Trump Shuts Down Project 2025 For Embarrassing Him

Oh and it had some Nazis in it. Trump hates those!

Photo by Jakayla Toney on Unsplash

This just in, struggling Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump has pushed out Heritage Foundation Project 2025 Director Paul Dans in a power struggle, and now Heritage says the project is “winding down.” Sure, Jan!

Old Treasontits McGee is desperate for Project 2025 to disappear, and to hypnotize voters into forgetting that they ever saw it. Never mind that 31 of 38 Project 2025’s authors have ties to his former administration, how his name is all over it, and how JD Vance just wrote a fawning foreword for Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’s book. Never mind how Trump’s own plan, “Agenda 47,” is the exact same plan, other than hiding the ball on abortion.

It’s all so embarrassing now that Trump put the screws on Heritage to make the project quietly go away, and will now “I don’t know her” and “it was just a Covfefe Foundation” to the grave, as is his way.

His senior adviser Susie Wiles even issued a threatening statement to anyone at Project 2025 who might think to claim an association with him:

President Trump’s 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 President or the campaign in any way.

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.

Mad and desperate much?

A lot of the plan has already done what it set out to do, anyway. The Supreme Court already ended the right to abortion, and defanged government administrative agencies, and put the president above the law. All that’s missing now is a President Trump to finish up the conservative coup, this time with a staff of loyalists to ensure that he ends voting forever in a very official way. Which is not going to happen if voters keep getting reminded how horrible his policies are, and how he’s connected to this Brain Trust Think Tank of horrible people.

Also, most importantly to Trump, he wants loyalists who are loyal to him, not some other cult! According to Roger Sollenberger at The Daily Beast, Project 2025’s loyalist staffing plan has created an “ongoing power rift over staffing control for potential second Trump admin.”

Project 2025’s self-immolation also helps Trump because only worse news can keep coming out about the creepy people behind it.

Case in point! In the latest reportage, at least five of Project 2025’s contributing scrods have histories of YEEKS OVERT racist writing and/or white supremacist activity, which USA Today’s Will Carless helpfully details. What else would you expect, from the brain trust behind Reagan’s dogwhistle “welfare queen” slur back in the ‘80s? 

After all, when they say “Heritage Foundation,” there is only one heritage they mean (the white, hetero, male-dominant Christian one, of course)! If you’ve scrolled through their 922-page Project 2025 screed, one of the things you may have said to yourself was, gee, this sounds an awful lot like if a hundred David Dukes with a hundred typewriters went to Yale. 

They’ve got a plan to eliminate racism … by not collecting any demographic data that might show it exists, and censoring any talk about its existence, in schools and government! What’s left of schools and government, anyway, after they eliminate the Department of Education, fire the disloyal civil servants and gut most of the agencies.

The only discrimination in the world, they say, is against white conservatives and their viewpoints. That’s the real bigotry the Office of Civil Rights should be probing! Sam Alito, Kim Davis, and Trump agree. Trump recently moaned to Time Magazine, “I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed.”

So maybe it’s no surprise that the tank that’s been doing the thinking for Trump features fine people such as these?

There’s Richard Hanania, who under the name “Richard Host” wrote decades’ worth of pro-eugenics essays. Reported Huffington Post,

He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war. 

When busted, Hanania quickly disavowed his own racist sentiments in his online newsletter: 

“I generally hate when people play the “mental illness” card … That said, it would be dishonest to pretend like my thinking has always been purely the result of dispassionate analysis.”

But he was quickly back to his old tricks, blogging quips like “Asians love listening to authority.” No lesser racist than punchable Nazi Richard Spencer told USA Today that Hanania hasn’t changed a bit. “I think it’s very clear that Richard is a race realist and eugenicist.” 

Writing in his home from a plantation in old Virginny is failed GOP Senate candidate Corey Stewart, a champion of Confederate flags and statues who believes that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War. He’s friends with “Unite The Right” organizer Jason Kessler, reported the New York Times in a profile titled “White Nationalists Love Corey Stewart.” 

There’s Michael Anton, a former senior national security official in the Trump administration and one of the 31 out of 38 authors or editors of Project 2025 with a direct connection to the Trump administration. Anton wants to end birthright citizenship, just like Trump does, so “Third World foreigners” don’t make America less “traditional”:

The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle. As does, of course, the U.S. population.

That’s a view shared by contributing author Jason Richwine, whose PhD thesis used junk science to argue that the US should limit Hispanic immigration because Hispanics are parasites with lower IQs.

Then there’s author Stephen Moore, remember him? He was the nominee to the Fed after Herman Cain (RIP) withdrew, until his uncovered writings revealed he was a big old sexist pig. He haw-hawed in a speech about health care that the first thing Trump did as president was kick a Black family out of public housing, haw haw!

So, no wonder Trump can’t distance himself enough from his old friends. But will Project 2025 really go away, are they going to get rid of the plan they have to staff the government with a whole affirmative action program for people who love authoritarianism and think white people are the most discriminated-against people in the world?

Ha! Heritage has been working on its plan to rule for 50 years, those people and their 200-year-old ideas aren’t going anywhere. They think they’re being commanded by God, for Pete’s sake. Their project will simply reconstitute in another form, like Robert Patrick in Terminator 2. And too late anyay, we all saw the plan already! All 922 pages of it, right out there on the Internet!

But isn’t it fun to watch them furiously shaking the Etch-a-Sketch, trying to make it all go away?

[USA Today/ NYT]