"They are scared": Trump runs from Project 2025, claims not to know what it's about

Donald Trump claimed in a Truth Social post last week to "know nothing" about Project 2025 and have "no idea" who is behind the sweeping plan shaped by the conservative, Trump-aligned Heritage Foundation to stack the executive branch with MAGA loyalists and enact a litany of right-wing policies if he wins a second term.

The former president's public disavowal comes more than a year after the plan was first released, but right as it has begun to draw attention from mainstream media outlets in wake of Heritage president's Kevin Roberts' threats of a potentially bloody "second American Revolution." Trump's campaign and Project 2025 have characterized the 900-page policy blueprint as merely a set of recommendations that Trump can adopt at his discretion.

"I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them."

Skeptics of Trump's claims say that he's lying to avoid political damage. "The Trump SuperPAC has run ads about Project 2025, and a ton of Trumpworld people are authors of it," MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes wrote on X. "They are scared now because they are desperate for no one to know what they're actually up to."

Many central figures behind Project 2025 aren't just Trump supporters—they also worked in the top echelons of his administration. One of them, Trump's former White House personnel director John McEntee, said that Heritage and the Trump campaign plan to "integrate a lot of our work" later this year. Another, Trump's former budget chief Russ Vought, is both advising Project 2025 and sitting on the Republican National Committee's platform committee this year.

"If Trump has 'no idea' who the authors behind Project 2025 are, he’s showing an alarming cognitive decline," former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote on X. "He appointed most of them to roles in his administration! Project 2025 is, in short, the plan to implement what Donald Trump has said he wants to do if he’s reelected."

Trump's own Super PAC is promoting the project as "Trump's Project 2025" while the GOP nominee himself has repeatedly declared his support for key parts of the agenda, including the implementation of a rule that would allow the president to remove civil servants at will and set the rest of Project 2025 in motion.

"I will wield that power very aggressively," Trump said in a campaign video last year.

The rest of Project 2025 includes proposals to dismantle the Department of Education, restrict access to birth control, strip away workers' protections, terminate clean energy incentives and grant tax cuts to large corporations and wealthy Americans. Much of it seems eerily familiar to Heritage's "Mandate for Leadership," a policy blueprint for Trump's first term that the former president embraced.