Project 2025 is a lengthy set of policy plans put together by former Trump officials.
YUNI: Hi. This is Yuni (ph) from Edmonton, Canada. I just finished listening to the last episode of the NPR POLITICS PODCAST before I leave for summer camp and miss three weeks of the pod. This podcast was recorded at...
SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
12:40 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, July 10, 2024.
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MCCAMMON: Have fun at camp.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: I mean, what are they expecting people to do on hikes - not listen to podcasts? It doesn't make any sense.
MCCAMMON: Listen to the birds.
FRANCO ORDOÑEZ, BYLINE: No. NPR POLITICS PODCAST - we're going to appeal to the camp.
MCCAMMON: All right. Hey, there, it's the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the campaign.
ORDOÑEZ: I'm Franco Ordoñez. I also cover the campaign.
MONTANARO: And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
MCCAMMON: Today on the podcast, what is Donald Trump's agenda for a second term? It's a big question, and a group made up of former top officials from his administration has put together a 900-plus-page document. You may have heard of it. It's called Project 2025, and it is full of proposals.
Then the Republican National Committee has a platform of its own. And there's what Trump himself has said. We're going to try to untangle all of it. It's a big web of stuff. But Franco, you've been reporting on all of this, and I want to focus first on Project 2025. What are some of the ideas in that document?
ORDOÑEZ: Yeah. Certainly, as you pointed out, it is a 900-page pro-Trump plan to essentially overhaul the American government and really to expand his presidential powers. Dozens, dozens of conservative groups got involved in this project, drafting all these policies, which really became kind of a wish list of conservative ideas that Trump could essentially pull from.
And I do want to make clear that this is not, quote-unquote, "Trump's plan," but it is a plan for Trump, and there's no mistaking that there is a lot of overlap with it. I mean, in many ways, it takes what Trump's biggest policy goals are and kind of shows a plan to execute them.
MONTANARO: Wasn't that sort of the point of the drafting of this in the first place? I mean, you had a lot of Trump acolytes and Trump people who are close to him who drafted this, and it certainly is a more Trumpian vision of America than you would have probably had if Paul Ryan had drafted this, the former House speaker, or John Boehner, the former House speaker, or Mitt Romney had drafted this.
ORDOÑEZ: No. And, I mean, when I spoke with Paul Dans - he's the project director for Project 2025 - I mean, he called Trump the embodiment of the project. And another thing that inspired it, on that note, is the experience they had at the beginning of the 2016 administration. They just did not have a transition process in place. They didn't have a plan in place. And they really struggled to get the people involved, and there was a lot of infighting and just a lot of problems.
MCCAMMON: Now, the way this has been described, Project 2025, by the head of the organization that helped craft it - the word he used is revolution. Tell me about that.
ORDOÑEZ: Yeah. I mean, there is no question at all that those involved - I mentioned Dans -have talked about this as a revolution. Dans actually told me he called it a clarion call for Conservatives. But Kevin Roberts - he kind of took that even further. He is the president of The Heritage Foundation. And he went on a podcast, the "War Room," a conservative podcast that is usually hosted by Steve Bannon, who is another Trump former official who is now in prison. And Kevin Roberts went on the show, and he said this.
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KEVIN ROBERTS: We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.
ORDOÑEZ: And those comments really set off a lot of people, including Democrats who saw this as threatening, an underscore of violence, but also saw it kind of as an opportunity to kind of tie Trump to this and kind of like - that he is a danger if reelected in a second term.
MCCAMMON: Remain bloodless if the left allows it to be - I mean, that certainly sounds threatening. Domenico, what have Democrats been saying about this? How have they responded?
MONTANARO: Well, you know, this is a kind of thing that Democrats - many were aware of previously, you know, in the past year when it started to gain some attention. But it's really only recently become - gone sort of viral. I've seen these posts that have started to pop up about what Trump would do with some bullet points, outlining what Project 2025 would do, and it got new attention and went viral at a BET Awards event where Taraji P. Henson actually mentioned it.
