Project 2025’s plan to criminalize porn has a sinister subplot

Amid the 920 pages’ worth of conservative ideas in the Project 2025 plans for a second Donald Trump administration, one stands out for its sheer improbability: criminalizing pornography.

Just five pages into the foreword by the president of the far-right Heritage Foundation think tank, the proposal stakes out an uncompromising position that porn should be banned, porn producers and distributors should be sent to prison, and tech companies that circulate it should be shut down.

It’s true that politics makes strange bedfellows, but we’re talking about anti-porn crusaders teaming up with Trump, who has literally had his share of strange bedfellows. To recap:

He was on the March 1990 cover of Playboy magazine next to Playmate Brandi Brandt, who was wearing his tuxedo jacket and nothing else. He hung it on his wall of his office in Trump Tower and often autographed copies on the campaign trail in 2016.He had short cameos in 1994 and 2000 Playboy videos in which he interviewed models (who, to be fair, were wearing clothes at the time) and took Polaroids, asking them if they had “what it takes” to be a Playmate.He opened the nation’s first strip club inside a casino in in his failed Taj Mahal venture in Atlantic City in 2013. The 36,000-square-foot club took up the space formerly occupied by three restaurants.He allegedly had an affair with Playmate Karen McDougal and adult film actress Stormy Daniels and was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records over hush money payments to Daniels made during his 2016 campaign. (Trump denies that he had sex with either woman.)He boosted future first lady Melania Trump’s modeling career by allowing her to do a photo shoot in his private jet that included partial nudity. (She also modeled fully nude before she met Trump in photos that were leaked during the 2016 race.)

Trump has said, unconvincingly, that he does not know the people behind Project 2025 and does not support all of its proposals. But on this subject, he has previously endorsed a similar idea, signing a pledge from the group Enough is Enough in 2016 to crack down on porn and potentially appoint a presidential commission to look at the “harmful public health impact of Internet pornography on youth, families and the American culture.” (He did neither.)

As with other sections of Project 2025, one of your first thoughts when reading it is: who wants this?

As with other sections of Project 2025, one of your first thoughts when reading it is: Who wants this?

The polling is mixed, at best. Gallup’s annual social survey has found that only 38% of Americans think that pornography is “morally acceptable,” down slightly from a high of 43% in 2018 but still higher than the low of 30% in 2011. That puts it somewhere between the number who think “sex between teenagers” and “cloning animals” is morally acceptable. (The question specifically states that this is regardless of whether you think it should be legal.)

Digging into the crosstabs is instructive, though. The groups that are most accepting include people aged 18 to 35, college graduates and liberals, while the least accepting were people over 55, people who didn’t finish college and conservatives. In other words, banning porn would be popular with Trump’s voter base, and unpopular with everyone else.

But the Project 2025 proposal is even more sweeping than the one Trump endorsed in his first campaign, indicating that its anti-porn language may be covering for a broader crusade against LGBTQ rights. It’s worth reading in full:

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

That’s a lot to unpack. Under this proposal, Stormy Daniels might be the one at the defendant’s table next time, and Trump’s new friend Elon Musk might see X shuttered for being too XXX.

But the giveaway here is in the two examples provided at the beginning “transgender ideology” and “sexualization of children.” That echoes similar rhetoric being used by groups such as Moms for Liberty to oppose everything from drag queen reading hours to LGBTQ books in school libraries, but the rest of the paragraph takes it to another level.

After all, “transgender ideology” is a broad enough term to not just cover specific books that some parents might find objectionable, but the very idea that people can be transgender.

Other sections of Project 2025 make this clear, calling for barring transgender Americans from serving in the military, reversing anti-discrimination rules that bar employers from firing workers for being LGBTQ and issuing regulations that declare that gender reassignment surgery is “dangerous” and should not be covered by health insurance.

But while recent clashes around LGBTQ rights have revolved around removing books from the shelves or even, in one case, barring children from a public library entirely, the broad wording in the Project 2025 proposal could be read as a call for forcing teachers and librarians to register as sex offenders for merely stocking books that acknowledge that transgender people exist. That could even end up including classics such as Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando” or Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City.”

Unlike other, more detailed proposals in Project 2025, it’s unclear exactly how this would be put into place. As the foreword glancingly acknowledges, the Supreme Court has held since 1973 that obscenity laws only apply to works without any “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” — although the current conservative majority has been known to overturn decisions from that far back. A number of states have passed laws requiring age verification to access adult content online, though the proposal doesn’t mention that approach.

Perhaps, as with Trump’s 2016 pledge, the vague proposal to ban porn may go nowhere in a second term. But the anti-LGBTQ proposals that it portends almost surely will.

Ryan Teague Beckwith

Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MSNBC. He has previously worked for such outlets as TIME magazine, Bloomberg News and CQ Roll Call. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies.

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