A desperate Trump wants to distance himself from Project 2025. Here's why.
There's a reason Trump doesn't want voters to know the GOP's plans if he gets elected
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On Friday, Donald Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025, the 922-page conservative playbook for a second Trump administration. He (or someone on his campaign staff) posted on Truth Social:
You can tell he’s desperate to wash his hands clean of this by the way he pretends to “know nothing” about the plan while simultaneously saying he disagrees with certain parts of it… which would require him to know what’s in it. (Which parts does he think are “ridiculous and abysmal”? Who knows.)
He’s also lying when he claims to have “no idea” who’s behind it since many of the key players—listed in the document itself—were in his previous administration. Here’s the Washington Post summarizing the cast of characters:
People involved in Project 2025 include Ben Carson, Trump’s former housing secretary; Peter Navarro, White House trade adviser under Trump; and Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump. Earlier this year, Trump and the Republican National Committee named Vought as policy director for the RNC committee crafting the party platform ahead of its national convention this month in Milwaukee.
Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is a senior partner in one of the groups advising Project 2025, the Conservative Partnership Institute. And John McEntee, director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office under Trump, serves as a senior adviser to Project 2025.
Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, also appeared in a Project 2025 video last year promoting a program to train possible political appointees.
It’s possible Trump didn’t even know his account posted this and that it came from his campaign team since the post includes proper grammar, complete sentences, and normal capitalization. That’s just not the way Trump posts. Or speaks. Or thinks.
But there’s a reason Trump is now pretending he has nothing to do with a playbook centered entirely around him: More and more people are discovering what’s in it—and they’re rightly horrified.
In recent weeks, Project 2025 was covered in depth by Last Week Tonight (which said a second Trump term would be defined by “ruthless efficiency”) and got mentioned during the BET Awards by host Taraji P. Henson (“The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up”). Rep. Jared Huffman and House Democrats even launched a task force to combat Project 2025, which they refer to as a “dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will.” There’s been non-stop coverage from progressive outlets as well as mainstream press.
With Joe Biden’s campaign currently in freefall, the last thing Trump wants to do is alienate the moderate voters he would need in the all-important swing states. That’s why he’s treating Project 2025 like E. Jean Carroll, distancing himself as much as he can despite all the available evidence.
That’s why now is a good time to remind everyone what Project 2025, a product of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, calls for if Republicans ever retake control of the government.
(By the way, I know it sounds similar to “Project Blitz,” the Christian Right’s playbook to change laws and revise history to promote an evangelical-friendly future for the country, and there’s plenty of overlap between the two, but they are different projects.)
Project 2025 is named after the year when the winner of the 2024 election would be inaugurated, and proponents don’t plan to waste any time gutting the government in the first 180 days of the new administration.
For example, they would reinstate Schedule F, giving them the power to reclassify, then fire, tens of thousands of career government employees… basically all the people who keep the government running and working smoothly. Replacing them with political cronies is virtually guaranteed to break the engine that keeps the nation functioning, which Republicans are eager to do in part so that they can blame the dysfunction they’re creating on Democrats.
To get around controversial Senate confirmations, Project 2025 says the president should simply appoint acting heads of agencies, giving more power to the Republican president with virtually no checks on his authority. The president could also authorize foreign arms sales without congressional approval.
There’s a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, particularly curbing its independence and ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of misinformation. It calls for stepped-up prosecution of anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.
There are proposals to have the Pentagon “abolish” its recent diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, what the project calls the “woke” agenda, and reinstate service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
A lot of this reads like a Tucker Carlson fever dream. But make no mistake: It would elevate a conservative brand of Christianity above other faiths, no faith, and other kinds of Christian faith.
We see this in the first few pages, when Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts writes, “Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent.”
All of that is a lie. Church/state separation groups are not calling for churches to lose their tax-exempt statuses on the basis of their preaching; the only time that has come up is when pastors endorse political candidates from the pulpit, violating their own agreement with the IRS.
Elsewhere, the document claims “the Biden Administration has been hostile to people of faith, especially those with traditional beliefs about marriage, gender, and sexuality.”
The Biden administration opposes discrimination and bigotry; they have no problem with people of faith. (Biden is, in fact, a person of faith.) The fact that Project 2025 conflates the two says more about the type of Christianity they espouse than anything negative about the current administration.
Then consider how they plan to attack the education system (according to FFRF Action Fund, the lobbying arm of the Freedom From Religion Foundation):
… in addition to eliminating the Department of Education — effectively weakening public schools across the country — Project 2025 calls for mandatory religious exemptions from accreditation “standards and criteria” for private schools. In other words, religious private schools and universities that fail to meet accreditation standards would be entitled to claim accreditation anyway — simply because of their religious beliefs.
