As Democrats wrestle with what to do with their presumptive, and defiant, nominee for president, Donald Trump has been giddy amid the disarray.
But the former president has his own albatross to contend with: the radical Project 2025 blueprint for an authoritarian second Trump presidency, written with the participation of least 240 former Trump administration officials, associates and acolytes under the guidance of his “good friend” Kevin Roberts, head of the far-right Heritage Foundation.
Related:
Trump claims to know nothing about it. Newly resurfaced video catches him in the lie.
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After Roberts showed his hand last week in a podcast interview, crowing, “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be,” Trump claimed on Truth Social to “know nothing about Project 2025” and have “no idea who is behind it.”
But video of a Trump keynote speech at a Heritage Foundation dinner in February 2022, just as the massive “Mandate for Leadership” was coming together, makes clear the would-be dictator is all in on Project 2025’s authoritarian goals.
Trump, in April ’22, keynoted a Heritage dinner as it began work on Project 2025:
“This is a great group & they’re going to lay the groundwork & detail plans for exactly what our movement will do … when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.” pic.twitter.com/2ni0XESMci
“This is a great group,” Trump said of Roberts and the Heritage Foundation, “and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”
The 900+ page document, rank with Christian Nationalist ideology, lays out a frightening vision of government in a second Trump administration, calling for a national ban on the abortion pill mifepristone, mass deportations, gutting civil service protections, stocking federal agencies with Trump loyalists, subverting Congress’s power of the purse and eliminating the Department of Education, among other goals in an exhaustive far right-wing wish list.
The document suggests that the department of Health and Human Services should “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family,” and it proposes elimination of a long list of terms from all laws and federal regulations, including “sexual orientation”, “gender equality”, “abortion” and “reproductive rights”.
In one unhinged chapter, the authors conflate transgenderism with pornography and propose to outlaw it.
“The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered,” reads one excerpt from the so-called mandate.
Trump’s claim in particular that he knows no one associated with Project 2025 is overwhelmed by evidence to the contrary. CNN reports at least 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump, from foot soldiers to high-ranking officials. Six former Trump Cabinet secretaries helped write or collaborated on the document. Twenty pages are credited to his first deputy chief of staff.
