Ex-Project 2025 Leader Brags Trump’s Policy Mirrors Theirs

The former leader of Project 2025 once claimed that many of Donald Trump’s policies for his second term would be ripped right from the pages of their authoritarian playbook.

In a recently unearthed video, Paul Dans, the former director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, spoke about the similarities between his policy plan and Trump’s on Steve Bannon’s War Room.

Dans said that his organization, which includes 140 former Trump staffers, wasn’t technically affiliated with their former boss’s campaign—but that it didn’t particularly matter because their product was 100 percent Trump.

“We’re not, to be sure, connected to President Trump’s campaign. But many of our ideas, you’ll see one-to-one mirroring,” Dans admitted.

“We sat down and wrote this book before President Trump had even announced,” Dans added.

It seems that Trump’s staffers knew him best while crafting their project’s agenda, which includes everything from the dissolution of essential government agencies, such as the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency, to the implementation of federal abortion bans and contraception restrictions.

Dans previously appeared on War Room in June and called Project 2025 an “instruction manual” for a second Trump administration.

Dans resigned as director of the project in July, when Trump repeatedly tried to disavow the conservative manifesto after it started to be covered more widely in the press. But Dans’s resignation failed to quell the concerns of Democrats, and none of Trump’s attempts to distance himself, like pretending not to know what Project 2025 even was, have been particularly convincing.