Project 2025 All Done, Going Home Now, Nothing More To See, Please Stop Mentioning Project 2025
Sudden uptick in hiring at 'Project First 100 Days (No Relation).'
Congratulations, lefties! You’ve exposed Project 2025 and driven it out of business! Haha, we are joking, a little, in that nobody at the Heritage Foundation or in the Trump White House cares that the 900+ page manual for a second Trump term, written mostly by former Trump administration functionaries, has shocked a lot of normal Americans with its ambitious plans to turn the executive branch into a rightwing policy shop. Still, Project 2025 announced Tuesday that it’ll be shutting down its policy operations, and Paul Dans, the project’s director at the Heritage Foundation, will be leaving, possibly for a big policy farm upstate where he can run and jump and publish white papers to his heart’s content.
And yeah, the Washington Post reports (gift link), heated attacks from Democrats did play a role, but only because they annoyed Donald Trump by distracting from him as the sole absolute leader of Republican policy, such as it is.
The former president has repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025 after relentless attacks from Democrats using some of the 900-page playbook’s more aggressive proposals to impute them to Trump’s agenda since many of the proposals were written by alumni of Trump’s White House. While some participants in the project started avoiding interviews and public appearances, Trump advisers grew furious that Heritage leaders continued promoting the project and feeding critical news coverage.
Not that the policy ideas were unwelcome, just that they kept making news and making Trump look bad.
And by golly, the Trump campaign was ready to play with the hard balls, we learn:
Trump senior adviser Susie Wiles repeatedly called Heritage leaders instructing them to stop promoting Project 2025. She and Trump strategist Chris LaCivita repeatedly wrote public statements disavowing the project, and then Trump started saying so in his own social media posts. More recently, LaCivita has started saying that people involved in the project would be barred from a second Trump administration.
Wiles and La Civita even issued a joint statement Tuesday saying the campaign “has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” although if anyone actually remembers what the Trump campaign actually was saying a year ago, it would be a freaking miracle. (OK, a bit less than a year ago Trump was planning and then backing out of a tell-all press conference to exonerate him from all the indictments that were piling up, and stewing about “RIGGERS” when that was obviously a typo for what he really meant. Remember that? OF COURSE NOT, we all have had mushbrains since 2016.)
The Wiles-LaCivita statement also warned, woe, WOE to they who dared to keep working on Project 2025, they MEAN IT:
“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.”
They are just so W-word, trying to sound like cartoon supervillains. What are you dorks going to do, master the Chaos Emeralds and turn the upstarts into robots?
So what the hell, no more Project 2025, because it’s officially no longer welcome, apart from all the Trump policy plans that echo parts of the Project because it was written by Trumpers. Also, the people behind Project 2025 will stop their work because they already finished all the work. It’s right there. They made a book out of it.
The Post points out that the idea of a Trumpworld ban on Project 2025 participants seems unlikely, given that prominent contributors include “close Trump advisers such as former White House speechwriter Stephen Miller, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan, and former White House economic adviser Peter Navarro.” The piece dutifully notes Miller’s denial that he was involved, but adds that Miller’s America First Legal is one of the 110 rightwing groups affiliated with Project 2025 — although it seems to have finally gotten its name taken off the “advisory board” — and adds that “his deputy, Gene Hamilton, wrote the playbook’s chapter on the Department of Justice.”
Just in case, some Heritage Foundation employees are asking to have their names taken off the parts of the document they worked on, and others are considering leaving so they won’t be blacklisted, according to an anonymous insider. Heritage President Kevin Roberts “has told people privately that the storm will blow over,” but some of the brave conservative warriors who work for him are now fretting that they’re in big trouble for having angered the Big Man. How can this be happening to them when they were so sure they were just doing what he wanted, and now what will they do if there’s a fascist takeover of America and they’re left out?
Some donors have also expressed concerns about how angry the campaign seems about the project, the current employee said. Others agree that the controversy will pass.
It’s hard to say. Trump collects grudges the way wealthier wingnuts collect Supreme Court justices, so he may stay mad forever, or he may get mad at someone else — like, we’re really hoping he’ll be simply furious with Kamala Harris for winning in a landslide in November, which would also have the nice knock-on effect of mooting the question of whether Project 2025 alums will get Trump administration jobs.
Even if the Trump campaign and its sworn frenemies at the Heritage Foundation try to insist that Project 2025 has finished up and gone to bed, the Harris campaign isn’t about to let it. Harris’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, said Democrats won’t let Project 2025 fade into the background, heavens no:
“Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real — in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding,” she said in a statement. “Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country.”
We predict that within the next week, Donald Trump will be saying that there’s no Project 2025 at all, that the Democrats actually made it up, and that it was written by Democrats to make him look bad, although it also isn’t real.
[WaPo (gift link)]
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Project 2025 is no more! It has ceased to be! It has rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible!
This is an EX-Project 2025!
It's funny (hahaha, eyeroll) that these yutzes (Trump vs. Heritage) are arguing about "policy" when in reality their overriding drivers are hardly policy and more like fascist little wish lists that will enable them to maintain their undemocratic hold on power and exert their christofacist vision. Useless, arrogant, dangerous little fuckers. And absolutely aligned, no matter how much they try to distance themselves.