Axios Unearths Questionnaire Designed to Help Trump Hire Only Die-Hard Loyalists For Second Term

AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File

Former President Donald Trump has made it very clear that if he gets another chance at being president, he’s going to spend his time and use to government to retaliate against his domestic enemies — and he won’t be doing it alone. Axios has been on the trail of Project 2025, the ultra-conservative “presidential transition project” that seeks to staff a new Republican administration with die-hard MAGA loyalists. On Friday, Axios revealed the actual questionnaire that prospective applicants would have to fill out.

Project 2025 is the creation of the hard right Heritage Foundation and isn’t tied to any specific presidential candidate. However, a questionnaire that Axios found was, according to a former Trump administration employee, used at the end of Trump’s term in 2020 to weed out anyone who didn’t express loyalty to the ex-president. Axios’s Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen reported on both the questionnaire and the Project 2025 job application that’s being used to find staffers willing to help centralize authority in the next Republican presidential administration.

While some of the questions come as no surprise considering the rightward lean of the Heritage Foundation, there are some questions in the Project 2025 application that stand out. And notably, they aren’t about job qualifications or experience — they’re about what the applicant believes, who inspires their beliefs, where have they talked about certain political figures, etc. Here are a couple from a section of questions for an applicant to express their agreement or disagreement:

The U.S. has the right to select immigrants based on country of origin.

Life has a right to legal protection from conception to natural death.

The police in America are systemically racist.

We should be proud of our American heritage and history, even as we acknowledge our flaws.

But this question is very consistent with the desire to push an authoritarian model of governing:

The President should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hinderance from unelected federal officials.

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, stated that the mission of Project 2025 was to get a conservative president in office and “ready to govern in the most aggressive, ambitious, audacious way to destroy the Deep State and devolve power back to the individual Americans.”

Visit Axios for more on their dive into Project 2025,

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