Beware: Trump is Project 2025 — and he cannot escape it

“Project 2025” is nothing short of a 900-page blueprint for guiding Donald Trump’s second term of office if he’s reelected.

After the Heritage Foundation unveiled Project 2025 in April last year when Trump was seeking the Republican nomination, he had no problem with it.

But now that the nation is turning its attention to the general election, Trump doesn’t want Project 2025’s extremism to turn off independents and moderates.

So Trump claimed Friday on his Truth Social platform that he has “no idea who is behind” Project 2025.

This is another in a long line of Trump lies.

The Project 2025 playbook was written by more than 20 officials who Trump himself appointed during his first term. If he has “no idea” who they are, he’s showing an alarming cognitive decline.

One of the leaders of Project 2025 is Russ Vought. Vought was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, a key position in the White House. Vought is also drafting Trump’s 2024 GOP platform.

Another Project 2025 leader is John McEntee, another of Trump’s top White House aides. (McEntee recently went viral with a video in which he claimed he gives counterfeit money to homeless people to get them arrested.)

Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, and both of its associate directors, Spencer Chretien and Troup Hemenway, were in charge of personnel in Trump’s White House.

Even the national press secretary for Trump’s campaign appears in the Project 2025 recruitment video.

Trump says he “knows nothing” about Project 2025. And he says he “disagrees” with it.

As the former chairman of the Republican Party, Michael Steele put it, “Ok, let’s all play with Stupid for minute … so exactly how do you ‘disagree’ with something you ‘know nothing about’ or ‘have no idea’ who is behind, saying or doing the thing you disagree with?”

The Trump campaign platform is basically Project 2025. Trump’s Make America Great Again PAC is running ads calling it “Trump’s Project 2025.” The Make America Great Again PAC also created the website TrumpProject2025.com.

Trump might be trying to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation, concerned that it will also alarm independents and moderates.

On Wednesday, Heritage president Kevin Roberts raised the prospect of political violence. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts told the “War Room” podcast, founded by Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

In case there’s any doubt that Trump and the Heritage Foundation are working in close partnership, Trump can be seen in this video praising the Heritage Foundation and saying he “needs” them to “achieve” his goals.

The close relationship between Trump and the Heritage Foundation goes back years. In 2018, the Heritage Foundation bragged that Trump implemented two-thirds of their policy recommendations in his first year — more than any other president had done for them.

The goals of Project 2025 are the same goals Trump tried to achieve in his first term or has been advocating in this campaign.

One key goal of Project 2025 is to purge all government agencies of anyone more loyal to the Constitution than to Trump — a process Trump himself started in October 2020 when he hoped to remain in office.

Trump has promised to give right-wing evangelical Christians what they want. Accordingly, Project 2025 calls for withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, expelling trans service members from the military, banning lifesaving gender-affirming care for young people, ending all diversity programs, and using “school choice” to gut public education.

Project 2025 also calls for eliminating “woke propaganda” from all laws and federal regulations — including the terms “sexual orientation,” “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” “gender equality,” and “reproductive rights.”

Other items in the Project 2025 blueprint are also what Trump has advocated on the campaign trail, including mass arrests and deportations of undocumented people in the United States, ending many worker protections, dropping prosecutions of far-right militias like the Proud Boys, and giving additional tax cuts to big corporations and the rich.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that climate change is a “hoax.” Project 2025 calls for expanding oil drilling in the United States, shrinking the geographic footprint of national monuments, terminating clean energy incentives, and ending fossil-fuel regulations.

Trump has said he’d seek vengeance against those who have prosecuted him for his illegal acts. Project 2025 calls for the prosecution of district attorneys Trump doesn’t like and the takeover of law enforcement in blue cities and states.

Project 2025 is, in short, the plan to implement what Donald Trump has said he wants to do if he’s reelected.

Trump may want to distance himself from Project 2025 in order to come off less bonkers to independents and moderates, but he can’t escape it. The document embodies everything he stands for.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/