Mother Jones illustration; Xpb/Action Press/ZUMA; Getty
Former President Donald Trump has spent much of this week freaking out about Project 2025, the initiative that produced the 900-page extremist right-wing guidebook for the next conservative administration.
This weekend, at a rally in Michigan, Trump derided Project 2025 as a product of “some on the severe right” and said unnamed proposals included in it as “seriously extreme.” On Wednesday, he wrote on Truth Social: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!” The same day, his campaign put out an update claiming, “Project 2025 is not President Trump’s agenda” and insisting that the GOP platform is the document that people should understand as his agenda. In a live call-in to Fox and Friends on Thursday, Trump told the hosts the document was written by a group of “very, very conservative people,” adding: “I have nothing to do with the document. I’ve never seen the document…it doesn’t speak for me.”
But there’s a problem with those claims: Many of the “very conservative people” behind the initiative—which is led by dozens of right-wing groups and spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation—have close ties to Trump.
Trump did not always seek to distance himself from the group behind Project 2025 as much as he is now. As NBC News pointed out, back in 2022 Trump spoke at a Heritage Foundation event as the group began working on the initiative, praising Heritage as “a great group” that was “going to lay the groundwork” and “detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
Notably, it turns out Trump’s newly named running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), wrote the foreword of a forthcoming book by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and leader of Project 2025. According to publisher HarperCollins, the book—titled Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America and set to publish in September—”identifies institutions that conservatives need to build, others that we need to take back, and more still that are too corrupt to save: Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, BlackRock, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, to name a few.” (It turns out this is not the only far-right book Vance has endorsed recently, as my colleague David Corn wrote today.)
While Vance’s forward does not yet appear to be publicly available, his endorsement for the book is: “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets,” he writes. “In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.” So much for “turning down the temperature,” as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called for after the attempted assassination of Trump.
Spokespeople for Vance’s office and the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones about Vance writing the forward of Roberts’ book or which Project 2025 policies the candidates explicitly endorse or disavow.
As Media Matters points out, Roberts also said on a podcast this month that there’s an overlap between Project 2025 and the GOP platform on “all of the priority issues that the American people care about.” Roberts told the New York Times last year that the Heritage Foundation had briefed Trump on their plans, shutting down the ex-president’s claims he knows “nothing about” it.
CNN reported earlier this month that their review found that at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration were involved with Project 2025, including six of his former Cabinet secretaries. One of those people, Russell Vought, Trump’s former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote a chapter of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” which focused on how the president should wield power in office. Vought was also appointed by the Republican National Committee and the Trump Campaign to be the policy director of the committee that wrote the new GOP platform.
Another is Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025 and an editor of the “Mandate for Leadership,” who told a right-wing radio host last year that “Trump’s very bought in with this.”
It’s no surprise Trump has sought to feign ignorance about Project 2025, given the extreme policies laid out in it, including a nationwide ban on medication abortion, eliminating the Department of Education, and abolishing climate protections. Democrats, and especially the all-but-certain new presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, have been campaigning on the threats posed if Trump is reelected, and using Project 2025 as a document of the potential administration’s plans. At her first official campaign rally this week, Harris said Project 2025 would “weaken the middle class” through its cuts to the social safety net, adding, “Can you believe they put that thing in writing?”
On Fox and Friends today, speaking about the policy proposals outlined in the document, Trump said, “They wrote something that I disagree with in many cases, and in some cases you agree, but it’s like a group of radical left people that write something, and you know, people get angry by it.”
But if Trump actually “disagrees” with certain policy ideas the plan outlines, as he claims, he has yet to specify them. So for now, remember that even if he claims not to support Project 2025, hordes of influential Republicans already shaping Trump’s potential administration wrote it.
