How Trump Could Actually Distance Himself From Project 2025

It’s understandable that Donald Trump and his campaign are annoyed by the considerable attention that’s been paid to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s mammoth effort to ensure that a second Trump administration isn’t the disorganized improvisational stab at governing the country endured in 2017. The 900-page document Heritage produced is an excruciatingly detailed blueprint for the Trumpification of the federal government, faithfully reflecting through the filter of wonky language an authentic MAGA rage at liberalism in all its manifestations.

But it’s inconvenient for a presidential campaign that prefers to communicate its goals in the poll-and-focus-group-tested bromides of Agenda 47, the official list of promises from Trump-Vance 2024 (“END INFLATION, AND MAKE AMERICA AFFORDABLE AGAIN,” reads a typical plank). That’s particularly true given the emergence of Project 2025 as a shorthand reference for the enormities a Trump comeback might entail, even among normal people who would never wade through the turgid pages of that manifesto.

And so Trump and his operatives have become ever more aggressive in distancing the former president from Project 2025, basically telling its authors and sponsors to STFU about it. Trump told a very big lie on the subject via Truth Social:

I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.

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

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.

If Team Trump really wants to end the talk over Project 2025 once and for all, it should explicitly make the threat that Wiles and LaCivita imply: Anyone associated with Project 2025 won’t be hired by the second Trump administration.

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

New organizations centered around Trump’s political movement, his conspiracy theories around his electoral defeats and his first-term policies are deeply involved in Project 2025 … One of the advisory groups, America First Legal, was started by [Stephen] Miller, a key player in forming Trump’s immigration agenda. Another is the Center for Renewing America, founded by Russ Vought, former acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, who wrote for Project 2025 a detailed blueprint for consolidating executive power.

Vought recently oversaw the Republican Party committee that drafted the new platform heavily influenced by Trump.

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

Beyond the big names — and few are bigger in MAGA policy circles than Miller and Vought — the authors and sponsors of Project 2025 are a sort of administration-in-waiting, as Adam Serwer noted:

“Trump can try to distance himself from this, but 70 to 80 percent of the people who wrote the book are going to be in his second administration — the cabinet, under secretaries, assistant secretaries, the senior advisers,” one anonymous Project 2025 contributor told Rolling Stone. “They’re all going to be the foot soldiers in a second Trump administration!”

So Trump & Co. need either to own these people and their views or put them out in the cold. The latter is unlikely, of course, because while Trump may not be personally aware of the unpopular ideas of his acolytes, there’s really no longer any significant difference between the MAGA movement, the conservative movement, and the Republican Party. If there’s a right-wing crackpot churning out obnoxious policies anywhere, the odds are very high it’s on behalf of Donald J. Trump.