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TARAJI P HENSON: Pay attention. It's not a secret. Look it up. They are attacking our most vulnerable citizens. The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up.
MONTANARO: It's become sort of the thing that now is being held up on the left to say, if you want Trump back in office, here are the things he's going to do. Now, Trump, of course, is distancing himself somewhat from it, saying, he doesn't have any idea who the people are who's running this, which is not true, that he's - that some of the things, he agrees with. Some of the things, he says, are, quote, "absolutely ridiculous." And I think that it's important to point out the things that are overlap here with Project 2025 versus the things that Trump himself has said, which are myriad. He said a lot of things that are highly controversial and a lot of things that do overlap.
ORDOÑEZ: Yeah. I mean, some of those things that overlap is - you know, Project 2025 proposes mass deportations of more than 11 million people who are in the country illegally and stricter rules on migrants. So does Trump, and so does the RNC platform. Trump has talked about getting rid of the Department of Education, as does Project 2025. He's also talked about kind of withholding federal funds from so-called sanctuary cities, and Project 2025 kind of does that as well. What's interesting is, like, Project 2025, in many ways, takes some of Trump's biggest goals and kind of shows a plan to execute them.
MCCAMMON: Do we have a sense of how - I mean, I guess we can't know sitting here now, but how receptive - to what degree Trump would be receptive if he's reelected to truly sort of absorbing this document?
MONTANARO: Well, I don't know that Trump is necessarily going to absorb the document 100%. This is why he's saying that he's trying to distance himself from it. But this will provide a bit of a roadmap and some policy details that he didn't have in the first administration. I mean, remember, it was very chaotic. He did a lot of the things he was promising to do. He's promising to do a lot of things again, and now you have an entire apparatus of people who know how to craft this kind of legislation and policy, and they're saying, hey, if you want to do it, we've got a plan for you.
MCCAMMON: Right. And part of this is - what? - is training, recruiting, vetting staff.
ORDOÑEZ: Yeah. Absolutely. This has been described as kind of like a LinkedIn for conservatives. Another issue has been they just didn't have the political appointees ready for the beginning of the 2016 administration. With this effort, they want to have thousands of conservatives ready on hand who can be kind of hired and picked, chosen from, to man a new administration.
MCCAMMON: OK, we're going to take a quick break. More in just a moment.
And we are back. This is something that Trump has tried, as we mentioned, to distance himself from a little bit. But I think it is worth talking more about the connections between former President Trump and the people who are putting together Project 2025. Here's Trump campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez.
DANIELLE ALVAREZ: And so, Democrats are desperate. And they're throwing a Hail Mary, attempting to talk about outside groups as though they're President Trump's policy positions.
MCCAMMON: So she's downplaying this connection. But we know the connection exists. Franco, what is it?
ORDOÑEZ: Yeah, I mean, she's downplaying it and kind of accusing the Biden administration of trying to distract from his, you know, disastrous, you know, debate performance a couple of weeks ago. But the connections are real. I mean, again, policy is personnel, and the people who have been leading this are so intertwined with both the Trump administration and the Trump campaign. Starting with Russ Vought, he was the director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Trump administration. He currently is helping lead the policy committee at the Republican National Convention. There's also John McEntee. He was former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office in the Trump administration. There's also Gene Hamilton. He was a top official for the Justice Department.
I mean, these are the people who are involved in Project 2025, and they are so mixed in with Trump. And, you know, just to add to that, there's very little doubt that if he is elected again, he is going to need these people. And he's going to depend on them to not only, you know, kind of fill key roles of his next administration and help him, you know, issue policy that he wants to do.
MONTANARO: You know, the fact is Trump is trying to distance himself with parts of it that he feels politically aren't going to help him win, right? I mean, we've heard him talk about that with abortion rights, for example, where he's tried to, you know, massage or finesse this position that really has him in a bit of a box saying, you know, let's push it back to the states, you know, let the states decide, when it really is the state policies that a lot of people are upset with. But Project 2025 and the people associated with it certainly are spiritually aligned with Trump if we think of it in that kind of way. And a lot of the people, as Franco is noting, who are behind this are probably going to fill the spaces within a Trump administration if Trump does win. And they're the people who've been in his ear and who will continue to be in his ear.
