The "Next Phase" of Project 2025

There is still much we don't know about Trumpworld's authoritarian plans

At the Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker sought to remind viewers of Project 2025. Jim Clyburn referred to it as “Jim Crow 2.0.” Cory Booker mocked it was “Project 1825” and “Project 1925.” Michigan Senator Mallory McMorrow was one of many speakers who brought an enlarged version of the Mandate for Leadership document published by the Heritage Foundation that serves as the backbone to Project 2025.

Trump’s campaign has falsely claimed that Project 2025 is dead, and in mailers to voters he has doubled down on his efforts to distance himself from it. (Note to Forbes and other media outlets who confuse repeating Trump’s lies with reporting: this is what you get — becoming a tool in his disinformation efforts).

Of course, Project 2025 very much remains alive and the most relevant way to understand how Trump would govern. At the convention, Tim Walz invoked Project 2025 when he said that “when somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re going to use it.” The comedian Keenan Thompson gave one of best summaries of the relationship between Trump and Project 2025:

You know how when you download an app and there are hundreds of pages there that you don’t read. Its just the terms and conditions. And you just click agree, right? Well, these are the terms and conditions of a second Trump Presidency. You vote for him, you vote for all of this.

Trump dislikes Project 2025 as a brand because it lays out a series of specifics about right wing policy goals, which, it turns out, are unpopular. There has been some schadenfreude in how Project 2025 has become baggage for the Trump campaign, and has in some ways backfired for the Heritage Foundation, who went from energetically promoting their ties to Trump to gingerly defending their efforts from Trump’s own campaign.

But I want to make a different point:

Despite the details of Project 2025 that are so irksome to Trump, there is still much we don’t know about some very radical plans about how Trump would govern.

We got a glimpse about the scale and nature of these plans when some British undercover journalists performed a sting operation of Russ Vought. Vought is touted as a potential Chief of Staff in a second Trump administration. As a Trump official, he helped to cover up Trump’s withholding of arms to Ukraine, and aggressively pushed Trump’s plan to fire career civil servants. Out of office, he then complains about the weaponization of federal agencies without a trace of irony.

Vought told the journalists, posing as potential donors to his organization, the Center for Renewing America, about what one of his aides described as “the second phase” of Project 2025:

We’ve got about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature that are, we’re planning for the next administration. For example, “you may say, ‘OK, all right, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation.’” What are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it? Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos. Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not, you’re not having to scramble or do that later on.

The Washington Post had already reported that Vought had been assigned responsibility for implementing a secret “180-Day Playbook” to make Project 2025 a reality, and enacting this vision of a Christian nationalist state in a post-constitutional environment. While the existence of the playbook has also been confirmed by other reporters, the content of actual plans continue to remain secret. However, we can predict that much of this work centers on not just using Schedule F to fire career employees in order to make the bureaucracy as subservient to Trump as the Republican Party has become, but finding other ways to undermine the administrative state. Vought told the undercover reporters:

Eighty percent of my time is working on plans of whats necessary to take control of these bureaucracies. I want to be the person that crushes the deep state. I think there are a lot of different ways to do that. Its defunding it. Its impoundment, the ability to not spend money. It’s getting rid of their independence.

This secret 180-Day Playbook goes from policy goals laid out in The Mandate for Leadership to the actual text of executive orders. But we don’t know what is in there. Burned by the negative feedback from Project 2025, Vought said that these plans will be be hidden from the public on “very, very close hold.” Specific Project 2025 policy goals like banning pornography would still be pursued, according to Vought, but through “back door” regulatory means, like increasing liability for porn companies to the point that they shut down in some US states.

These plans would, according to Vought, enable mass deportations. They would also be used to deploy the military to not just round up immigrants, but also to be deployed against the mass protests that would certainly arise as Trump pursues his authoritarian goals. Reporting by the New York Times suggests that among the documents that Vought and the Center for Renewing America has prepared are topics that were too radioactive to gain consensus even among the Project 2025 group, which include implementing “Christian nationalism” policies, and encouraging states to ignore federal policies they dislike. An email between Center staff also listed: “Insurrection — stop riots ** — Day 1, easy.”

In the sting video, Vought alluded to how his Center’s legal analyses — nominally about using troops for immigration purposes — would be used to quell internal dissent.

George Floyd obviously was not about race — it was about destabilizing the Trump administration. We put out, for instance, a 50-page paper designed for lawyers to know that the president has, you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military and that’s something that, you know, that’s going to be important for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm. But we’ve given them the case for that.

