Milwaukee, Wisconsin — JULY 18: A podium displaying a website URL for Project 2025 is displayed at a Biden-Harris campaign and DNC press conference on July 18, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The press conference was held to address Project 2025 and Republican policies on abortion. (Photo by Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)
Photo: Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
Donald Trump doesn’t want anyone to link him with Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for his potential second administration. “I have no idea who is behind it,” he once said on social media, a claim that never survived much scrutiny. A CNN review published Thursday found that 140 former Trump administration officials “had a hand” in the project. “Dozens more who staffed Trump’s government hold positions with conservative groups advising Project 2025, including his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and longtime adviser Stephen Miller,” CNN continued. Chief among them is former Trump official and Project 2025 author Russell Vought.
According to CNN, Vought recently dismissed Trump’s public disavowals as “graduate-level politics” and said that Trump had “blessed” his organization, the Center for Renewing America. The former president is “very supportive of what we do,” he added. Vought may well have exaggerated for the benefit of his audience. (He’d been duped by a British journalism nonprofit, and two of its members were secretly recording him.) Placed in context, though, his remarks form part of a broader pattern. Trump can try to distance himself from Project 2025 in public all he likes, but the people behind it have every reason to believe they can sway him in the future.
Trump needs people like Vought, who served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget — a key role that allowed him significant control over the former president’s regulatory agenda. Vought, in other words, knows how the federal government works, and he knows just how to gut it until all that remains is a tool for a second Trump administration’s most radical priorities. He told the undercover journalists that his organization was drafting “hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos,” CNN reported. “Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said. “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence … whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.”
Sources told CNN that Trump and Vought have spoken on various occasions since the ex-president left office and that Trump “has adopted some of Vought’s ideas.” That’s cause for concern, given Vought’s extremism. Conservatives, he told the undercover journalists, have “been too focused on religious liberty, which we all support, but we’ve lacked the ability to argue we are a Christian nation,” adding, “Our laws are built on the Judeo-Christian worldview value system.” Vought has expressed such ideas in public before, as CNN pointed out; earlier this year he told Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA that America has grown “too secular.” In the interview with Kirk, he added, “Christian nation-ism would probably be the most accurate aspect of what I believe,” a sentiment he would later repeat to his undercover audience.
Vought is not the only Project 2025 architect who is poised to play an important role in a second Trump administration, but his experience, and the breadth of his vision, make him a particular threat. If CNN is right, and Trump has taken up some of Vought’s ideas, it’s not hard to see why. The former president is not a deep thinker; he is reactive and vengeful. The Christian nationalism of figures like Vought can be useful, a means to a greater end. What better way to own the libs than to rip the heart out of the federal government and render it unfit for purpose? Vought knows how to transform the bureaucracy into a far-right paradise, and he’s already putting those plans in motion.
Project 2025 was never going to work quite how the memes suggested; some of it will be difficult to implement. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem. The real danger lies in the memos and executive orders that Vought and his cronies have set upon drafting. Trump will have to staff his administration somehow, and conservatives have carefully built an infrastructure in Washington, D.C., that will help a second Trump White House take shape. “President Trump will want to spend literally zero amount of time thinking or contemplating what a transition will look like,” Vought told the journalists. “It’s not how he thinks.” Instead, Vought and his allies are doing Trump’s thinking for him. “We were always going off of, if Donald Trump was head of this agency, what would he do with it?” Trump certainly doesn’t want anyone to think he’s a puppet, but he’s not a policy mastermind, either. If he wins in November, he’ll need people who pay closer attention to detail.
Vice-President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, are right, then, to harp on Project 2025. It’s more than a way to scare liberals into voting; it’s a way for the Democratic ticket to set up a sharp contrast between their vision and Trump’s. People like Vought aren’t really at work in the shadows; they’re open about their beliefs and their plans. As long as they’re around, the future of our multiracial democracy is in question.
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