Trump’s Reelection Agenda Was Set by Actual Hate Groups

Project 2025, the short name for the 180-page ultraconservative plan for a second Donald Trump presidency, has some frightening minds developing its schemes to oust civil servants and severely roll back civil rights, among other authoritarian plots.

Behind the expansive playbook is its advisory board, made up of dozens of think tanks and advocacy groups, including three that are designated hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the substack Decoding Fox News reported Monday. And despite Trump’s recent attempts to distance himself from the plan, these group’s fingerprints were all over his last administration and will likely be all over his next one. 

The first group is that old standard the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy group that brought the very case that overturned Roe v. Wade, sought to recriminalize sex acts between LGBTQ+ adults, and pushed heinous lies about gay and transgender people.

It’s worth noting that House Speaker Mike Johnson worked at that law group for nearly a decade and former Trump attorney John Eastman was also allied with the group. While in the White House, Trump worked with them too, it seems. In 2018, he invited the group’s senior counsel Tyson Langhofer to speak at a youth outreach event about free speech. 

The second designated hate group is the Center for Immigration Studies, or CIS, a conservative anti-immigration think tank. Its website sports the tagline, “Low Immigration, Pro Immigrant.”

While Trump claims not to be affiliated with those behind Project 2025, CIS has long had its hands in the immigration policy of the Trump administration. While sketching out some of Trump’s harshest immigration policies, former senior White House adviser Stephen Miller heavily relied on data from CIS and would often pass reports from the group on to the president’s desk, as well as to his affiliates at Breitbart for publication, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

The Trump administration reportedly spoke regularly with Jessica Vaughan, who is the think tank’s director of policy studies, according to NPR. The group’s executive director, Mark Krikorian, also said he met with Trump officials to discuss immigration policy, per The New York Times.

The think tank mostly publishes its own studies and blog posts for the purpose of fearmongering about immigration in the United States. One of its most recent posts posits that Joe Biden’s new immigration policy, which will grant protections to millions of undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, will equate to a “marriage fraud mill.”

CIS has repeatedly shared links to VDARE, a site that publishes the drivel of white supremacists. The group also lists Jason Richwine—a public policy analyst who once suggested that his research had found that Hispanic people were less intelligent than whites—as its resident scholar. 

The CATO Institute has debunked much of the so-called research produced by CIS, including a report that allegedly used double-counted data on murders committed by undocumented immigrants in Texas. It’s likely that many of the group’s dubious studies have served as fuel for the fire of Trump’s, and the entire Republican Party’s, insistence on an immigrant crime wave. 

As a member of the Mandate for Leadership’s advisory board, CIS’s connections to the previous Trump administration should surprise no one, because despite what the former president may claim, he can be found in every corner of Project 2025 and its “abysmal” policy points, as he called them. 

The third designated hate group is the Family Research Council, which published anti-LGBTQ+ studies based on debunked science, opposed same-sex marriage, bashed laws against hate crimes, and undermined anti-bullying programs. 

Trump also has ties to this group. Last year, he spoke at an event for the group’s Pray, Vote, Stand conference, urging them to back off painting him as pro-life, wanting to distance himself from the position that proved unpopular among voters in the midterms. Trump recently spoke in a prerecorded message at a luncheon co-sponsored by the Family Research Council. 

Project 2025’s advisory board was originally announced on the same day that Roe v. Wade was overturned, as if to present the cast list for the Republican Party’s plan to proceed with the obliteration of civil rights. It would be a mistake to see Project 2025’s policies as anything but essential to Trump’s potential presidency, regardless of what he’d have you believe.