We are now one year into Donald Trump’s second term, and something strange is happening in political media. A lot of people who spent years insisting that the so-called “alarmists” were being hysterical have started, tentatively, to admit that maybe they got it wrong.

Last April, David Brooks published a long essay in The Atlantic titled “I Should Have Seen This Coming,” in which he acknowledged that he’d underestimated how much conservatism had become pure anti-liberal reaction. Jon Stewart, who spent the early weeks of the second Trump administration chiding liberals for being too quick to use the word “fascism,” eventually conceded on air: “I did not think we would get this authoritarian this fast. I really didn’t. I’m sorry. Who could’ve known? Maybe if somebody out there had yelled at me on Bluesky about this, I would have known. But no one did. Except every day. In all caps.”

Political scientist Corey Robin, who had spent years dismissing those who called MAGA fascist, admitted on an October podcast: “I was skeptical coming into this second administration that they would be able to wield the kind of power that people feared they would wield. I have since turned out to be wrong.”

And then there are the journalists who covered the 2024 campaign, who are now looking back at their own work with what might charitably be called discomfort. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially after listening to a recent podcast that crystallized something for me.

On the one-year anniversary of Trump’s return to power, Reuters dropped the latest episode of its On Assignment podcast. The guest was Sally Buzbee, the outlet’s North American editor, who joined Reuters in December 2024 after leaving The Washington Post. Host Jonah Green asked her about covering the first year of Trump’s second term, and Buzbee offered this reflection:

I think it is actually, many presidents are very, very active in their first year in office. But I think, it is fair to say that this is sort of historically ambitious, energetic, and just a real agenda. I don’t think in those first few days, we understood what an organized agenda they had for his second term, but now we understand that.

We didn’t understand.

Now we understand.

I found myself rewinding that part of the episode a few times because I wasn’t sure I’d heard it correctly. Buzbee, who spent years running one of the country’s most important newspapers and now oversees political coverage for one of the world’s largest news agencies, was saying that the press didn’t grasp how organized Trump’s second-term agenda would be. That it took watching the administration in action for journalists to finally get it.

But then, later in the same interview, Buzbee said this:

We all sort of knew that we knew about Project 2025. We knew that they were going to come into a second term more organized. I think the level of organization and the level of like methodical action has surprised me.

So which is it? Did “we” not understand the organized agenda, or did “we” know about Project 2025 and know they’d be more organized this time around?

Project 2025, for anyone who somehow missed the discourse, is a nearly 900-page policy document published by the Heritage Foundation in April 2023. It lays out, in exhaustive detail, exactly what a second Trump administration should do: gut the civil service, stack agencies with loyalists, restrict abortion access, roll back LGBTQ protections, dismantle the Department of Education, and dramatically expand executive power. The document was publicly available. You could download it. I have a copy on my computer right now. Anyone who wanted to know what Trump’s allies were planning could simply read it.

And yet Buzbee describes herself as “surprised” by the methodical action. Surprised by the organization. Surprised, apparently, that the people who wrote a detailed manual explaining what they intended to do went ahead and did those things.

I reached out to Reuters’ media relations department to ask Buzbee about this. I wanted to understand the disconnect between knowing about Project 2025 and not understanding the organized agenda. I asked what it would have taken for major outlets to treat the document as a roadmap rather than speculation. I asked how the press should handle situations where Trump’s denial of involvement with something is treated as more credible than the documented evidence of his involvement.

I haven’t heard back as of publication, but I’ll update this piece if I do.

But the question I’m asking isn’t really about Buzbee specifically. She wasn’t at Reuters during the 2024 campaign. She’s speaking in the collective “we” of political journalism, taking on the institutional voice of a profession that, by its own admission, failed to understand something that was written down and handed to them. She’s saying out loud what a lot of journalists seem to believe: that the organized nature of Trump’s agenda was somehow unknowable until it started happening.

But it wasn’t unknowable. It is literally the job of political journalists to know what politicians are planning to do. It is the job to read policy documents, to track personnel, to notice when a candidate praises an organization on video and then claims to know nothing about it. This is the work. And yet, when advocates and experts did that work and tried to warn people about what was coming, they were dismissed as partisan or alarmist. When Trump lied about his involvement with Project 2025, that lie was treated as a fact that needed to be carefully weighed.

And now, a year in, with more than two-thirds of Trump’s week one executive orders tracking closely with Project 2025’s proposals, with the man who directed Project 2025 now running the Office of Management and Budget, with Trump himself publicly referencing Russell Vought as being “of Project 2025 fame,” after months of denying any connection, the press is offering........

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