Donald Trump’s Project 2025 is basically a policy blueprint/wishlist for the next Republican president. Trump’s former staffers and advisors openly worked with the Heritage Foundation on Project 2025, and absolutely everyone, of all political ideologies, agrees that Project 2025 is exactly the kind of anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ, anti-education, anti-environmentalism, anti-federal government, anti-reproductive rights, anti-immigration agenda which would be enacted during a Trump-Vance administration. One of the first things Kamala Harris did as the Democratic nominee was talk about Project 2025 and express surprise/amusement that they wrote it down and published it for everyone to see their blatantly fascist agenda. In recent weeks, there’s been a huge uptick of news about Project 2025, meaning… people are going online and reading about it, or they’re watching TikTok explainers about the agenda. Suddenly, those MAGA weirdos are getting very touchy about their f–king fascism blueprint. Which brings me to this hilarious news:
The right-wing policy operation that became a rallying cry for Democrats and a nuisance for Republican nominee Donald Trump is trying to escape the public spotlight and repair relations with Trump’s campaign.
Project 2025, a collaboration led by the Heritage Foundation among more than 110 conservative groups to develop a movement consensus blueprint for the next Republican administration, is winding down its policy operations, and its director, former Trump administration personnel official Paul Dans, is departing. The Heritage Foundation also recently distributed new talking points encouraging participants to emphasize that the project does not speak for Trump.
The former president has repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025 after relentless attacks from Democrats using some of the 900-page playbook’s more aggressive proposals to impute them to Trump’s agenda since many of the proposals were written by alumni of Trump’s White House. While some participants in the project started avoiding interviews and public appearances, Trump advisers grew furious that Heritage leaders continued promoting the project and feeding critical news coverage.
Trump senior adviser Susie Wiles repeatedly called Heritage leaders instructing them to stop promoting Project 2025. She and Trump strategist Chris LaCivita repeatedly wrote public statements disavowing the project, and then Trump started saying so in his own social media posts. More recently, LaCivita has started saying that people involved in the project would be barred from a second Trump administration.
“President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” Wiles and LaCivita said in a joint statement Tuesday. “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.”
So a blueprint written by former and current Trump staffers, working alongside the right-wing policy groups who have always seen Trump as a blank slate through which they can imprint their agenda, has absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump; The thing is, I know for a fact that Donald Trump has never read Project 2025. The man is illiterate. And yet… if you asked him specific policy changes within Project 2025, I’m sure he would be all for each and every policy proposal. He just doesn’t want to be associated with “Project 2025” because Democrats have done such a good job tying that extremist agenda/brand to Trump.
As WaPo points out, in the terrifying scenario where Trump does win the election, all of the architects of Project 2025 are going to be White House staffers or in the administration, working to enact all of their dreadful and weird policies. WaPo also points out that many of the Trump campaign’s announcements unsurprisingly mimic Project 2025’s proposals. Shocking!
Guess who wrote the foreword to the Project 2025 book?
The Trump campaign is so distanced from Project 2025, his VP literally wrote the foreword to the book. https://t.co/EiAFqYgWTw
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) July 31, 2024
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