Despite being written by over 140 people who worked in Donald Trump’s White House, Project 2025 seems to be cut off from the Trump campaign for good.
Last week, Paul Dans, the head of Project 2025, announced he was stepping down from both the project and the Heritage Foundation. Does this mean the end of Project 2025, or the beginning of a new phase?
Project 2025 is a 900-page playbook that outlines proposals for a conservative presidency. (I have written extensively about Project 2025 in previous issues of The Preamble, and even interviewed Dans. You can see all the articles here.)
This summer, the public outcry over 2025 began. During the BET Awards in May, host Taraji P. Henson said, “The Project 2025 plan is not a game, look it up.”
In response, actor Mark Ruffalo posted a video of Henson’s speech on X and said, “Don’t be fooled by Project 2025’s extremist and perverse ideology. Trump is bringing it to all our lives: abortion, LGBTQIA+ rights, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of education, and equality between the races and genders—GONE. Forced birth and forced religion. Trump’s American Taliban.”
Late night hosts including John Oliver, Seth Meyers, and Stephen Colbert also highlighted the project. On July 11, Colbert called Project 2025 “an obvious and chilling blueprint for a Christo-fascist future.”
President Biden criticized Project 2025 during his campaign, saying what’s in the plan should “scare every American.” After he dropped out and Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, she said Trump would use Project 2025 and the recent Supreme Court decision that granted presidents full immunity for official acts to become a dictator.
In response, Trump posted on Truth Social saying, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
Trump does know who is behind it, he is quite familiar with the Heritage Foundation. He has spoken at their events, where he said things like, “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.”
After he was elected, Heritage says he adopted two-thirds of their policy recommendations in the first year.
In September 2023, the Trump campaign national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, participated in a Project 2025 video promoting the plan, former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office John McEntee, who is one of Trump's most trusted aides, is a senior adviser for the project.
This is a very short summary, the full list of former Trump administration officials and current advisors who helped write the plan is lengthy. One of Project 2025 contributors (who stayed anonymous) told Rolling Stone, Trump essentially “birthed” Project 2025, and it is based on his publicly-stated desires, including things like his executive order to place more federal employees under presidential control.
Project 2025 has proven to be highly unpopular with voters. According to Navigator Research, only 11% of voters viewed it favorably. Faced with being tied to a losing proposal, the Trump campaign says they are cutting ties.
By the end of July, he called it “ridiculous and abysmal.” According to The Washington Post, Trump senior adviser Susie Wiles called Heritage leaders multiple times and told them to stop promoting Project 2025. Wiles, along with Trump strategist Chris LaCivita, wrote public statements denying connections to the project.
Even Paul Dans got involved, saying that Democrats were “vilifying Project 2025,” and, “what Democrats [have] said about Project 2025 is probably the greatest misinformation campaign since the Russia hoax.”
(When I spoke to him in early June, Dans specifically named Trump as the person who will be in charge of implementing the objectives outlined in the project.)
After Dans’ resignation, Wiles and LaCivita said in a joint statement, “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.”
But despite Dans’ exit, Project 2025 will continue. The president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, said “When we began Project 2025 in April 2022, we set a timeline for the project to conclude its policy drafting after the two party conventions this year, and we are sticking to that timeline.”
Meanwhile, though Trump continues to distance himself from Project 2025, some people, including Project 2025 writers, don’t believe his distancing will last forever.
There are nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and Trump, including at least 140 people who worked in the first Trump administration who participated in the project. This includes four people he nominated as ambassadors and six former Cabinet secretaries.
The anonymous Project 2025 contributor told Rolling Stone, “70 to 80 percent of the people who wrote the book are going to be in his second administration — the cabinet, under secretaries, assistant secretaries, the senior advisers. They’re all going to be the foot soldiers in a second Trump administration. You can’t look at this constellation of organizations and people without seeing that they’re all his people.”
Trump’s team has released “Agenda 47,” a list of policy plans supported by Trump that they are pushing instead of Project 2025. Some of the policy proposals in Agenda 47 are similar to Project 2025, especially immigration (both support mass deportations).
And despite Dans’s resignation, the Heritage Foundation isn’t shutting down Project 2025. Dans said that Heritage will, “continue to put Project 2025 and its recommendations in a place to be of best assistance to the new Conservative Administration, in November.”
And don’t expect Kamala Harris’s campaign to just let this one go, either. Her campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, said: “This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country.”