I explained this in Section 3: The General Welfare after it took me five paragraphs to (not even fully) address the lies contained in a single sentence of Project 2025, but let me talk here for a moment about what rhetorical technique they’re primarily using, and what their goal is.

This is a purposeful rhetorical technique called the “firehose of falsehood” or the “gish gallop.” It involves flooding a conversation or debate with a large number of false or misleading statements in rapid succession. This strategy overwhelms the listener or opponent, making it difficult or impossible to fact-check each claim in real-time or even after the fact. Trump engages in this style of rhetoric often. In a debate, he lies so confidently and so often that it’s impossible for an opponent to address every single lie in the time allotted. Each individual claim might be easily debunked, but the sheer number of falsehoods makes it hard to address them all.

The audience is bombarded with so much information that it becomes hard to discern truth from lies. Fact-checkers, journalists, or opponents trying to correct the falsehoods are faced with an impossible task of addressing all claims simultaneously. There is also a time and effort disparity at work here. It’s fast and easy to make a false claim. Fact-checking requires much more time and effort (this website is a prime example.) Each lie requires research, evidence, and explanation to debunk, whereas the original misinformation can be delivered without regard for truth, context or nuance. Even if some of the false claims are debunked, many of them may still stick with parts of the audience, especially if they reinforce existing biases. The volume of lies also helps spread misinformation faster than corrections can be issued.

The reason this technique is effective, is that people have a limited capacity to process information, and when they’re presented with too many claims at once – especially conflicting or false ones – their ability to critically evaluate each one diminishes. When confronted with numerous false statements, the audience might start to feel that “the truth is somewhere in the middle”, even when it’s not. This tactic works by creating doubt and eroding trust in credible sources or facts. Constantly fact-checking every lie becomes exhausting for the audience and the fact-checker. People may give up trying to discern what’s true and accept some misinformation by default. In a debate or discussion, the person using this technique may appear knowledgeable or confident simply because they have presented more information, regardless of its accuracy. Audiences sometimes mistake quantity for quality.

I’m really feeling fact-check fatigue! Fact-checkers have it hard. They have to choose and prioritize which claims to debunk, knowing they can’t address all of them. This often means some falsehoods go unchallenged, giving them room to spread. While lies can be simple and emotionally charged, the truth is often more complex and nuanced, requiring longer explanations. The truth also rarely appeals to emotion, another effective rhetorical technique. This makes it harder for debunkers to be as quick or effective as the original propagandist. Also, if fact-checkers focus only on the most egregious claims, they may be accused of cherry-picking or being biased, even though their capacity to check everything is limited.

This rhetorical style is not an accident. The writers of Project 2025 are hoping that the audience becomes too exhausted and confused to be able to call them out on all of their lies.

Suffice it to say, if I (inevitably) fail to address every single claim, it’s not that I’m letting that claim go unchallenged. I literally do not have enough time to debunk every single thing in the document. No one person does. And they’re counting on no one trying.

Obviously, that’s not the only rhetorical technique Project 2025 is using, but that’s the big one. Others they’re very commonly using include:

• Appeal to Emotion (persuading an audience by triggering emotional responses like fear, anger, pity, or joy.) This is 100% the rhetorical technique behind anti-immigrant sentiment, for example. “They’re eating the dogs.”
• Straw Man Arguments (misrepresenting or oversimplifying your opponent’s argument to make it easier to attack.) A common example of this is climate change denial rhetoric. “People who support environmental regulations want to shut down all industries”, or “people who support defunding the police hate the police and want to leave communities unprotected.”
• False Dichotomies (presenting only two options when more exist, while framing one as clearly worse.) A common example of this is war propaganda, like George W. Bush famously said, “You’re either with us, or against us.”
• Red Herrings (introducing an irrelevant-to-the-discussion topic to divert attention away from the real issue.) A common example of this in U.S. rhetorical propaganda, which combines false dichotomies and red herrings, are politicians and pundits who say things like, “we shouldn’t take care of homeless people until we take care of our veterans.” Well, they have no intention of taking care of veterans. They’re just using them as an excuse not to do anything else, either. Trump also engages in a form of this type of rhetoric a lot. In order to distract from one scandal (such as a terrible debate performance), he introduces something so outrageous (such as claiming that legal Haitian immigrants are 1) actually illegal and 2) eating your pets), that the media feels they have no choice but to talk about the new outrage instead, thus leaving less time to focus on the original issue.
• Begging the Question / Circular Reasoning (assuming the conclusion along with the premise while providing no evidence of it.) A common political example of this is “We need stricter voter ID laws because we need to prevent voter fraud.” The statement assumes that voter fraud is a widespread issue without actually providing any evidence of that. The fraud part is assumed rather than demonstrated. In reality, voter fraud is vanishingly rare¹, but repeating these kinds of lies make it more difficult for millions of eligible Americans to participate in elections, which is the goal of such rhetoric, along with the broader goal of getting so many people to believe this lie, that they’ll be more easily led to believe that an election was “rigged” if the results don’t go their way. They’re laying the groundwork for more claims of a stolen election. Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation are at the forefront of pushing these types of lies, up to and including manufacturing false evidence.²
• False Equivalencies (equating two things that aren’t truly comparable in an attempt to make one seem more or less reasonable or acceptable.) “Allowing refugees is just like letting criminals into the country.” Another form of this type of rhetoric is “both sides-ing” issues, such as “both sides of the climate change debate have valid points, so we should consider them equally.” This creates a false equivalence by implying that the scientific consensus, which is supported by overwhelming evidence from climate scientists, is equal to the opinion of a climate change denier, which either lacks scientific basis or is motivated by political or economic interests. The two sides are NOT supported equally by evidence, but this framing suggests that they deserve the same weight in policy discussions. The idea that “my opinion is just as good as your expertise” is a relatively modern one, in terms of political rhetoric. Previous eras placed significantly more value on expertise. Now, we have entire manifestos written for the “post-truth era” that argue for the government being entirely run by partisan bootlickers who believe that their opinions are as good as expertise, rather than actual experts.
• Hasty Generalizations (drawing a conclusion based on insufficient or biased evidence.) “I heard on TV a rumor that someone who may or may not be Haitian once ate a cat, so all Haitians are eating your pets.”