Don’t Be Fooled By Trump’s Big Display Of Killing Project 2025

David Kurtz
·8 min read
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Project 2025 Is Dead, Long Live Project 2025

Of all the Trump flailing over the past 10 days, nothing was quite as comical, nonsensical, and ineffectual as yesterday’s big push to try to shove Project 2025 – the centerpiece of MAGA world’s planning for a Trump II presidency – down the memory hole.

Where to even begin with this? It’s bogosity piled on top of bogosity in an effort to pretend it was a rogue effort by unsanctioned people very distant from the former president. None of that was true from the beginning. It wasn’t true yesterday. And it won’t be true tomorrow. What happened yesterday amounts to a whole lot of nothing.

But you don’t have to believe me. The Trump campaign effort to try to make it all go away was itself incriminated by the Trump fingerprints left all over the place. Nothing says “we had nothing to do with this” quite like forcing out the Project 2025 head honcho and making public statements that the same fate awaits anyone else who dares draw too much bad publicity for the former president.

“Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you,” Trump campaign senior advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement (emphasis mine).

Paul Dans, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, speaks at the National Conservative Conference in Washington D.C., Wednesday, July 10, 2024. (Photo by Dominic Gwinn / Middle East Images / Middle East Images via AFP) (Photo by DOMINIC GWINN/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
Paul Dans, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, speaks at the National Conservative Conference in Washington D.C., Wednesday, July 10, 2024. (Photo by Dominic Gwinn / Middle East Images / Middle East Images via AFP) (Photo by DOMINIC GWINN/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

On the surface, the only semi-meaningful change seems to be the departure of Paul Dans, who was Project 2025’s director. Beyond that, the work of Project 2025, to the extent it wasn’t already done, will continue under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation, which has housed Project 2025 all along. “Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts will take over Project 2025’s operations,” the WSJ reported.

Most importantly, the work that Project 2025 was doing is basically already done. It assembled a 900-page blueprint for a radical far-right agenda for Trump II and became a clearinghouse for potential personnel in a second Trump term. Perhaps a better way to phrase it is that a bunch of alum from Trump I have been charting out who they would hire for Trump II. None of that goes down the memory hole or disappears. “This tool was built for any future administration to use,” said Heritage’s Roberts.

Despite the big display of opprobrium from the Trump campaign, including warning that participants in Project 2025 would be barred from serving in a Trump II administration, few took the threat very seriously:

Some Project 2025 participants have responded by doubting a ban could be enforced when contributors include close Trump advisers such as former White House speechwriter Stephen Miller, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan, and former White House economic adviser Peter Navarro. Miller has denied his involvement in Project 2025, but his America First Legal group is a participating organization, and his deputy, Gene Hamilton, wrote the playbook’s chapter on the Department of Justice.

The best way to think of yesterday’s mini-eruption was as a calculated planned media effort by the Trump campaign to try to drive a stake through the heart of the ongoing series of negative stories about Project 2025 and its plans for Trump II. They needed a head on a pike as a sign that this was “real” and not just a media effort. Dans served that purpose, but one sacrificial lamb doesn’t make this any less of a targeted media effort. “Today’s news looks like political maneuvering, not a substantive disavowal of the policies Trump has advocated for up until now,” Joyce Vance rightly observed.

The icing on the cake is that Roberts, the Heritage Foundation leader who helped spearhead Project 2025 and will now pick up the pieces after the Trump campaign’s eruption, has a book coming out in September with a glowing forward from none other than GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance.

JD Vance Is The Oppo Gift That Keeps On Giving

It’s getting hard to keep track of all of the examples of JD Vance publicly scorning people without children over a period of years:

  • TPM’s Emine Yücel: Vance’s History Of Extremist Remarks On Family Doesn’t Stop At ‘Childless Cat Ladies’

  • Media Matters: Three more Fox interviews where Vance lashed out at “childless” Democrats like VP Harris

  • CNN: It’s not just ‘cat ladies’: JD Vance has a history of disparaging people without kids

On The Trail

  • Kamala Harris held a raucous rally Tuesday night in Atlanta, where Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) had the crowd eating from his hand:

  • Kamala Harris will hold her first joint event with her not-yet-named running mate in Philadelphia on Tuesday, Politico reports, before the new Democratic ticket embarks on a four-day campaign tour through Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

  • President Biden will keynote the first night of Democratic national convention, CNN reports.

Trump’s Blatantly Racist Appeal

These excerpts from Trump’s interview with Laura Ingraham don’t take any reading between the lines to understand:

2024 Ephemera

Quote Of The Day

I picked this room for this interview. This is my favorite room in the Justice Department. It’s a law library. For more than 20 years, I was a federal judge. Do I look like somebody who would make that basic mistake about the law? I don’t think so.

Attorney General Merrick Garland, on U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling in the Mar-a-Lago case that he unlawfully appointed Jack Smith as special counsel.

Good Read

Joan Biskupic: The inside story of John Roberts and Trump’s immunity win at the Supreme Court

Tina Peters Goes On Trial

The former county clerk in Mesa County, Colorado who stands accused of tampering with voting machines in 2020 in a cockamamie search for evidence of election fraud finally goes on trial in state court today. Just one of the many echo effects of Donald Trump’s Big Lie crusade.

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