Donald Trump’s 2025 Vision

Even Donald Trump doesn’t want anything to do with Project 2025—at least not publicly.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on Truth Social. “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.”

Imagine how toxic the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 must be to get disavowed by Trump, the guy who has otherwise mused about being a “dictator” and planning mass deportations if elected. And that’s despite the fact that “Trump shares many policy goals with Project 2025,” as The Washington Post put it, from dismantling the Department of Education to scaling back climate regulations to gutting the civil service. The Guardian, too, found that Trump’s platform, “dubbed Agenda 47, overlaps with Project 2025 on most major policy issues.”

But the former president is running scared—like he has on abortion, an issue over which the GOP’s extremism has proven so poisonous to voters that Trump is now conveniently trying to look moderate—from a project that includes contributions from Russ Vought, who not only served as his onetime director of the Office of Management and Budget, but is also the platform committee policy director for next week’s Republican National Convention. Former senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller has also been linked to Project 2025, though he, too, has denied involvement with it.

Trump’s comments about Project 2025 came on the heels of Heritage president Kevin Roberts’s appearance on Steve Bannon’s far-right podcast, War Room. (Incidentally, Bannon wasn’t hosting that day because he’s currently serving a four-month sentence in a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut; former Republican congressman Dave Brat was filling in.) “We are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” The Heritage Foundation even followed up on X to claim Democrats have “a well established record of instigating the opposite.”

Roberts isn’t some fringe right-winger fantasizing about revolution, but the head of a powerful think tank that’s taken the lead in drafting the 922-page Project 2025 agenda, which is like a modern version of the Ronald Reagan–era “Mandate for Leadership,” albeit “more extreme, and even more dangerous,” according to The Nation. The Project 2025 proposal, noted Politico, includes giving the president full power “over quasi-independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies that have been the bane of Trump’s political existence in the last few years.” It calls for breaking up the FBI, defunding the Justice Department, and eliminating the Department of Education, arguing that “federal education policy should be limited.”