Separate reporting from Jonathan Blitzer in the New Yorker has confirmed these plans, noting the role of Center for Renewing America employee, Jeffrey Clark:

Those close to Trump are also anticipating large protests if he wins in November…Jeffrey Clark and others have been working on plans to impose a version of the Insurrection Act that would allow the President to dispatch troops to serve as a national police force. Invoking the act would allow Trump to arrest protesters, the person told me. 

As President, Trump repeatedly pushed his officials to use military troops by invoking the Insurrection Act. Many resisted. Trump fired his acting Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, when Esper said in a press conference that using Insurrection Act powers against protestors was unnecessary. As candidate, Trump has promised to invoke the Insurrection Act to impose federal control over Democratic cities like Chicago, even if Governors or Mayors do not seek help (something that has not happened since the civil rights era). What this means is that a) Trump has already shown he wants to use these powers in radical ways, b) will hire officials who are comfortable with such actions, and c) will have a legal rationale to justify his actions.

Looking Beyond Heritage

The Heritage Foundation been portrayed as the central player in Project 2025, deservedly so. But its role reflects a certain continuity of effort — it has been publishing Mandate for Leadership guides sine Reagan — that understates the dramatic nature of the change that has taken place on the right. The Conservative Partnership Institute, which has played a less visible role in Project 2025, is more emblematic of the MAGAification of the conservative movement. A recent profile of CPI by Jonathan Blitzer in the New Yorker is eye-opening.

CPI was created in 2017 by Jim DeMint, the Heritage Foundation leader who was pushed out for trashing Heritage’s reputation for credible research by making it more partisan and less serious. DeMint also aligned early with Trump, which some Heritage board members never forgave him for.

CPI operates less like a think tank, where former Trump officials hang their hat, and more like a venture capital firm providing seed funding for MAGA-aligned organizations, as well as connections to other donors, and physical space to get a foothold in DC. These include:

• Russ Vought’s Center for Renewing America

• Stephen Miller’s America First Legal

• The American Accountability Foundation, which ran attack campaigns against Biden nominees, and is currently compiling an enemies list of career civil servants

• Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. CPI had been deeply involved in election denial. It helped to organize efforts to disrupt the vote to confirm Biden’s election on January 6th. Mitchell a Secretary of CPI, was the lawyer who helped Trump with his call to Georgia officials asking them to fine more votes. She is organizing a network of legal challenges to block legitimate election outcomes this year.

• The State Freedom Caucus Network, whose goal is to embed state versions of the House Freedom Caucus in every state

An API official said that in a speech at Mar-A-Lago: “Trump complained about his personnel. He said he had these bad generals, bad Cabinet secretaries. That was a big signal to the people there.” This is why there is such an intense focus on Schedule F, to fire civil servants, and building a pipeline of dedicated Trumpists as political appointees.

Part of the function of CPI was to alter the incentives for Trump officials. A previous generation of conservative lawyers or other appointees might worry about their long-term career prospects for engaging in a little light treason. CPI has created an ecosystem existed to defend them (they have funded legal defenses for John Eastman, Peter Navarro, Mark Meadows and Jeffery Clark), to and to find them new roles after wrongdoing. Blitzer put it this way:

C.P.I. was demonstrating to Trump allies that, if they took bold and possibly illegal action in service of the cause, they wouldn’t face financial ruin or pariah status in Washington.

This sort of action are intended to recalibrate the calculations of Trump officials, pushing them towards loyalty to Trump rather than the constitution. In a very real way, it also served to protect and empower the specific actors involved are critical to Trump’s future governance. The job of the Election Integrity Network is to ensure that if Trump does not win by getting enough votes, he will win by other means. Stephen Miller is planning to lead a mass deportation of immigrants using camps and military forces. Jeffrey Clark is expected to lead a restructuring of the Department of Justice to protect Trump from risk and use the law to attack his enemies. Russ Vought will control budgets and personnel. These are central issues to Trump and how he will govern in a second term.

Heritage moved unusually early with its Mandate for Leadership document because of a fear of being outflanked by CPI-aligned organizations. Heritage also brought those organizations into the tent, making them part of Project 2025, and giving CPI officials senior roles in directing Project 2025. At an event hosted by a CPI affiliate, Heritage President Kevin Roberts indicated just how far Heritage gad traveled from firing DeMint: “I come not to invite national conservatives to join our movement but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part of yours.”

If Heritage is getting all of the attention with Project 2025, the CPI-aligned network is doing what Trump actually wants: developing detailed plans for governing without drawing too much critical scrutiny. Their desire to hide their plans should be a real concern, given their willingness to embrace authoritarian models of governing, like purging the bureaucracy, revoking programs put in place by Congress, turning the legal system into a partisan tool, and using the military to end dissent.