Former President Donald Trump I’ve spent most of this week worrying about Project 2025, an initiative to produce a 900-page far-right guidebook for the next Conservative government.
At a rally in Michigan this weekend, Trump derided Project 2025 as the product of “some on the far right” and called its unnamed proposals “deeply extreme.” On Wednesday, he wrote on Truth Social, “I have no affiliation with Project 25, I know nothing about it. What I know is disinformation spread by the radical left Democrat mob. Don’t trust them!” That same day, his campaign put out an update insisting that “Project 2025 is not President Trump’s agenda,” and that the Republican platform is the document people should understand as his agenda. Fox and Friends On Thursday, Trump told the hosts that the document was written by a group of “very, very conservative people,” adding, “I had nothing to do with it. I’ve never seen it… It means nothing to me.”
But there’s a problem with that argument: Many of the “ultra-conservatives” behind the initiative, which is led by dozens of right-wing groups and spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, have close ties to Trump.
Trump has not always been as willing to distance himself from the group behind Project 2025 as he is now. As NBC News points out, Trump praised Heritage as a “great group” that would “lay the groundwork” and “lay out a detailed plan for exactly what our movement is going to do” when he spoke at a Heritage Foundation event when the group began work on the initiative in 2022.
Of note, Trump’s newly appointed running mate, Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), wrote the foreword to a forthcoming book by Dr. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and leader of Project 2025. According to the publisher, HarperCollins, the book is titled Early Light of Dawn: Reclaiming Washington to Save America The report, due out in September, identifies institutions conservatives should build, institutions we should take back, and those too corrupt to save: Ivy League colleges, the FBI,The New York Times“These include the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, BlackRock, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Endowment for Democracy.” (As my colleague David Cohn writes today, it turns out this isn’t the only far-right book Vance has recently endorsed.)
Vance’s preface, which has not yet been released to the public, is in support of the book: “We all realize that it is time to gather around the wagons and load our muskets,” he writes. “In the fight that is to come, these ideas are essential weapons.” This is what House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called for after the Trump assassination attempt: “Lowering the temperature.”
Vance’s office and a Trump campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions. Mother Jones The fact that Vance wrote the foreword to Roberts’ book, which is about the Project 2025 policy that the candidates explicitly support or reject.
As Media Matters points out, Roberts said on a podcast this month that there is overlap between Project 2025 and the GOP platform on “every single priority issue that the American people care about.” Roberts said The New York Times Last year, the Heritage Foundation denied briefing Trump on their plans, claiming the former president knew “nothing” about them.
CNN reported earlier this month that their review found that at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration were involved in Project 2025, including six former Cabinet secretaries. One of them, Russell Bott, Trump’s former Office of Management and Budget director, wrote a chapter in Project 2025’s “Imperative for Leadership” that focuses on how the president should exercise power while in office. Bott was also appointed by the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign as policy director for the committee that drafted the new GOP platform.
Another is Paul Dance, the director of Project 2025 and editor of “Imperative for Leadership,” who told a right-wing radio host last year that “Trump is very much on board with this.”
It’s no wonder that Trump has tried to feign ignorance about Project 2025, a radical package that includes a nationwide ban on medical abortion, abolishing the Department of Education, and eliminating climate protections. Democrats, especially the all-but-certain new presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, have been campaigning on the threat posed by a Trump reelection, using Project 2025 as a document outlining a potential administration plan. Harris said in her first official campaign stop this week that Project 2025 would “undermine the middle class” by cutting the social safety net, adding, “Can you believe they wrote that down?”
In ~ Fox and Friends Today, President Trump said of the policy proposals in the document, “They wrote things that I don’t agree with, and in some cases I may agree with, but it’s like when people on the radical left write something and people get upset.”
But if Trump actually claims he “disagrees” with any specific policy idea outlined in the plan, he hasn’t said anything specific yet. So for now, that A group of influential Republicans who are already shaping Trump’s potential administration have argued that they do not support Project 2025. that.
