Trump's Bogus Denial of Project 2025: Turning Point?

During the recent BET awards TV broadcast, host Taraji P, Henson used the platform to issue repeated warnings that a win by Republican Donald Trump in the November presidential election would, in Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch’s words, “undermine our fundamental rights.” Bunch, who has been one of the few op-ed writers at a major news outlet to focus on Trump and his lies in the aftermath of the recent presidential debate, sees Henson’s use of her platform to warn of the GOP’s plans to drastically change the relationship between government and citizens as a potential turning point in the presidential campaign. While the details of Project 2025 are apparently not widely known, the 900+ page document is publicly available, and touted by right-wing pundits – including principal architect, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts – on conservative media.

Voting rights website Democracy Docket describes Project 2025 as “a collection of policy transition proposals” that would enable Trump, if elected, to “vastly remake the federal government most effectively to carry out an extremist far-right agenda.” Democracy Docket highlights what Roberts in an opening essay calls four “broad fronts that will decide American’s future.” These include:

• Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
• Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
• Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
• Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the
  Blessings of Liberty.”

The document includes a “playbook” for the first 180 days of an imagined Trump administration. The playbook envisions replacing tens of thousands of federal workers with conservative true-believers whose actions will be guided by Project 2025. “Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State," writes Paul Dans in the introduction to the playbook. Dans served as director of the US Office of Personnel Management in the Trump administration.

In its February 2024 article on Project 2025, The New Republic calls it “a detailed guide to turning the US into a fascist’s paradise." ”Health care providers, educators, employers, and the government’s own civil rights enforcement apparatus, among many others, would all be marshaled to ensure our acquiescence in this dictatorial male supremacist society,” writes author, Melissa Gira Grant. Acknowledging the risk of “getting lost in the details” in a 900+ page tome of right-wing verbiage, Grant chooses to focus on “how Project 2025’s drafters plan to mandate their narrowly defined and state-enforced patriarchal, heterosexual, married, procreating family and how they plan to confine people within that vision.” The items she singles out are:

• Equate legal personhood with heterosexuality, gender conformity, and compulsory motherhood by removing mention of any alternative from all laws, all government agencies, all grants and contracts, and any other official regulations.
• Establish not individuals but families—specifically one married mother, one father, and their biological children—as the basis for governmental policy.
• Adopt the position that abortion is murder and harms women. Strike the word “abortion” from all laws, policies, and regulations.
• Overhaul policy and research to deny the existence of transgender and nonbinary people, and instead pursue methods of ensuring children remain the sex they were assigned at birth.
• Outlaw anything conservatives deem “pornographic,” treating the public presence and depictions of queer and trans people as a threat to children and families. Shut down or imprison any individual or company that discusses or shares such depictions.
• Outlaw abortion. Until then, surveil abortion in the areas in which it remains legal in order to prioritize criminal cases against “chemical abortion” and “abortion tourism.”

“This playbook, the groups and donors behind it, the installation of ideologically motivated staff across government agencies, and the theory that the Constitution permits the executive to rule absolutely, is more than guidance for a new conservative presidential administration,” Grant concludes. “It is also one of the right’s most open admissions that they aim to install an authoritarian ruler and roll out a twenty-first-century American fascism.”

During his tenure as president of Wyoming Catholic College, Roberts was labeled a “cowboy Catholic” because of his refusal of federal Title IV aid for students, rejecting the requirements that participating institutions not discriminate against transgender individuals or those with same-sex orientation, and that health insurance cover birth control. Having grown up poor in Louisiana, Roberts doctoral thesis at the University of Texas at Austin argued that slaves in Louisiana influenced the state’s “evolution into a slave society,” according to a recent profile in the Guardian. In 2016 Roberts went to work for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, eventually becoming its president. While there he distinguished himself fighting pandemic restrictions and critical race theory. He was named president of the Heritage Foundation in 2021.

In addition to the Handmaid’s Tale view of gender roles and the family, Project 2025 also proposes:

• Restoring mandatory military service (“the draft”)
• Eliminating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
• Using the military to round up immigrants and confine them in detention centers.
• Moving the Department of Justice under direct White House control, pardoning allies and prosecuting political opponents.

Besides Paul Dans, Trump administration veterans working on Project 2025 include

• Ben Carson, Trump’s former housing secretary
• Peter Navarro, former White House trade adviser
• Russ Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought was recently named Vought as policy director for the RNC committee creating the party platform for its convention in Milwaukee.
• Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, is a senior partner in the Conservative Partnership Institute, which is advising Project 2025
• John McEntee, Trump’s director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office is a senior adviser to Project 2025.
• Trump advisor Stephen Miller has attempted to deny involvement with Project 2025, but appears in a video on the Project 2025 website along with Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

As details of Project 2025 spread, and the outrageousness of its affront on American freedoms and way of life became apparent to more and more people, Trump or a surrogate scurried to the Truth Social platform to claim that he “knew nothing about Project 2025.”