Trump's attempted rebrand of Project 2025 is failing
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The Trump campaign issued a very weird statement yesterday disavowing the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 — again. As campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita point out, they've been trying to get them to shut up for some time:
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 President in any way, 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.
The Trumpian threat at the end was a nice flourish but they do mean it. The professional campaign's frustration with the group has been obvious ever since the Democrats jumped on the 900-page manifesto and made it into another Trump-branded product. No matter how hard the Trump campaign tried they couldn't get people to stop talking about Project 2025.
Trump has personally tried to distance himself from the project, calling it "appalling" and "extreme" at different times and claiming he didn't know anything about it, even though his own running mate, JD Vance, has extensive ties to the organization and has even written the foreword to Heritage President Kevin Roberts' upcoming book, Dawn's Early Light, Taking Back Washington to Save America. As has been thoroughly documented, most of the people associated with Project 2025 are Trump administration alumni, such as his former Housing Secretary Ben Carson, trade adviser Peter Navarro, White House adviser Johnny McEntee and former Director of Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought. In fact, one report showed that 31 of 38 authors and editors of the 900-page tome had been on Trump's team at one time or continue to be. This is not surprising since Trump and his MAGA movement have devoured what was once the conservative movement of which The Heritage Foundation was a founding institution. Conservatives are MAGA now or they are no longer relevant.
Wiles' and LaCivita's statement was issued in reaction to the news that Paul Dans, the person who was in charge of producing the "Mandate For Leadership" governance guide, announced that he was leaving the project in August. Dans' departure was immediately interpreted to mean that the Trump people had engineered his ouster and had successfully gotten the Heritage Foundation to back away from it.
But is that really the case?
The 900-page "Mandate for Leadership" is already written. In fact, it was largely finished over a year ago when we first started talking about it. It's all over the internet. The producers of the document are MAGA movement operatives and it is a MAGA document whether Trump wants to claim it or not. Certainly, the Harris campaign is not going to let him off the hook:
Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country. Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real – in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.
Trump is running around pandering to every constituency and donor group, promising anything and everything in order to get reelected. And most of what he's promising is in Project 2025 — except for the third rail issue of abortion, which he fatuously insists he's "solved" by having it go back to the states, claiming that's what everyone on all sides always wanted. That is, of course, absurd. But pretty much everything else from policies on law enforcement to trade to education and immigration are all listed on his own Agenda 47 website with very little to distinguish them from Project 2025, except for the level of detail. In other words, they see Project 2025 as a branding problem, not a substance problem. The media needs to be much more careful to explain that.
The "Mandate for Leadership" guide is only part of Project 2025. The other component is the vast personnel database that a new Trump administration will use to staff the federal government once they implement "Schedule F", an executive order that strips federal civil service protections from workers allowing them to fire thousands of federal workers and replace them with Trump loyalists. There is no doubt that this is a Trump initiative since they first wrote Schedule F during his administration. This database is as much a part of Project 2025 as the manifesto.
Project 2025 has become inconvenient for the Trump campaign but it has produced nearly all the policy it was ever going to & owns the central personnel database in the conservative movement. Trump doesn’t yet have a functioning transition team & will likely need its resources. https://t.co/v3FvDLo3O6
— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) July 30, 2024
Trump has every intention of implementing its vision. It's his vision, too. Not only would it be terrifying and dangerous, but it would also be dangerously incompetent. That wouldn't be the first time. As I noted back in 2016, when it became news that since Trump had no experience in government he was relying on the Heritage Foundation during his transition, it has a very poor record when it came to staffing a government. As the Washington Post reported over 20 years ago, Heritage was instrumental in one of the most disastrous policies of the Bush administration:
They had been hired to perform a low-level task: collecting and organizing statistics, surveys and wish lists from the Iraqi ministries for a report that would be presented to potential donors at the end of the month. But as suicide bombs and rocket attacks became almost daily occurrences, more and more senior staffers defected. In short order, six of the new young hires found themselves managing the country's $13 billion budget, making decisions affecting millions of Iraqis.
Viewed from the outside, their experience illustrates many of the problems that have beset the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), a paucity of experienced applicants, a high turnover rate, bureaucracy, partisanship and turf wars.
[...]
For months they wondered what they had in common, how their names had come to the attention of the Pentagon, until one day they figured it out: They had all posted their résumés at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank.
This epic debacle was documented in the book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" by Rajiv Chandrasekaran which revealed that the Bush administration had decided they wanted ideological litmus tests for the people who were going to build the new Iraq government from the ground up. Among the criteria were questions like whether were they "pro-life" and if they believed in unfettered gun rights, none of which had the slightest relevance to the jobs at hand.
It appears that if Trump wins in November they're going to try it again, only this time they're experimenting on their fellow Americans. And they still have clearly learned nothing from all their previous humiliating failures.
