WASHINGTON — Donald Trump, facing a backlash over Project 2025, now claims he knows nothing about the right-wing policies and workforce management manifesto his former aides created to avoid a repeat of the chaotic lack of competent staffing that plagued his first term.
More than half of the authors Page 920 Critics described the document as follows: Authoritarian PlaybookA former Trump White House adviser or current campaign aide. His campaign secretary was featured in a Project 2025 recruitment ad, and many of his actual policies were cut down and made into a video Trump recorded for Agenda 47. At a rally in Florida on Tuesday night, Trump publicly praised one of the project’s authors, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during his administration.
“But we’re bringing back Tom Homan.” blow– The former president told thousands of followers gathered at his golf resort in Doral. “We’re bringing back all the people who did a great job at the border.”
And Trump I personally thank you “This is a wonderful group of people, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and the detailed plan for what our movement is going to do when the American people give us this enormous mandate to save America, and what your movement is going to do,” the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that runs the 2025 Project, said at a dinner in April 2022.
The screaming made his words believable. Last week’s Truth Social postsHe denied any knowledge of Project 2025 or its creators.
“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of what they are saying, and some of what they are saying is completely ridiculous and miserable. I wish them good luck with whatever they do, but I have nothing to do with them,” Trump wrote on July 5.
The denial comes three days after Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts hinted at violence during a discussion about implementing Project 2025. On the podcast: “We are in the midst of a second American revolution, and it will continue bloodlessly if the left allows it.”
Born in the chaos of 2017
The 2025 Project is only now gaining widespread attention, but its real genesis began eight years ago, when Trump suddenly became president-elect and had thousands of executive branch positions to fill, but no plan for doing so. The main reason was that Trump thought he would lose the 2016 election.
Under those assumptions, he tasked former New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie with filling mid- and lower-level political positions in a potential Trump administration, tapping into the same networks that Christie used to find candidates for previous Republican administrations.
But after Trump was elected, he scrapped all of Christie’s work and turned the project over to Vice President-elect Mike Pence just weeks before the inauguration.
As a result, the new administration has left key positions vacant for months (and thus filled by career officials) or by appointees of Trump’s Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama.
Efforts to enact Trump policies have been messy and often ineffective. For example, when Trump tried to follow through on his promise to impose a Muslim ban within days of taking office, the man who ended up writing the plan was Stephen Miller, an anti-immigrant activist and former congressional staffer who suddenly became a senior White House adviser. Miller was not a lawyer, and his travel ban was quickly overturned in court.
“It’s very rare for a politician to be placed in a high-profile position,” said a senior Trump White House official who is also a current Project 2025 participant. complained During a “background” briefing with reporters in 2019.
Plus, with the constant turnover of staff coming and going in the Trump administration, the brains there often quickly depleted. Some of the key positions in the White House were given to him. College students People who haven’t graduated yet.
To avoid that scenario, the Heritage Foundation began three years ago to compile a detailed agenda and list of conservative loyalists who would be willing to work in the next Republican administration. Over time, it has drawn on other conservative and Trump-supporting groups, and has now produced a plan to fundamentally restructure the federal government by giving the president sweeping new powers. Fire tens of thousands of civil servantsFor example, you can replace it with a political appointee. Combining an ideological framework with someone who can push it is much more effective. effective Trump has run a better administration than he did in his first term.
“As we’ve said for more than two years, Project 2025 does not represent any candidate or campaign,” Heritage Foundation spokeswoman Ellen Keenan said in a statement to HuffPost in response to questions about Trump’s wife. “We are a coalition of more than 110 conservative organizations that advocate for policy and personnel recommendations for the next conservative president. But ultimately, it is up to the president, who we believe is President Trump, to decide which recommendations to implement.”
Amanda Carpenter, a former aide to Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and now a researcher at the group United to Protect Democracy, said Trump’s current attempts to distance himself from the effort are ridiculous.
“Trump has promised that if he takes office, he will pardon the January 6 rioters, purge government officials and replace them with loyalists, weaponize the Justice Department and other agencies against those he perceives as his enemies, and order the military and other federal law enforcement to conduct the largest deportation operation in history and militarize our streets — that’s what he’s saying,” she said. “Project 2025 is simply a plan to make his rhetoric our reality.”
Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Tseng defended Trump’s blanket denial.
“He really has no idea what his former employees are doing,” Cheung said.
A radical plan to restructure the federal government
It remains to be seen how many of the hundreds of policy proposals included in Project 2025 — including restricting access to the abortion drug mifepristone, basing government social services on “biblical” values and halting climate change research — will actually become law in a second Trump term.
Trump has had a notoriously short attention span during his four years in office, and many of his demands have been ignored because they are likely to be forgotten. For example, his call to retrofit U.S. aircraft carriers with magnetic launch systems with old-fashioned steam launchers was repeatedly ignored after Navy officials grew tired of explaining that such a request would require a complete overhaul and redesign of the multibillion-dollar ships.
Trump has made it clear that if he returns to the White House in 2024, he will focus on seeking revenge on those who have wronged him, freeing up senior officials to pursue their goals as they see fit.
Democratic President Joe Biden is using the renewed interest in his radical Project 2025 proposals to attack Trump.
in Social Media post On his campaign account on Wednesday, Biden wrote, “Project 2025 will destroy America,” and provided a link to the document.
“Despite Donald Trump’s lies, his extreme Project 2025 agenda is being written and driven by his inner circle — the same extremists who comprised Trump’s first administration of loyalists and dismissed anyone who disagreed with his dangerous instincts, the same people who will help Trump ‘end’ the Constitution, ‘take revenge’ on his enemies, and rule as a ‘dictator from day one’ if he wins in November,” said Sarafina Citica, Biden’s chief campaign spokeswoman.
Rick Wilson, a former Republican consultant who now runs the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said the Trump campaign team understood in polls how “toxic” Project 2025 had become for many voters, and that was behind the decision to distance Trump from the project.
He said President Trump’s actual plan will remain the same as outlined in Project 2025, as evidenced by the Republican National Committee’s platform summary released this week.
“Putting it out on the RNC platform was like saying to ChatGPT, ‘Rewrite Project 2025 like Donald Trump would shout at his rallies,’” Wilson said.
Trump is scheduled to formally receive the Republican nomination for president next week in Milwaukee, despite recently being convicted of 34 felonies in a New York City trial and facing an additional 54 felonies in three pending federal and state indictments. Trump has not yet been sentenced for his convictions.
