Trump Flipped Out That ‘Lunatic’ Project 2025 Could Tank His Campaign

Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez
·8 min read
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As he entered the final stretch of the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump spent much of this month trying to disown the highly Trumpy, Heritage Foundation-led Project 2025 — to the point that he even got his fans to boo the initiative during a recent campaign rally. His protracted freakout over the conservative project — to which he has multiple direct ties, and which is only as extreme as it is largely because of his influence — is driven almost entirely by Trump’s fear over one thing.

When the twice-impeached ex-president and convicted felon took to social media in early July to make the (patently absurd) claim that “I know nothing about Project 2025, [and] I have no idea who is behind it,” he added, “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying, and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” He did not specify what “things” he meant.

But according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, shortly before he posted that brief message, Trump had been privately — and very bitterly — complaining about the abortion policies laid out in the lengthy Project 2025 manifesto, and trashing the Project 2025-linked “lunatics” who keep demanding unpopular abortion bans and restrictions. Among the policy proposals in Project 2025’s policy road map are plans to end federal approval for abortion pills, use federal agencies for expanded “abortion surveillance,” restrict access to emergency contraception, end the federal requirement that hospitals provide medically necessary emergency abortion care, and revive a 150-year-old law that could serve as a de facto national abortion ban.

For what it’s worth, some of the people who helped author Project 2025’s abortion provisions were appointed under Trump to influential federal posts during his stint in the White House — including Roger Severino, who headed the HHS’ Office of Civil Rights under Trump, and Gene Hamilton, who worked in Trump’s Justice Department and Homeland Security Department.

Trump, now the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, vented that the abortion policies could badly damage his chances at retaking the White House, even at a point in the election cycle when Trump was riding high on strong polling numbers against President Joe Biden. (In the time since, Biden has dropped out of the 2024 contest, with Vice President Kamala Harris now the presumptive Democratic nominee.)

Of course, it was Trump himself who made the hard-right, ambiently unpopular abortion policies embedded in Project 2025 possible at all, as it was Trump’s Supreme Court nominees who were necessary to destroy Roe v. Wade in the first place.

This is yet another example of Trump getting exactly what he wanted and what he promised to deliver in his first term, and then being annoyed that those actions are coming back to haunt him at a consequential time. After all, if he loses to Harris in November, it may not spell just the end of his political career, but it could end in prison sentences.

Furthermore, Trump and his lieutenants’ ongoing meltdown over Project 2025 serves as a reminder of why, exactly, Project 2025 types are poised to inherit the keys of influence in a potential second Trump administration — no matter how much of a public relations “pain in the ass” they are today to Team Trump’s ambitions.

Project 2025, a policy and personnel planning coalition of various groups led by the Trump-aligned Heritage Foundation, is stacked from top to bottom with right-wing MAGA diehards. These include several who remain in regular contact with Trump, former senior Trump administration officials, Republicans who are all but guaranteed a job offer in a second Trump term, and conservative leaders who’ve vowed to make the project and GOP as Trumpified as possible.

During his post-presidency, Trump has been directly briefed by confidants and close aides about Project 2025’s substance and progress, sources with knowledge of the matter say. Top figures in the project, such as former senior Trump administration hands Russ Vought and John McEntee, still talk to the former president. And the project — which was intended to provide policy ideas and a vetted personnel database for a future GOP (read: Trump) administration on day one — is the way it is only because of Trump and his hostile takeover of the Republican Party.

One source close to Trump describes the former president as having essentially “birthed” Project 2025, in the sense that its agenda wouldn’t look how it does, had it not been for Trump’s demands for total fealty and extremism from his own party and movement. The project broadly reflects Trump’s publicly-stated desires and obsessions, especially when it comes to gutting and remaking the so-called “deep state” and purging the federal government of real or imagined enemies.

“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 his 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!” one of Project 2025’s contributors, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, tells Rolling Stone. “You can’t look at this constellation of organizations and people without seeing that they’re all his people.”

Indeed, it can be difficult, or impossible, to tell precisely where Trumpland ends and Project 2025-ville begins. For instance, one of the sections in the initiative is authored by Stephen Moore, a conservative economics writer who has been a fixture in the right-wing think tank world for decades. In a brief interview, Moore says that he contributed only one part of the project, and that “it’s not the Trump plan … Trump has his own plans.” When asked if he still communicates with the former and perhaps future U.S. president, Moore says, “I meet with him every month or two, to discuss economic policy.”

None of this has stopped Team Trump from attempting to create distance between his campaign and Project 2025 — a desire that the project’s team has sought to publicly accommodate. At an event in Milwaukee during the Republican National Convention, Project 2025 director Paul Dans — who served as chief of staff in Trump’s Office of Personnel Management — argued that Democrats were wrongly “vilifying Project 2025, and then making this fake attachment to President Trump.” He claimed, “What Democrats [have] said about Project 2025 is probably the greatest misinformation campaign since, I don’t know, the Russia hoax.” On Tuesday, Dans officially resigned from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation.

“President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the [former] president in any way,” Trump campaign co-chiefs Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement Tuesday. “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.”

According to reporting by CBS News, Project 2025’s “work is likely to continue,” and the project still intends to share its lists of policy recommendations and potential Trump administration hires to his campaign for review.

One reason that longtime conservative movementarians and policy wonks — including many involved in Project 2025 — are in line to amass government power is that Trump, in many ways, cannot seem to be bothered by the details. According to two people familiar with the matter, when some of Trump’s top advisers have attempted to talk to him about certain transition or personnel matters in recent months, he has grown visibly irritated and abruptly cut off the conversation if the topic didn’t interest him.

And for all of Trump’s public exasperation about Project 2025, he and his team’s efforts to distance him from it have arguably helped Democrats drive public awareness about the project.

Multiple Project 2025 authors and key figures in the Heritage-housed initiative tell Rolling Stone that they aren’t taking Trump’s supposed disavowals personally. They are aware that he and his campaign staff are hyper-focused on not scaring off too many swing voters who will determine the 2024 presidential election. One project author simply dismisses Trump’s words as “ass-covering” and little more. And several of these sources remark that the ex-president and his lieutenants’ fury lately had done nothing but create a “Streisand effect,” drawing greater attention to Project 2025 and Trump’s connections to it.

Indeed, with the 2024 Harris campaign now actively campaigning against the project, Team Trump has been trying, in vain, to denounce it.

Over the weekend, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, said that “Project 2025 has nothing to do with Trump, his platform, campaign, or what he wants to do for the future of this country … Anyone who pushes Project 2025 knows it is a hoax.”

On Tuesday, as word spread that the former Trump administration official spearheading Project 2025 was leaving, The New Republic published the foreword that Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, penned endorsing a new book authored by Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation.

“Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism,” Vance wrote. “The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”

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