Former President Donald Trump's campaign is trying to pretend they kicked Project 2025 to the curb, wrote Heather Digby Parton for Salon — but "don't be fooled," it is very much still informing their plans for a second term.
Project 2025, a 900-page transition plan written by the far-right Heritage Foundation, lays out how the next Republican president can replace federal workers with an army of loyalists, impose Christian nationalism in U.S. law, gut programs safeguarding racial civil rights, and eliminate a huge range of programs and services from Social Security and Medicare, to the National Weather Service, to federal funding for public transportation, to benefits for military families. This comes as Democrats have gone on the offensive by tying Trump to the most unpopular parts of the plan, and voters appear to be reacting with alarm.
Trump has sought to distance himself for a while, calling the plan "extreme" and denying he has anything to do with it. On Tuesday, Paul Dans, a key architect of the plan, was forced out of the Heritage Foundation, for which Trump's campaign manager Chris LaCivita took credit: "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."
But the fact that the Heritage Foundation is seeing staff turnover is not in any way a sign Project 2025 won't be used by the Trump team, wrote Parton.
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"The 900-page 'Mandate for Leadership' is already written. In fact, it was largely finished over a year ago when we first started talking about it. It's all over the internet. The producers of the document are MAGA movement operatives and it is a MAGA document whether Trump wants to claim it or not," she wrote.
Moreover, according to New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan, Project 2025 "owns the central personnel database in the conservative movement. Trump doesn’t yet have a functioning transition team and will likely need its resources."
Furthermore, Trump already tried to implement one of Project 2025's core elements on his way out of office, which was reclassifying huge cross-sections of the federal workforce to strip them of their merit protections and allow them to be fired at will for political reasons.
"There is no doubt that this is a Trump initiative," wrote Parton. "This database is as much a part of Project 2025 as the manifesto."
"Trump has every intention of implementing its vision," she concluded. "It's his vision, too. Not only would it be terrifying and dangerous, but it would also be dangerously incompetent."