MCCAMMON: So even though, as we've said, there are many, many pieces of Project 2025 that are right in line with things Trump has said and continues to say he wants to do, this appears to be an effort to seem more appealing to moderate voters, to swing voters. Is that what this looks like it's about?
ORDOÑEZ: I mean, certainly the pushback from Trump is an effort to appeal to moderate voters. I mean, he knows the politics of this issue, as Domenico was talking about, on abortion. He knows the challenges of abortion. In Project 2025, in that 900-page playbook, they go much farther on restrictions for abortion. He's seeing the challenges of reaching independent voters, more moderate voters, that he is going to need to win in a general election.
MONTANARO: And I don't know if it's him really appealing to moderates as much as it's him wanting to not look extreme to moderates, right?
MCCAMMON: Right.
MONTANARO: He doesn't want to be cancelable among moderate voters who would say, gosh, I really just can't get, you know, with somebody who - even if I have issues with Joe Biden's age and mental fitness and ability to be president, and I kind of agree with some of his stuff, but not everything, and I'm more conservative on some things, they don't want to have a president who, you know, believes that there should be a crackdown on gay rights, for example, which are a lot of the things that within Project 2025 a lot of people are very concerned that it would do.
ORDOÑEZ: Yeah, and also Trump doesn't like to give credit, you know, to other groups, to other people. He likes to be the...
MONTANARO: That's true (laughter).
ORDOÑEZ: He likes to be the spokesman. He likes to say, I am making the decision - he is writing the policies. And some of his surrogates and allies say that the Heritage group just got a little bit too far ahead of their skis.
MONTANARO: You guys remember when Steve Bannon appeared on the cover of a magazine and it set off this entire thing during the Trump administration about Trump just really bristling at the fact that people were giving Steve Bannon the credit as his, like, campaign chairman, as really the sort of brains behind Trump. That is the kind of thing that will put you on the outs more quickly than anything else that you could do with Trump.
MCCAMMON: He wants to be at the center of the conversation.
MONTANARO: And attention.
MCCAMMON: And attention.
ORDOÑEZ: Sarah, I want to ask you, actually, because you've been doing some reporting on this. You know, the RNC just put out its platform, though the campaign tells me that Trump wrote every single sentence of it. What do you make of the platform? Because there's been a lot of talk about the language surrounding abortion and concerns that they didn't go far enough.
MCCAMMON: Yeah, I mean, it's been portrayed as an effort to sort of moderate, you know, specifically the abortion piece. The new language focuses more on, really, what Trump's position has been for a while, which is the idea of leaving the issue to the states. It backs away from the idea of federal legislation. At the same time, it talks explicitly about the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which of course is federal law. And, you know, so I think, in practice, what this actually means is unclear. And in talking to my sources in the anti-abortion movement, I hear, you know, some people are concerned. They don't feel it goes far enough. Others, I think, see it as a step in the right direction, they've told me. What we do know is that these groups are hopeful that if Trump is reelected, he will appoint people who share their views on abortion to a host of federal agencies and push forward their agenda one way or another.
MONTANARO: Well, what I find interesting - former Vice President Mike Pence, who was really brought on the ticket to help Trump in 2016 appeal to, you know, white evangelical Christians who might have had some pause about Trump's personal life. Pence wrote that this was a profound disappointment to millions of people who are against abortion rights. He said it was, quote, "part of a broader retreat in our party, trying to remain vague for political expedience."
MCCAMMON: My sense is that it leaves the door wide open if Republicans were to take control of Congress and the presidency. I don't think there's anything in that platform that prevents them from moving forward with efforts to restrict abortion nationally, which is the goal of the anti-abortion movement. All right, well, let's leave it there for today. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the campaign.
ORDOÑEZ: I'm Franco Ordoñez. I cover the campaign as well.
MONTANARO: And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
MCCAMMON: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
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