Commentary
The Trump campaign’s desperate and dishonest attempts to distance itself from the MAGA movement’s wildly unpopular Project 2025 policy agenda are failing miserably.
The Heritage Foundation, a central hub of the right-wing political infrastructure which moved aggressively into the MAGA camp under the leadership of its current president Kevin Roberts, launched Project 2025 in 2022. Right Wing Watch took notice, reporting on the project’s confident assertion that it was preparing the MAGA movement to “take the reins of government” after the 2024 election. As RWW noted, by that point the right-wing movement had achieved its long-sought goal of taking dominant control of the Supreme Court. Project 2025 is a game plan to do the same for the executive branch.
Heritage gathered dozens of former Trump administration officials and other MAGA movement leaders to produce a more than 900-page policy agenda detailing their plans. They created a blueprint to give the next conservative president virtually dictatorial powers to bend federal agencies to his will, turning them into weapons against his personal enemies and political opponents and an enforcement arm for the Christian nationalist worldview, while at the same time sabotaging agencies’ ability to carry out their mission to protect American workers, communities and the environment. Project 2025 began recruiting and training tens of thousands of ideological warriors to prepare them to fill the jobs of the federal government employees they plan to purge.
But the Heritage Foundation’s arrogance may have gotten the better of them. It turns out that most Americans do not want to gut environmental protections, public education, and civil rights enforcement. Most Americans don’t want federal power being used to intrude into families’ most intimate decisions—or to enforce the idea that there’s only one legitimate form of family.
Public opposition to Project 2025 grew as more media outlets and policy experts dug into the policy agenda this year, and explained who would be hurt if these policies were implemented. Public awareness soared after John Oliver dedicated the June 16 episode of Last Week Tonight to exposing Project 2025, and again when actress Taraji P. Henson used her platform as host of the June 30 BET Awards to sound the alarm, telling people, “The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up.”
Trying to limit the political damage, Trump has pretended not to know anything about Project 2025, using his Truth social network to claim on July 5, “I have no idea who is behind it” and “I have nothing to do with them.” These literally unbelievable claims unraveled quickly.
Here are some of the reasons Trump cannot shake himself loose from Project 2025:
- In April 2022, as the Heritage Foundation was gearing up to launch Project 2025, Trump gave a speech to Heritage donors, where he said, “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.” A Heritage Foundation press release announcing Trump’s appearance noted, “During his four years as president, his administration worked closely with Heritage on a number of policy initiatives. In addition, dozens of Heritage staff and alumni worked in the Trump administration; several of whom have since returned to Heritage.”
- At least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a role in Project 2025, including six former cabinet secretaries, according to CNN, and dozens more Trump staffers work for groups that are part of the Project 2025 coalition, which is made up of more than 100 MAGA and right-wing organizations.
- The Heritage Foundation was a major sponsor of this year’s Republican National Convention and hosted a day-long “policy fest” to promote Project 2025’s agenda on the first day of the convention. The event ended with a conversation between Heritage President Kevin Roberts and former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, who delivered a spiritual warfare message.
- Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist former Trump administration official and a Project 2025 architect, was a leader of the Trump team that jammed the campaign’s platform language down the throats of the GOP platform committee in an authoritarian, dissent-crushing manner suggestive of the methods by which Project 2025 envisions a second Trump administration wielding power.
Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025 were ultimately doomed by his choice of MAGA hardliner J.D. Vance as his running mate. Vance has praised Project 2025’s authoritarian, anti-equality, anti-freedom policy agenda. Right Wing Watch reported during the RNC that Vance wrote the introduction to Roberts’ new book, “Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America.” As Right Wing Watch noted at the time, “Roberts’ book title is reminiscent of a joke told among Federalist Society operatives describing their long game to repeal the New Deal and reverse a century of precedent and progress: ‘Rome Wasn’t Burned in a Day.’”
Since then, the Trump camp has been flailing.
At the end of July, Project 2025 director Kevin Dans, championed as hero by MAGA leaders like Steve Bannon, was apparently forced to step down under pressure from the Trump campaign, which wanted some beneficial headlines suggesting that Project 2025 was shutting down. In reality, the policy agenda is in place, along with the secret 180-day game plan for pushing it forward, and Heritage continues to recruit potential foot soldiers.
Roberts and his publisher toned down his book’s subtitle, removing the unlit match from the cover and changing “Burning Down Washington” to “Taking Back Washington.” Then they announced that the book’s release—which was scheduled for September—would be delayed until after the election. Unfortunately for Trump and Vance, some journalists and researchers got review copies of the book and have reported on Roberts’ ideology and Vance’s violent rhetoric.
Roberts’ book and Vance’s enthusiastic endorsement of it are good examples of a phenomenon I identified in an article on Project 2025 for Political Research Associate’s Public Eye magazine earlier this year. I noted that Project 2025 reflects “a movement-level, ideological shift away from a libertarian mistrust of government power and toward an authoritarian view of government power being used ruthlessly—whether as a righteous force wielded to advance a ‘biblical worldview’ or turned against an ‘administrative state’ supposedly captured by a radical Marxist left.”
As Alex Shephard reported in The New Republic, Vance writes in his foreword, “The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems. We are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach.” Vance continues:
As Kevin Roberts writes, “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”
We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.
The most recent blow to the Trump campaign’s attempts to hide the MAGA movement’s agenda from the American public is the release by ProPublica and Documented of 14 hours of Project 2025 training videos, “which are intended to train the next conservative administration’s political appointees 'to be ready on day one.'” ProPublica and Documented reported that 29 of the 36 speakers on the videos worked on Trump’s transition team, his administration, or his 2024 campaign.
One video suggests that Project 2025 seeks to ensure that a returned President Trump would not hire the kind of staffers who were willing to stand up to him and defend the rule of law when he tried to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. Former Trump administration lawyer Dan Huff seems to confirm that Project 2025 is only interested in people willing to go along with the president, no matter what. “If you’re not on board with helping implement a dramatic course correction because you’re afraid it’ll damage your future employment prospects, it’ll harm you socially — look, I get it,” Huff says. “That’s a real danger. It’s a real thing. But please: Do us all a favor and sit this one out.”