Similarly, the document says no public institution could require a teacher to use a transgender student’s pronouns if it goes against the teacher’s religious beliefs.
Sex discrimination protections get attacked as well. The Obama administration allowed colleges to request religious exemptions when it came to Title IX rules, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. The list of schools receiving those exemptions were made public. But Project 2025 aims to hide that “list of shame” from public view, making it harder for Americans to see which schools promote faith-based sex discrimination.
Project 2025 also wants to funnel federal grant money to “biblically based” groups that oppose marriage equality and transgender identities. Specifically, they want to reward groups who say marriage is between “one man and one unrelated woman.”
The document also condemns any “pressure to conform to nonreligious definitions of marriage and family” because those definitions treat gay people as people.
The conservatives at Project 2025 don’t want to see wages increased for workers across the board, but they do believe that anyone who works on the “Sabbath” should be eligible for overtime pay. (The goal is to pressure employers to simply not be open on Sundays, which coincides with the Christian version of a day of rest.)
There are multiple references to the country’s supposed “Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis” and all of our “God-given” rights, but there are virtually no mentions of non-Christian religious beliefs. As FFRF Action Fund notes, “the only mentions of Islam in the 920-page publication are references to Islamic terrorism and concerns over the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear capabilities.” The document also says, “Religious devotion and spirituality are the greatest sources of happiness around the world.” (No citation is provided.)
There are other policy changes that would open the door to religious companies receiving loans from the Small Business Administration, endorse religious pharmacists who don’t want to provide contraception to patients, support religious bigots who run adoption and foster care agencies (with taxpayer dollars) but don’t want to work with same-sex couples, and give faith-based anti-vaxxers a way to spread diseases in the name of Jesus (while spreading a lie about how those vaccines were derived from “aborted fetal cell lines”).
In another section of the document written by anti-LGBTQ activist Roger Severino, he dismisses the CDC precautions that were taken during COVID to prevent mass gatherings in order to slow the spread of the virus: “For example, how much risk mitigation is worth the price of shutting down churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar and far beyond as happened in 2020? What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?”
Severino makes it sound like Christians were the only people who suffered during the pandemic and that going to in-person services was worth the cost of spreading a virus that has taken the lives of an estimated 7.05 million people worldwide. He believes the CDC’s policy was anti-Christian rather than pro-health and that any future science-based recommendations that inconvenience Christians should be tossed aside because he believes his mythological beliefs ought to override public health. The government should not be in the business of worrying about your eternal soul.
In short, Project 2025 is a Christian Nationalist wishlist that elevates white evangelical bigotry at the expense of pretty much everyone else. The document is meant to convince the Republican base that they should fall in line and vote for Trump despite his status as a convicted felon and rapist, many, many crimes. But it should really serve as a warning for saner Americans about what’s at stake in the next election if they don’t vote for the Democratic candidate or claim to have principled reasons for sitting out the election entirely.
The people behind Project 2025 have a $22 million budget to work with and an “advisory board” full of right-wing organizations with a long history of harming marginalized groups, spreading lies about American history, filing lawsuits to destroy civil rights protections, and banning books.
And Donald Trump is at the center of it all. (A SuperPAC endorsing him is literally behind a website with the URL TrumpProject2025.com.)
Much like a football team’s playbook may be written with its star quarterback in mind, there’s no way to separate Project 2025 from Trump. The Heritage Foundation can act like “Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign,” but none of this would work unless Trump or another Republican as shameless and ignorant as Trump is willing to implement it—and no one who inspires the GOP base has the courage to reject it.
This is the future that awaits us if the Republican Party wins the election. It’s not fear-mongering. They’re literally telling us their plans.
Remember that if Biden—or someone else—is the Democrat on the ballot, you’re not just voting for a single person. You’re voting for the constellation of people they appoint. You’re voting for who gets to nominate future Supreme Court justices. You’re voting for which of two possible futures you want to see. Only one option gives us a chance for a better tomorrow. Only one option wants to protect church/state separation and the balance of powers and democracy itself.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
It is not, and has never been, the job of our secular government to backstop anybody's religion. As they always do, these people play the victim of the godless left while totally ignoring the horrific history of what Christians acting in the name of Christianity have done to their fellow humans. Neither this country nor the wider world faces a single problem that has a religious solution. Christian-nationalists are attempting to accomplish through government what they failed to achieve from their pulpits. Mere religious freedom is never enough for them.
Of course, Trump wants to distance himself from Project 2025. That's why he's saying in one breath that he doesn't know what it is, yet he disagrees with some of it and he wants nothing to do with it, but he wishes them luck. And that's what he'll do ... RIGHT up to the point where he gets back in the Oval Office and all of a sudden decides that Project 2025 is TERRIFIC and he wanted to implement it all along.
Because that's what Trump has done from the get-go.