How Trump Could Actually Distance Himself From Project 2025

Nobody wants to own this manifesto.
Photo Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: The Heritage Foundation

Donald Trump and his campaign are understandably irritated by the significant attention that has been given to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s massive undertaking to ensure that a second Trump administration is not the disorganized, improvised attempt to govern the country that was 2017. The 900-page document, produced by Heritage, is a painfully detailed plan for the Trumpization of the federal government, faithfully capturing, through the filter of bizarre language, the authentic rage of MAGAs against liberalism in all its guises.

But that’s inconvenient for a presidential campaign that prefers to communicate its goals in the poll- and focus-group-tested platitudes of Agenda 47, the official Trump-Vance 2024 promises list (“END INFLATION AND MAKE AMERICA AFFORDABLE AGAIN,” goes a typical blurb). That’s especially true given the emergence of Project 2025 as a shorthand for the enormity of Trump’s return, even among ordinary people who would never have made it through the manifesto’s ponderous pages.

And so Trump and his aides have become even more aggressive in distancing the former president from Project 2025, essentially telling its authors and sponsors to shut up. Trump lied about it, via Truth Social:

I don’t know anything about Project 2025. I have no idea who’s behind it. I disagree with some of the things they say, and some of it is absolutely ridiculous and pathetic. Whatever they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.

But later in a statement, Trump campaign co-managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita went from alleged indifference to anger:

Reports of the demise of Project 2025 would be welcomed and should serve as a warning to anyone or any group attempting to misrepresent their influence over President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.

If the Trump team really wants to end Project 2025 talks once and for all, they should make the threat Wiles and LaCivita suggest explicit: No one associated with Project 2025 will be hired by a second Trump administration.

Don’t hold your breath for that to happen. As CNN explained, MAGA’s fingerprints are all over Project 2025. It’s a far cry from some pre-Trump stronghold of conservatism:

New organizations around Trump’s political movement, his conspiracy theories about his election defeats and his first-term policies are deeply involved in Project 2025… One of the think tanks, America First Legal, was founded by (Stephen) Miller, a key player in shaping Trump’s immigration agenda. Another is the Center for Renewing America, founded by Russ Vought, a former acting director of the Office of Management and Budget who wrote Project 2025’s detailed plan for consolidating executive power.

Vought recently oversaw a Republican House committee that developed a new agenda largely inspired by Trump.

In addition to Vought, two other former Trump Cabinet secretaries have written chapters for “Mandate for Leadership”: Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller. Three more former department heads — Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, acting Transportation Secretary Steven Bradbury and acting Labor Secretary Patrick Pizzella — are listed as co-authors.

Beyond the big names — and few are more important in MAGA political circles than Miller and Vought — the authors and sponsors of Project 2025 are a kind of administration waiting to be decided, as Adam Serwer noted:

“Trump may try to distance himself from this, but 70 to 80 percent of the people who wrote this book will be in his second administration — in the Cabinet, undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, senior advisers,” said an anonymous contributor to Project 2025. Rolling Stone“They will all be foot soldiers in a second Trump administration!”

So Trump and company either have to take on these people and their views or throw them out. The latter is unlikely, of course, because while Trump may not be personally aware of his followers’ unpopular ideas, there really is no significant difference between the MAGA movement, the conservative movement, and the Republican Party anymore. If there’s a right-wing nutcase spouting disgusting policies anywhere, the odds are very good that he’s doing so in the name of Donald J. Trump.