nikki Haley voters who are turned off by Trump’s extremism,” Harris’s campaign said in a statement, which noted that Haley, the former U.N. ambassador, garnered 43 percent of the state’s vote in her bid against Trump.

Trump’s campaign has suggested that Harris is traveling to New Hampshire because she is struggling there. Many Democratic leaders in the state were upset when Biden opted to bypass its first-in-the-nation primary to elevate South Carolina earlier this year.

Harris “sees there are problems for her campaign in New Hampshire because of the fact that they disrespected it in their primary and never showed up,” Trump wrote Tuesday on his social media platform Truth Social. “Additionally, the cost of living in New Hampshire is through the roof, their energy bills are some of highest in the country, and their housing market is the most unaffordable in history.”

The economy is expected to be a major focus during Tuesday’s debate against the two candidates, and Harris has focused much of her policy rollout on what she has branded the “Opportunity Economy.”

During her visit to Throwback Brewery in North Hampton, Harris is expected to announce plans for a $50,000 tax benefit for small businesses, expanding the current $5,000 deduction for start-up firms by tenfold, according to a campaign official. Campaign aides say the proposal — part of a suite of new initiatives to boost entrepreneurship – would help draw a contrast with Trump, who has proposed tax cuts for corporations.

Trump and his campaign have sought to draw a contrast of their own, leaning into his polling advantage on economic matters. The former president has tried to brand Harris as excessively liberal, arguing that her policies have created inflation and stunted economic growth.

Harris’s latest proposal is part of an ongoing effort to combat Trump on that issue and woo some of the voters who dislike the former president but are concerned that Harris would be unfriendly to business.

In addition to the $50,000 tax deduction, Harris is proposing to create a new standard deduction for small firms to expedite their tax filings, lower barriers for occupational licenses and approve incentives for state and local governments to make it easier to form start-ups, among other changes, the campaign official said. The plans are part of a bid to spur some 25 million new business applications over four years, up from the record 19 million since Biden took office.

Harris, who has supported Biden’s proposals to increase taxes on large corporations and the wealthy to pay for other Democratic priorities like child care, has not said how much her latest efforts would cost or how the government would pay for them.

Jeff Stein contributed to this report.