University of Kwazulu-Natal

Why Trump Was The Perfect Pick To Put Project 2025 Into Action

Bonisiwe Shabane
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why trump was the perfect pick to put project 2025 into action

To understand the 100-day sprint, you have to understand the long game that’s playing out behind the scenes, says Alex Hannaford. Now it is happening in real time, America is having to face up to the consequences of a new dictator class No one can accuse Donald Trump of easing his way slowly into the job the second time around; of slouching back in his chair in the Oval Office, Fox News on the big screen,... In 100 days he’s managed to lay off 12,000 federal workers in the name of government efficiency, alienate countless allies, threatened to invade Greenland and take over the Panama Canal, humiliated Volodymyr Zelensky, told... But perhaps most notable in terms of his policy agenda is that he has essentially governed by executive order – more than 140 of which have bypassed Congress entirely. And these orders have targeted everything from immigration to education to the detention of 6 January defendants.

All in under four months. Why anyone is surprised, however, is the question. In Project 2025, the sweeping, dystopian blueprint for his second term crafted by The Heritage Foundation, he was presented with the instruction manual of how to govern. While on the campaign trail, he disavowed it, saying: “I haven’t read it, I don’t want to read it.” But from day one, it feels as if his administration has been following the right-wing plan to disrupt and tear down key government infrastructure. They have set about erasing federal language around gender identity and reproductive health, targeted DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives, dismantled climate policies, and have been busy stacking the bureaucracy with loyalists.

It is clear to anyone following American politics, Project 2025 is not theoretical anymore – it’s happening in real time. And it’s gone further than any of the architects of Project 2025 surely ever imagined. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. When Project 2025 went viral last summer, it wasn’t just because of the extreme policy stances it embraced. After all, things like rejection of abortion rights, cruelty toward the poor, and cheerleading for the fossil fuel industry’s assault on a stable climate have become standard fare for the conservative movement. Instead, what was really shocking was the document’s detailed plans for how these objectives were to be accomplished—namely, by creating what amounts to an elected dictator who could do the job unimpeded by public...

Russell Vought—current director of the powerful White House Office of Management and Budget and a key Project 2025 architect—best captured this theory of change in his chapter for the document. There, he urged the next conservative president to make “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people.” It turns out that the conservative legal movement has been hard at work for decades laying the pseudo-intellectual groundwork for something like this vision of an imperial presidency through its development of the “unitary... In the first month of his second term, President Trump has reshaped the government with a flurry of executive orders. A recent analysis by Politico found that many of those actions have closely aligned with Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint he once disavowed. William Brangham speaks with Politico White House reporter Megan Messerly for more.

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. In the first month of his second term, President Trump has reshaped the government with a flurry of executive orders. As William Brangham reports, many of them echo the language of a policy blueprint he once disavowed. During the heat of the presidential race, the 900-page Project 2025 became a rallying cry for Democrats and a focal point for their warnings about a second Trump term. It was published by the Conservative Heritage Foundation, and it outlined plans to reshape the federal government, expand presidential power and enact right leaning social policies.

In polls, it proved widely unpopular with voters, and then candidate Trump distanced himself from it, calling parts of it ridiculous and abysmal. President Donald Trump made clear during his campaign that he wanted little to do with Project 2025, the sweeping and controversial conservative policy blueprint created by the Heritage Foundation. But just days into his second term, many of Trump’s early actions align with the Project 2025 agenda. An analysis by TIME found that nearly two-thirds of the executive actions Trump has issued so far mirror or partially mirror proposals from the 900-page document, ranging from sweeping deregulation measures to aggressive immigration... Democrats had seized on Trump’s connection to Project 2025 during the campaign, pointing out that many of the playbook’s contributors previously worked for Trump or had connections to his orbit. Trump repeatedly said he had “no idea who is behind” the conservative blueprint and that some of its ideas were “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” He appeared to soften his stance after winning the election,...

Despite Trump’s past disavowals, many of the individuals involved in drafting Project 2025, such as Russell Vought and Brendan Carr, have been tapped to serve in prominent positions in his Administration. Vought was nominated to run the Office of Management and Budget, while Carr was tapped to lead the Federal Communications Commission. The Heritage Foundation declined to comment for this story. A White House spokesperson tells TIME that Trump “had nothing to do with Project 2025” and that his first raft of executive orders “delivered on the promises that earned him a resounding mandate from... Back in April 2023, without a whole lot of fanfare, a conservative political operative named Paul Dans laid out what was basically a political battle plan. PAUL DANS: What we're doing is systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army of aligned, trained and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state.

DETROW: It was called Project 2025, a 900-plus-page blueprint for a future conservative president - because it's worth flagging that at this point, President Trump had not yet locked down the Republican nomination -... It outlined a suite of very conservative policies that would, for example, outlaw the mailing of abortion pills and abolish the Department of Education. It even suggests a return to the gold standard. Democrats saw this as a vulnerability for Trump in the 2024 campaign, and so we saw social media videos like this one from then-President and then-candidate Joe Biden. JOE BIDEN: Project 2025 will destroy America. Look it up.

DETROW: We saw "Saturday Night Live's" Kenan Thompson on the stage at the Democratic National Convention, holding up a giant bound copy of the plan. Professor of International Politics in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham David Hastings Dunn has previously received funding from the ESRC, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Open Democracy Foundation and has previously been both a NATO and a Fulbright Fellow. University of Birmingham provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK. Think-tank policy proposals rarely make the headlines, but 2024 is no ordinary year and Project 2025 is no usual set of plans for government. This is a not-very-secret set of plans that Republicans have put together in order to be ready to leap into the White House, if elected, and instantly get to work.

But the twist in this tale is that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says he doesn’t know anything about it, or does he? While president-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly disavowed it, it’s very likely that at least some of Project 2025 will come to fruition in his second administration. Project 2025 was designed during the campaign to be a comprehensive plan for the next Republican administration to lurch the country to the right. It’s written by officials who served in Trump’s first administration and will probably serve in his second. During the 2024 campaign, Democrats tried to tie former President Donald Trump to an unpopular policy blueprint called Project 2025, in the hopes that it would scare voters away from him. It clearly didn't work well enough, and with Trump set to return to office next year with a Republican majority in the Senate and possibly the House of Representatives, he could have broad latitude...

So what is Project 2025, and how might it influence Trump's governing agenda after he takes office next January? Project 2025 is a "presidential transition project" released by the Heritage Foundation, a staunchly conservative think tank. The Foundation has released a "mandate for leadership" document every election cycle for almost 40 years since 1981, after Reagan's first victory the previous year. Reagan went on to adopt or attempt almost two-thirds of the 2,000 policy recommendations in the first "mandate" document, according to the Heritage Foundation. Trump reportedly said five of the eleven judges he considered for appointment to the Supreme Court seat opened by Justice Antonin Scalia's death were the Heritage Foundation's picks. The nearly 1,000-page handbook led by the Heritage Foundation seeks to restructure government with conservative policy recommendations if a Republican president retakes the White House.

With Donald Trump's decisive victory in the 2024 election, many voters are now wondering what that means for the so-called Project 2025 plan and what's in it. Project 2025, a controversial blueprint for another Republican presidential administration, has been a consistent topic throughout the election, despite Trump denying knowledge or a role in it. Stream NBC 5 for free, 24/7, wherever you are. It exists not only as a policy blueprint for the next administration, but as a database of some 20,000 job-seekers who could staff a Trump White House and administration and a still unreleased "180-day... 20, 2025.

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