Reports of Project 2025's Death are Greatly Exaggerated
Reading the tea leaves of Trumpian infighting
The Trump campaign released a statement announcing Project 2025’s “demise.”
This was sort of a weird statement, and came on the heels of the project director of Project 2025, Pauls Dans, stepping down from the position. Here is his resignation email:
Soon after, the head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts released his own statement. Project 2025 will continue!
So what to make of this conflict?
Project 2025 is very much alive
The confusion led to some bad initial takes. For example, the Post released this headline, saying that Project 2025 is no longer doing policy work.
But this doesn’t really make any sense. Project 2025 already has finished its policy work. It did so in 2023. The primary product was “Mandate for Leadership” - a 900 page guide for how to run the federal government. Project 2025 might continue to promote this document with varying degrees of enthusiasm, but there is no new policy work coming out, and there never was.
Remember that the purpose of “Mandate for Leadership” is to be adopted by the Trump administration. In 2016, Heritage claimed that 2/3rds of its proposed policies in the equivalent year “Mandate for Leadership” was adopted. We don’t know yet how much a second Trump administration would adopt the current version, but the whole point was that the document was authored by Trump officials (including Dans), so its likely that a very high number of these policies would have been welcomed.
Saying that Project 2025 is no longer doing policy work is sort of like saying God is no long producing new bibles. Technically true, but misses the way in which the document exerts influence.
The other component of Project 2025 is a recruitment component, which seeks to hire 20,000 potential appointees for a second Trump administration. As Roberts notes, this component remains ongoing.
In short, Project 2025 is continuing to do what it would have been doing anyway. Russ Vought, tipped to be Chief of Staff in a second Trump administration, has a “180-Day Transition Playbook” to ensure maximum implementation of Project 2025 policy guidance.
Project 2025 became a political millstone for Trump
If Project 2025 isn’t changing, then what is all the fuss about? The short answer is that Project 2025 is exactly the sort of detailed policy blueprint that Trump seeks to avoid. As Trump denied his knowledge of Project 2025, it had a Streisand effect. The more negative the coverage of Project 2025, the more Trump’s campaign tried to distance himself from it, and the more people wanted to learn more about it.
It became incredibly easy to show the close ties between Trump and the project. USA Today found that 31 of 38 authors or editors of Mandate for Leadership had worked for Trump. And people started looking more closely at what they were writing. Which turns out to be fairly radical stuff.
One contributor to Project 2025 told Rolling Stone:
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 the second administration — the cabinet, under secretaries, assistant secretaries, the senior advisers. They’re all going to be the foot soldiers in a second Trump administration! You can’t look at this constellation of organizations and people without seeing they’re all his people.
This is about internal fighting within Trumpworld
Trumpworld — the constellation of policy expert, campaign officials, family members, criminal lawyers and various hangers-on - has grown enormously from 2016 and even 2020. Part of Trumpworld determined, correctly, that Trump’s ill-discipline and lack of preparation made him less able to implement their shared goals as President. So they started their own organizations or joined places like Heritage to ensure that next time they would be ready. Heritage claims more than 110 such organizations had signed onto Project 2025. It was the collective voice of Trump-aligned organizations.
This problem is that the part of Trumpworld concerned about governing run into conflict with the part of Trumpworld concerned about winning the 2024 election. This conflict arose precisely because the governing part is so unpopular, not because of any fundamental philosophical disagreement. The people running Trump’s campaign are furious that their efforts to block meaningful policy detail are being undermined by the guys who wrote a 900 page book explaining how they will govern. They want Project 2025 to go away, at least until after the election. The message shared with Heritage was: “Shut the hell up. Everyone knows you did this or are doing it, stop talking about it, stop trying to raise money off of it, don’t go on TV talking about it, just leave it.”
One measure of this internal fighting is that other parts of Trumpworld that are not tied to the campaign are deeply disappointed at the disavowal of Project 2025. Here is a sample message from Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, attacking Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign manager who has attacked Project 2025.
People working on Project 2025 are getting nervous about this. After all, the whole point of Project 2025 was to help Trump, but also to help themselves by landing gigs in the White House. As the Trump campaign has grown more belligerent — saying that no-one tied to Project 2025 would be hired, telling its leaders to shut up, pushing Dans out — people involved in the Project have become more nervous. The Post reports:
At least some Heritage employees are considering leaving the organization because they do not want to alienate a future Trump administration and hurt their future job prospects, according to a current employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail internal dynamics. While Heritage President Kevin Roberts has told people privately that the storm will blow over, employees have texted and messaged one another with dismay about the Trump campaign’s continued attacks on the organization.
Again, this is not about any philosophical or substantive differences. The Trump campaign just wants the Project 2025 people to stop spilling the beans. The message became, “if you want to remain part of Trumpworld, stop making trouble for us.”
Progressives can claim a win, but not a big one
Any progressive celebrations of the death of Project 2025 are premature. Dans might have been pushed out — that is what the Trump campaign is telling people. But Dans as a political actor only exists because he joined the Trump administration. He was a longtime fan of Donald Trump, an early campaign volunteer who bought into birtherism claims, according to an excellent profile by Alec McGillis. Dans failed for a long time to get a job in Trump’s administration because, he felt, he was "too America First,” blocked out by more traditional Republicans. He was finally able to leverage his college Federalist Society connections into a position at HUD.
It is hard not to see Dan’s obsession with building a Project 2025 recruitment machine for MAGA loyalists as a reflection of his own frustrations in trying to serve Trump. But when he did arrive, it was at a time when Trump was looking for such loyalists. With no background in government he was able to jump to senior positions in the last year of the Trump administration, part of the team pushing Schedule F, the plan to fire career civil servants. That is how he got such a senior position at Heritage. When he said “we completed what we set out to do” in his resignation letter, he is not wrong. Dans will find a place serving in Trumpworld, if Trumpworld continues to exist after November.
We might hear about it less, but the impact of Project 2025 on policy or personnel remains the same: very large if Trump wins. It is notable that the attention that progressives and the media brought to Project 2025 was able to force Trump to disavow it, and to create infighting in Trump world. That is no small achievement. But thats it. Internal fighting within Trumpworld is not the same as Trump rethinking his policy goals, for which Project 2025 remains the most useful detailed summary.