Donald Trump’s top advisers are organizing an authoritarian “revolution,” and they are recruiting a 20,000-strong “army” of loyalists to carry it out. Yet Trump himself claims to know nothing about the project.
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Don’t fall for it.
Over the past couple years, the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank has been running a presidential transition project called “
Project 2025.” It includes a 900-page
“policy bible” — far more comprehensive than the
16-page convention platform recently released by the Republican National Committee. The Heritage document’s 30 chapters provide a detailed game plan for how the next Republican president should curb the First Amendment, roll back gay rights, infuse Christianity into more state functions, repeal climate and environmental protections, and limit reproductive care and health care more broadly. Oh, and it also disembowels much of the federal government and concentrates more power in the hands of the president.
Because rampant vacancies and poor training limited Trump’s ability to implement his agenda last time, Project 2025 has also been recruiting and training thousands of loyal foot soldiers to execute these policies. As Paul Dans, Project 2025 director and former chief of staff of the Office of Personnel Management under Trump,
put it: “Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”
Trump
has disavowed any involvement in the project. In a post on his social media platform Friday, he
claimed he knows “nothing about Project 2025” and has “no idea who is behind it.”
This is preposterous.
Besides Dans, hundreds of Trump appointees and aides are part of the initiative. Among them is
Russell Vought, Trump’s former head of the Office of Management and Budget, who is now policy director for the Republican National Committee. Also
Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser. Plus
John McEntee, one of Trump’s closest aides, who recently told a conservative podcast that Project 2025 will
“integrate a lot of our work” with the Trump campaign later this year. Meanwhile, Trump’s super PAC is running ads highlighting Project 2025.
So why might Trump and his campaign wish to distance him from Heritage’s project? Partly because of troubling comments made last week by the foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts. In an appearance on the
“War Room” podcast, founded by Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, Roberts declared that “we are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
But the problem isn’t merely this chilling threat. The greater liability is nearly everything Project 2025 says Trump would
do as president, as it’s chock-full of unpopular, sometimes even dystopian policies.
Biden’s delegates are loyalists. Don’t expect a show of independence.
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For instance, it says “Pornography should be outlawed” and “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned,” without defining “pornography.” Given the ongoing
library wars, which have seen
books about gay penguins and how puberty works challenged as obscene, this seems like a dangerous, criminal campaign for the president to launch. Project 2025 would also infuse Judeo-Christian values throughout our government, such as its proposal for the state to formally recognize the Sabbath.
When it comes to health care, the platform would
slash Medicaid funding, end health department programs promoting “LGBTQ+ equity,” and direct the Food and Drug Administration to reverse its approval of medication
abortion drugs. On
climate and energy, it would cut federal funding for research and investment in renewables and block expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar power.
Among its unpopular immigration proposals, the blueprint would effectively terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which provides work permits and protection from deportation to undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. It would also further restrict
legal immigration. For example, it would dismantle the program that allows
seasonal agricultural workers to come here on visas.
More broadly, the playbook explains how the president would purge nonpartisan career civil servants and experts (the supposed “deep state”) and replace them with political appointees. This was actually a project
Trump began on his way out the door in 2020 but failed to complete.
The platform also lays out how the president would seize direct control of independent agencies such as the FBI and Federal Trade Commission. Conveniently, this would better enable Trump to use the powers of state to
reward his friends and punish his enemies, as he has vowed to do (and
often attempted the last time he was president).
Perhaps when Trump says he knows nothing about Project 2025, he means he’s unfamiliar with its nitty-gritty details. That could be true; few would mistake the man for a policy wonk.
But last time around, he delegated major administrative decisions to his underlings, and he’d likely do the same again in a second term. Which is why this playbook, written by those same underlings, should be taken seriously — whether you buy Trump’s professed ignorance of the malevolence ahead or not.
