Project 2025, RIP?

Where did we leave off?

Ah yes, if you recall, in my last post I told you I was about to fly out to Yellowstone if that Microsoft glitch gets fixed…

So there we were, up at 4:30am, my three kids and I going through security when the notification came that Delta had cancelled our flights. (My husband had flown out the night before to pick up our rental van but ended up stranded in Minneapolis.) Our vacation was hanging in the balance. There was nothing to be done but grab the van from long-term parking, drive home, sleep for an hour, and then drive eleven hours to Sioux Falls where we met up with family. My husband hitched a ride there from a niece, and at 5am the next morning we all caravaned to Wyoming.

It was a lot, and totally worth it. Completely cut off from internet and often from cell service, we spent a week hiking geyser basins, touring caves, sliding down natural rock waterslides (see below), watching a gunfight reenactment, panning for “gems” (the youngest did this, her favorite part), cooking at picnic sites, riding in the back of a pickup up a mountain on a ranch in the Bighorns, seeing two grizzlies ambling about, an otter swimming in a mountain lake, two coyotes frolicking in the evening, three big horn sheep who wandered into town, a black wolf close-up, and oodles of bison, elk, deer, a several other animals I’m sure I’m forgetting. And also eating lots of ice cream and putting a lot of miles on the van.

Before I signed off in that last post, I also left you with these words:

It’s ok to take a beat. It’s fine to step back, catch your breath, and get your bearings. One thing I know for certain, however, is that this election is not over. It’s not too late. There is so much time between now and then. So much can happen. And there’s so much to do.

So there I was, drinking caffeine and driving down Interstate 90 somewhere in Minnesota, when my notifications started going wild. Biden was stepping down. Kamala was in. You all know what’s happened since.

The collective despair many were feeling was instantly transformed into collective momentum. In my last post, I said it would be up to us and we’d need to find our own path. That path just got a lot smoother, and people are finding places to plug in. Black women were the first to step up with a Sunday night Zoom call to help galvanize support for Harris. Black men followed suit, as did AAPI folks, and then white women, and then White Dudes fo Harris, at which point I lost track. The campaign raised $200 million in the first week, and as I write, record-setting crowds are attending a Harris rally in Georgia.

In that last post, I also shared that I’d just recorded an interview with Michel Martin. It aired Monday on CNN and PBS, and you can watch here:

It is rare that a network gives this amount of time to unpack an issue, and I love that Michel always does her homework and asks such excellent questions.

Fast-forward to today, when President Trump decides to pull the plug on Project 2025. Maybe it was something I said?

Although Trump claimed to have nothing to do with Project 2025 and claimed not to know who was behind it, these claims were difficult to believe given the multiple close connections between contributors and the former president. But Trump wants to win and it was clear that opposition to Project 2025 was gaining traction across the electorate, hence his strategic statement “on Project 2025’s Demise”:

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.

So, is that the end of Project 2025?

Not likely.

Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts was quick to insist that the policy drafting was set to end at this point anyway and that Project 2025 would “continue our efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels—federal, state, and local.”

There is also the inconvenient fact that Trump’s new running mate, J.D. Vance, is closely connected to Roberts and to Project 2025. In fact, The New Republic just published J.D. Vance’s fiery foreword to Roberts’s forthcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light. The original subtitle, “Burning Down Washington to Save America” was replaced with “Taking Back Washington to Save America” in light of controversy surrounding Project 2025. (And the match on its cover removed, presumably deemed too incendiary.)

Here’s what Alex Shepherd writes:

But the inspiration for that extreme language can be found in Vance’s foreword, which ends with a call for followers to “circle the wagons and load the muskets,” and describes Roberts’s ideas as an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay [sic] ahead.” (The New Republic downloaded Dawn’s Early Light earlier this month from NetGalley, which provides advance copies of books to reviewers and booksellers. Copies were removed from the platform earlier this month.)

Vance does not explicitly mention Project 2025 in his foreword. He does, however, make clear that he is extremely close with Roberts and that he sees him as a strong ally in a shared political project. The foreword opens with the parallels in their biographies: Both are from poor families and had difficult childhoods, both are Catholic, and both are now working in Washington, D.C., to remake the country. Over the three-page foreword, Vance singles out Roberts in the areas where the two most strongly align politically. First, he praises Roberts for his willingness to criticize corporations and break with the GOP’s free-market orthodoxy; then, for his strong emphasis on the family. “Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics,” Vance writes, by “recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand.”

Vance’s foreword is also, notably, a call for revolution. “The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems,” he writes. “We are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach.” That is where the muskets come in:

“As Kevin Roberts writes, ‘It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.’

We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”

But we don’t have to look to Vance to see enduring connections. Trump himself has been actively promoting many of the Project’s most disturbing proposals: dismantling the “deep state” and replacing tens of thousands of federal employees with loyalists, initiating mass detention and deportation of immigrants, and pursuing various mechanisms for enhancing the power of the presidency, to name a few.

Russ Vought, a key contributor to Project 2025, also happened to chair the committee that drafted the Republican Party platform, a document with Trump’s fingerprints all over it, and there is significant overlap between the platform and Project 2025.

But having all those details out in the open and not just spewed by Trump in the midst of unhinged campaign rallies was doing some real damage. What Project 2025 accomplished was to remind Americans to look beyond the spectacle, the personalities, the drama of the campaign, and consider policy. Nine-hundred pages of policy proposals, laid out in black and white. As I said in my interview, there’s no guarantee that everything would be enacted, but we should expect nearly all of it to be on the table and a good portion of it enacted.

We still should if Trump wins, his protestations not withstanding.

But it’s a new week, and a new race, and there’s still so much to do.

In the meantime, enjoy some pictures from my week away.