It is a vision of America where same-sex marriage is outlawed, women are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term and viewing pornography is punishable with prison time.
“Project 2025”, a 922-page plan by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, suggests a dramatic reshaping of American government, law and society, based largely on Christian nationalist values.
While Donald Trump has publicly distanced himself from it, the plan offers a playbook for the first 180 days of a hypothetical second Trump term.
The project’s authors advocate for the immediate removal of as many as 50,000 government workers to be replaced with Trump loyalists, as well as eliminating the departments of education and justice and the undoing of Biden administration climate change policies.
It also includes more extreme policy ideas the former president has not floated publicly, including banning pornography, reversing federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, excluding the morning-after pill from coverage mandated under the Affordable Care Act and preventing same-sex couples from marrying or adopting children, to “maintain a biblically based definition of marriage and family”.
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“If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical left,” the authors write, “we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.”
As Democrats began highlighting it in the election campaign, Trump posted on his social media website that he knew “nothing” about Project 2025. “I have no idea who is behind it,” the 78-year-old presumptive Republican nominee said. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
It has already become a rallying point for President Biden and the Democratic Party, who say that it represents an ultraconservative agenda Republicans plan to install should they win back the White House in November.
“He’s trying to hide his connections to his allies’ extreme Project 2025 agenda,” Biden said of Trump in a statement released by his campaign over the weekend. “The only problem? It was written for him, by those closest to him. Project 2025 should scare every single American.”
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How close is Trump to its architects and their ideology?
The advisory board for Project 2025 includes representatives from conservative groups led by veterans of the Trump administration, such as America First Legal, which is headed by the former White House adviser Stephen Miller, and the Center for Renewing America, run by Russ Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget.
The director of the “presidential transition project” is Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official. Meanwhile, Gene Hamilton, a top aide to Jeff Sessions, Trump’s attorney-general, wrote the chapter on the justice department.
Of the 38 people responsible for writing and editing Project 2025, 31 were appointed or nominated to positions in the Trump administration and transition, according to an analysis by The Times.
“If Trump has ‘no idea’ who the authors behind Project 2025 are, he’s showing an alarming cognitive decline,” said Robert Reich, the Democratic former secretary of labour under President Clinton who is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “He appointed most of them to roles in his administration. Trump is Project 2025. It is his plan, written by people he hand chose, to put every aspect of Americans’ lives under Maga [Make America Great Again] control.”
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Reich described the plan as a step-by-step guide that would “turn America into an authoritarian nightmare”.
Jared Huffman, a Democratic congressman from California who is leading a resistance task force against Trump’s use of executive power should he become president, said: “This is so predictable and so Trumpian — like claiming he’s never heard of the Proud Boys [a far-right group] but telling them to ‘stand back and stand by’.”
The close relationship between Trump and the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential right-wing organisations in the country, dates back nearly a decade. Before the 2016 election the foundation created a similar project called “Mandate for Leadership”, which contained 334 “unique policy recommendations”.
A year into Trump’s term, the foundation announced that “64 per cent of the policy prescriptions were included in Trump’s budget, implemented through regulatory guidance, or under consideration for action in accordance with the Heritage Foundation’s original proposals”.
Project 2025 maintains that it is not tied to a specific candidate or campaign. “We are a coalition of more than 110 conservative groups advocating policy and personnel recommendations for the next conservative president,” it said in a statement. “But it is ultimately up to that president, who we believe will be President Trump, to decide which recommendations to implement.”
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However, speaking on a platform with Trump at a Nashville campaign event in February, Roberts was more candid. “We want no credit” for the groundwork it is laying, he said, adding that he instead wanted “President Trump and his administration to take credit for that”.
Pundits have suggested that Trump would not have bothered to offer a denial if the Democrats’ focus on Project 2025 had not been landing with voters. Many in Trump’s circle have come to see the plan as something of a liability as Biden’s team continues to hammer the Republican on some of its more controversial proposals.
“Fourth of July under Trump’s Project 2025,” Biden goaded in a post on Independence Day next to a shot from the dystopian TV drama The Handmaid’s Tale, showing women in the show’s red dresses and white hats standing by a cross where the Washington Monument should be.
In an effort to quell the attacks, the Republican Party released its official 2024 platform on Monday. It makes 20 promises, largely pulled from Trump’s own messaging, including to “STOP THE MIGRANT INVASION” and the “END INFLATION”.
Notably, the promises soften previous Republican manifestos on abortion and remove calls for a federal ban. There is also no longer a reference to “traditional marriage” as between “one man and one woman”.
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The 16-page draft document, titled America First: A Return to Common Sense, did have some of the Heritage Foundation’s talking points, however, including the “rooting out” of “corrupt government employees” they say have persecuted Trump on behalf of the Democratic Party. The Republicans also wants to get rid of the federal Department of Education, preferring to “let the states run our educational system as it should be run”.
Trump praised the Republican agenda, which he advised and approved, as “forward-looking” on his Truth Social page. Meanwhile, Biden’s team accused the Republicans of hiding Trump’s true policy goals.
Vincent Shi, youth engagement co-ordinator for the Biden campaign, said Project 2025 remained its most powerful recruitment tool. “I was talking to one of my smartest college friends who felt uncertain about voting after the debate,” he wrote on X on Monday. “I brought up Project 2025, which he had never heard of, and I walked him through what it promises to do. He is now officially horrified and a committed voter for Biden-Harris.”
