One person at a conservative think tank on the Project 2025 advisory board said: “People weren’t overly worried about” Trump’s burying the effort.

July 16, 2024, 3:00 AM PDT
By Allan Smith

MILWAUKEE — The brain trust behind “Project 2025” isn’t sweating former President Donald Trump’s disavowals of their wide-ranging presidential transition plan and policy roadmap for a potential second Trump administration.

At recent events in Washington, D.C., and Milwaukee, Project 2025 proponents and allies sought to defuse tensions and go on offense against the press and Democrats, after Trump took the wind out of their sails with critical social media posts as Democrats oriented their campaign around the plans.

“The lesson of the last few days and the motivation for something like Project 2025 is to make Washington a heck of a lot less important in our lives,” Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which is leading the project, said Monday during the think tank’s Policy Fest at the Republican National Convention, pointing to the assassination attempt against Trump on Saturday.

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Earlier, at the three-day National Conservatism Conference in Washington last week, more than a dozen leaders, advisers and contributors to Project 2025 and their allies made their case for drastically reconstituting the civil service, retaliating against Democrats for the ongoing prosecutions of Trump, launching mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and countering “anti-white” discrimination.

Since its 2019 launch, the conference has become a favored stop for the pro-Trump intelligentsia, think tank leaders and politicians who are pushing the conservative movement to keep marching in a right-wing populist and nationalist direction. Though the conference organizers are separate from Project 2025, activists connected to the effort had a strong presence there, while Project 2025 had a booth at NatCon.

Amid a stream of Democratic attacks on the project, including from President Joe Biden and his campaign, Trump distanced himself from it, posting earlier this month to his social media site that he knows “nothing” about Project 2025 and has “no idea” who is behind it. On Thursday, he wrote that “Radical Left Democrats are having a field day, however, trying to hook me into whatever policies are stated or said.”

“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” Trump wrote earlier this month. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Pointing to the dozens of allies and former Trump administration officials leading or connected to the project, Democrats have argued that Trump is deflecting merely to boost his electoral chances, not to flatly reject the ideas promoted in the project and the individuals behind them. At NatCon, it appeared some insiders agreed.

Describing conversations with others connected to the conservative battle plan, one person at a conservative think tank on the Project 2025 advisory board said that "people weren’t overly worried about" Trump's comments.

This person added that in Trump's first term, he was quite open to policy input from outside groups, including the Heritage Foundation.

“The general sense is this is a PR gesture for him to provide himself maximum room to maneuver and avoid making any commitments at this point,” this person said. “He wants to avoid having to answer questions about anything he doesn’t want to answer questions about. Most people I know who are involved with it don’t seem overly worried that this actually constitutes a repudiation and is going to mean anything on Jan. 20.”

The conference featured a range of conservative leaders — including Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, just tapped to be Trump’s running mate — and took place just days after the former president’s statement distancing himself from Project 2025 and right as the Republican National Committee passed its concise platform last week. The party platform had similarities to Project 2025 on issues including immigration and the civil service, while differentiating from it on social issues.

Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, who was in Milwaukee to advise the platform committee on social and family policy, told NBC News that Trump's remarks about the project left him conflicted.

“I love Kevin Roberts,” Schilling, whose group serves on the Project 2025 advisory board, said of the Heritage Foundation’s president. “I love Heritage, I think they do phenomenal work. And it’s kind of like you have two siblings in a fight and you don’t know who to side with. But at the end of the day, Trump has to have his own platform, his own policy agenda.”

“There’s a lot of things in the Project 2025 agenda that I would not run on or campaign on,” Schilling added. “Ultimately, what Trump’s doing is, he’s just making sure people know he’s independent.”

Much of Project 2025’s game plan is focused on rapidly reorienting every federal agency within the first 180 days of a new GOP administration and filling key jobs throughout the government via a ready-to-go database of conservative foot soldiers aligned with the incoming president’s vision.

It has generated even more buzz, though, for policy prescriptions in its Mandate for Leadership. Those include plans to ban pornography, dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, eliminate the Department of Education, reverse policies that allow transgender Americans to serve in the military, and put federal law enforcement agencies under the president’s thumb.

“Most of all, there’s overlap,” Roberts told reporters Monday about Trump’s policy preferences and Project 2025. “There will always be differences. And we’ll work on those when we’re talking about specific legislative work. And we know that those conversations are going to be very positive. We may not always agree.”

Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, described the recent reaction to the effort as “overwhelming” in a speech before NatCon. He proceeded to mock Democrats for their alarm, joking that the project advocated for “deporting any citizens or noncitizens wearing cargo shorts” and “requiring preschool education to include dual-wielding pistols as an essential skill.”

“We have the make sure that people we’re putting in those positions are actively helping [move] the president’s agenda forward,” Dans, a former Trump administration official, said, adding that the policy agenda included in the 922-page blueprint was “unapologetically conservative” because “we wanted to throw down the marker and say, you’re looking for where to land, and you’re searching for policy, this is going to be the sweet spot.'”

But, Dans added, the policy book amounted to “a wish list.”

“We don’t expect anybody to knock out this thing,” he said.

One Republican strategist told NBC News that proximity to anything Project 2025-related could be used against Vance because of the possibility “the Biden campaign will seize on this.” This person specifically pointed to Vance’s closeness with American Compass, a group that is at the forefront of conservative efforts to reorient the right’s economic agenda around working-class interests and is on the Project 2025 advisory board. Its chief economist, Oren Cass, also delivered an address at NatCon and praised Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate on Monday.

In his NatCon address, Vance said the conservative movement “is so influenced by what’s happened here,” describing it as “the place of intellectual leadership” on the right.

In recent weeks, Project 2025 has become the centerpiece of the Democratic campaign, particularly as Biden faces immense pressure from within his own party to exit the race following a disastrous debate performance against Trump last month. Since Trump first said he disavowed Project 2025 this month, the Biden campaign sent at least 45 press emails mentioning the plan through Saturday.

“Folks, Project 2025 is the biggest attack on our system of government and on our personal freedom that’s ever been proposed in the history of this country,” Biden said at a Michigan rally on Friday, adding it is “a blueprint for a second Trump.”

Project 2025 has started fighting back against the Democratic attacks, posting frequently on social media.

“As we’ve been saying for more than two years now, Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign,” a spokesperson for the effort said, adding, “Rather than obsessing over Project 2025, the Biden campaign should be addressing the 25th Amendment.”

Most voters now say they’re aware of the effort — and a plurality aren’t fans. An NPR/PBS/Marist poll released Friday found 16% of voters said they had a favorable opinion of Project 2025 while 42% viewed it unfavorably. Another 42% hadn’t heard of it or were not sure.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who delivered an address at NatCon laying out his vision for an America underpinned by Christian nationalism — an ideology he said did not align with “the authoritarian ideology of blood-and-soil” or “the harsh, ethnic nationalism of the ancient world” — said it was "ridiculous" to think that Project 2025 would serve as a blueprint for a future Trump administration. He said the focus on Project 2025 was merely a distraction from Biden’s stumbling on the national stage.

“If I were him, I’d do the same thing,” Hawley said of Trump’s disavowal. “I’d be like, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute.’ The president, if he gets elected, he will speak for himself. His Cabinet, their appointees, they’ll design the policy. It’s not a think tank, no matter who it is.”

Some Trump allies have sought to distance themselves from the project following Trump’s broadside. Former Trump administration adviser Stephen Miller’s organization, America First Legal, was recently listed on Project 2025’s advisory board. It no longer is.

“AFL has no involvement in Project 2025,” Miller, who spoke at the conference, told NBC News, adding that only the Trump campaign is a legitimate source on the former president’s plans.

Riley Moore, the West Virginia state treasurer and GOP nominee in one of the state’s congressional districts, told NBC News at NatCon that the Republican Party has undergone such a massive transformation since 2016 that the main point of Project 2025 — making sure Trump could immediately and more fully staff his administration — is essentially moot.

“It’s not 2016, it’s 2024,” Moore said. “And the idea that we’re going to have these massive vacancies all over the place — the president has total unity right now in this party in the effort that he’s got going on. And there’s going to be plenty of people to pick from.”

Ultimately, Schilling felt confident that any dispute now could be cleared up in the future.

“There will be a lot of people that are involved in Project 2025 that go into this next administration,” he said. “I just think there’s going to be disagreements. … We’ve got to win. And [Trump’s] going to make sure that he wins. And then we govern from there.”