A top official with Project 2025 has jumped in on Donald Trump’s effort to look like he’s not at all affiliated with the fascistic blueprint for his potential second term in the White House. Too bad for them, they already said the exact opposite.
Last week, Donald Trump tried desperately to distance himself from Project 2025 after a particularly bloodthirsty comment from Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind the plan. Now it seems that the project is taking its lead from Trump. But it’s less than convincing.
Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, worked overtime Monday to distance his brainchild from the former president it was designed for.
“What Democrats [have] said about Project 2025 is probably the greatest misinformation campaign since, I don’t know, the Russia hoax,” Dans said, claiming that Democrats “move from hoax to hoax,” according to Rolling Stone.
“Somehow that whole squad put all the marbles in vilifying Project 2025, and then making this fake attachment to President Trump,” he said. Dans previously served in the Trump administration as the chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
The so-called “fake attachment” to Trump that Dans is complaining about must’ve at one point seemed real to him, as Dans previously touted the project’s connection to the former president during a radio interview.
On a May 2023 episode of the We the People Convention podcast, Dans boasted about having “great relationships” with Trump and other Republicans, according to Media Matters. Dans explained that Project 2025 focused on a presidential transition team, adding, “So ultimately, yes. I think, you know, President Trump’s very bought in with this.”
While at the time, Dans described the project as being “candidate neutral,” just last month he also called Project 2025 an “instruction manual” for a second Trump presidency. In May, he said he thought Trump would likely “adopt” many of the ideas in the lengthy mandate, which explains how to replace the administrative state with Trump loyalists, among other things.
Trump’s hopes of distancing himself from the plan is about to get a whole lot harder, with the announcement that he’s tapped Ohio Senator J.D. Vance to be his running mate. Not only does Vance have Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, fawning over him, he’s also said that Project 2025 has “some good ideas in there.” It makes sense, because Vance pitched the same purge of civil servants in 2022, arguing that Trump should defy the law, if necessary, to “deconstruct the administrative state.”
