Even Donald Trump doesn’t want anything to do with Project 2025—at least not publicly.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on Truth Social. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

Imagine how toxic the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 must be to get disavowed by Trump, the guy who has otherwise mused about being a “dictator” and planning mass deportations if elected. And that’s despite the fact that “Trump shares many policy goals with Project 2025,” as The Washington Post put it, from dismantling the Department of Education to scaling back climate regulations to gutting the civil service. The Guardian, too, found that Trump’s platform, “dubbed Agenda 47, overlaps with Project 2025 on most major policy issues.”

But the former president is running scared—like he has on abortion, an issue over which the GOP’s extremism has proven so poisonous to voters that Trump is now conveniently trying to look moderate—from a project that includes contributions from Russ Vought, who not only served as his onetime director of the Office of Management and Budget, but is also the platform committee policy director for next week’s Republican National Convention. Former senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller has also been linked to Project 2025, though he, too, has denied involvement with it.

Trump’s comments about Project 2025 came on the heels of Heritage president Kevin Roberts’s appearance on Steve Bannon’s far-right podcast, War Room. (Incidentally, Bannon wasn’t hosting that day because he’s currently serving a four-month sentence in a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut; former Republican congressman Dave Brat was filling in.) “We are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” The Heritage Foundation even followed up on X to claim Democrats have “a well established record of instigating the opposite.”

Roberts isn’t some fringe right-winger fantasizing about revolution, but the head of a powerful think tank that’s taken the lead in drafting the 922-page Project 2025 agenda, which is like a modern version of the Ronald Reagan–era “Mandate for Leadership,” albeit “more extreme, and even more dangerous,” according to The Nation. The Project 2025 proposal, noted Politico, includes giving the president full power “over quasi-independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies that have been the bane of Trump’s political existence in the last few years.” It calls for breaking up the FBI, defunding the Justice Department, and eliminating the Department of Education, arguing that “federal education policy should be limited.”

Project 2025 is also about limiting freedoms, including abortion rights. It outlines using the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-vice law, to prevent the mailing of the abortion pill mifepristone. According to Project 2025, “Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, there is now no federal prohibition on the enforcement of this statute. The Department of Justice in the next conservative Administration should therefore announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such pills.” As for marriage, well, Project 2025 says it wants to “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.” It attacks “radical gender ideology.” It also seeks to ban pornography.

Vought, who authored a chapter on the executive office of the president, told Politico, “We have to be thinking mechanically about how to take these institutions over.” Per Politico, Vought is reassembling his Trump OMB team and described “his role as drafting fresh executive orders, playbooks, and memoranda for Cabinet secretaries to be ‘ready on day one of the next transition.’” As he added to the outlet, “Whatever is necessary to seize control of the administrative state is really our task.” Vought is being talked about as a potential chief of staff for Trump, filling a role previously held by Mark Meadows, who leads the Trump-aligned Conservative Partnership Institute, which has received funding from Trump’s PAC and is one of Project 2025’s coalition partners, along with right-wing organizations like Turning Point USA, Hillsdale College, and Moms for Liberty.

The Trump ties run deep within Project 2025, as Popular Information’s Judd Legum found that 31 of the 38 people responsible for writing and editing it “were appointed or nominated to positions in the Trump administration and transition.”

Trump won in 2016 in part because he was a Rorschach test; people could see in him what they wanted. He was a celebrity who had never held any elected office and had no legislative voting record. Though he ran as a Republican vowing to overturn Roe v. Wade, he had previously been “very pro-choice” and a registered Democrat. Of course, Trump governed from the right, prioritizing the desires of his MAGA base and assailing the left. But fortunately for the country, Trump wasn’t prepared to win the White House in 2016 and was wildly disorganized in office. Eight years later, however, there should be no uncertainty around how Trump might govern, with his minions crafting a far-right, Christian nationalist agenda that makes Richard Nixon look like Barack Obama.