More Lies About Project 2025

Today, we learned that Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts will delay the publication of his book, “Dawn’s Early Light,” (foreword by GOP VP nominee J.D. Vance) until after the election. This is in the wake of the Project 2025 debacle, which saw its director, Paul Dans, step down last week.

This doesn’t mean that Project 2025 is any less a feature of the Republican landscape. It means that they have come to understand that the policies and ideas that it consists of are politically toxic. Americans don’t want to deport immigrants who fuel the country's economy, politicize the Justice Department, eliminate the Department of Education, and put an end to the career civil servants who populate executive branch agencies with a commitment to the Constitution, not loyalty to Donald Trump.

As people became aware of the contents of Project 2025 and it began to trend on social media, Trump said that he didn’t know anything about it. He wished the creators “luck” but said he had nothing to do with them.

That changed as it became more and more clear that this was going to be a campaign issue. Cable news, podcasters, and newspapers began to cover it, and awareness spread. Public opinion was not favorable. So Trump demanded the Project come to an end and threatened the group obliquely, insinuating they had overstated their influence with him, noting that otherwise, “it will not end well for you.” Very presidential.

That was the end of it, right? Although we’ve continued to discuss Project 2025 here, the furor died down. Surely Trump wasn’t lying about something as important as his connection to it?

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts with former president Donald Trump on a private plane in April 2022. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

Apparently, he was. Tonight, the Washington Post reported that in April 2022, Trump and Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, the front man for Project 2025, took a 45-minute private plane flight together to get to a Heritage Foundation conference where the former president was one of the speakers. Trump told the audience that the Heritage Foundation was "going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do."

Project 2025 is a wrap. It’s locked, loaded, and ready to go. If you believe it’s about to disappear or that Trump won’t use any of it, I have some swampland in Florida for you.

How do we know that? Because Kevin Roberts told us so. After Trump made his threat, and Paul Dans, who had been running the Project at Heritage, stepped down, Roberts said on Twitter that “Project 2025 has completed exactly what it set out to do.”

In what appears to be a new page called “The Truth About Project 2025” on the official Project 2025 website, the authors of Project 2025 are explaining themselves. (It’s possible I just hadn’t noticed this page previously, although they Wayback Machine seems to think that it’s new too.)

You might think that with the director stepping down after Trump demanded it, the website would have disappeared. That’s not the case. The new page kicks off with this claim: “The Left has spent millions fearmongering about Project 2025, because they’re terrified of losing their power. And they should be. Project 2025 offers a menu of solutions to the border crisis, inflation, a stagnant economy, and rampant crime. It shows how we can take on China, fix our schools, and support families. But most importantly, it dismantles the unaccountable Deep State, taking power away from Leftist elites and giving it back to the American people and duly-elected President.”

Then there’s a benign, almost beneficent-sounding explanation of Project 2025: It’s just your kind old grandpa looking out for you. One hundred “respected organizations from across the conservative movement,” we are told, have come together to “abolish the Deep State and return government to the people.” That might be more believable if Trump hadn’t worked so hard to steal the last election from the voice of the American people, perhaps harder than anything he had worked at as president. Project 2025, the website tells us, isn’t partisan.

There are a lot of specifics here, many of which we’ve already discussed. They identify the four “real policy recommendations.” These are some of the worst proposals: mass deportations, ending even the baby steps we’ve been taking to prepare for climate change, firing career civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists, and eliminating the Department of Education and programs like Head Start.

Next comes a table of topics headlined as “debunking the lies” they say have been told about the plan, starting with the claim that it’s false that Project 2025 “is a plan from Trump.” In reality, the list and its contents serve to illuminate still more of the bad stuff embedded in Project 2025.

Taking what they write at face value without parsing the details, they acknowledge that they will end DEI protections, increase the use of the death penalty, outlaw pornography, use public dollars for religious education, and deregulate big business and the oil industry, while and increasing Arctic drilling.

In fine print, at the bottom of the page, there is more about what Project 2025 is. It paves the way for “an effective conservative administration,” and is a policy resource for “future conservative presidents.” J.D. Vance, the author of the foreword to the Heritage Foundation president’s new book, will be the proverbial one heartbeat away from the presidency if Trump wins. Is there any reason to doubt who would guide his hand if he became president at some point?

Project 2025 didn’t disappear because Trump made a couple of social media posts. Don’t be fooled.

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We’re in this together,

Joyce