‘A devastating self-own’: How Project 2025 became Trump’s worst nightmare

Project 2025 was always Trump’s game. How did the ultra-conservatives who crafted it let everything spiral out of control so badly? John Bowden reports

The silhouette of Donald Trump at his rally this week in Long Island, New York. (AP)

These days, “Project 2025” is nothing but a dirty word (or pair of words) to staffers on Donald Trump’s third bid for the presidency. After months of negative coverage and attacks from Democrats, Trump and his top aides are both engaged in a conscious effort to distance the former president from the project whenever possible. That effort drew to a heated pitch this summer as top Trump campaign officials Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles released a statement crowing over the resignation of a top Project 2025 operative and declaring the various groups involved with the plan to be speaking on the former president’s behalf without his permission.

This wasn’t supposed to be how the election went at all. The question remains: How did the Heritage Foundation and the other conservative groups behind Project 2025 fumble the bag this badly?

The answer seems obvious: Donald Trump. But that wasn’t obvious to anybody working on the effort.

Trump himself has made his own attempts at creating daylight between himself and a plan that was fundamentally crafted by his allies with the express purpose of streamlining his second presidency and addressing a number of his (supposed) priorities. Those include clearing the way for the weaponization of the Justice Department, among other changes to other agencies, which would allow Trump to direct his long-threatened crusade against Joe Biden and his family.

And therein lies the problem. All of Trump’s escapades occurred out in the open — his worst impulses laid bare by a series of damning tell-all interviews, book deals and instances of congressional testimony submitted by former aides and staffers. America’s political establishment and media are well-accustomed to the former president’s more outlandish barked orders and requests during his time in office, including his efforts to replace top officials at the Justice Department and use the agency to pursue his baseless claims of voter fraud in 2020.

The project “reinforces a perception that had already emerged”, Norm Eisen of the Brookings Institution told The Independent.

“Trump himself proclaimed he was going to be a dictator on day one,” said Eisen, who quipped that Project 2025 had landed as a “devastating self-own” for the MAGA-aligned right. Eisen, who has been at the forefront of Democrats’ efforts to prosecute the case against Trump over his and Rudy Giuliani’s plot to bully Ukraine’s government, said that Republicans set themselves up for failure by becoming “over-confident”.

Part of that, he said, was due to Joe Biden being at the top of the ticket: “There was a sense that Trump was going to run amok over Biden, and you didn’t need to keep the quiet part quiet [anymore].”

But that was exactly the problem. Trump spent the past two and a half years running around and claiming that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election, and refusing to back away from threats to weaponize the DOJ against his political enemies — if anything, rationalizing them with the criminal cases against him. And an offhanded comment wherein Trump quipped that he would like to be a dictator for just one day has played into an image which began emerging the minute the crowds dispersed on January 6, 2021: the former president is done with critics, naysayers, and anyone else who would possibly stand up to him were he to win the White House again.

That’s why Project 2025 was so inherently Trumpy and why it fell so flat when exposed to the sunlight. It reeked of deception from the beginning. No one earnestly believed — no one — that Nikki Haley, or Ron DeSantis, or Doug Burgum was going to implement a Project 2025-style transformation of the federal government, were they to win the GOP nomination and subsequently the presidency. This was a plan concocted for Trump specifically. Who else would need a blueprint for installing loyalist yes-men throughout government, for fear of a “deep state” thwarting their every move? (The answer is Vivek Ramaswamy, who thought he could beat Trump in a Republican primary by being Trump 2.0. But no one else.)

This was always a blueprint for fixing what “went wrong” in Trump’s first term — ridding himself and the federal government of anyone who would say, “That’s not constitutional” or, “That goes against all political norms”. It was a plan for ending the norms; for changing them forever.

And because so many hard-right conservatives saw Trump — who fundamentally shifts his positions to endear himself to new audiences moment-by-moment — as their vessel to reverse the left-trending bent of American politics and government, Project 2025 was as far-reaching as its authors, unburdened by any actual oversight from Trump himself, could dream. The result? Policy advocates in just about every topic important to the Democratic Party saw a banner they could rally against. It was able to be picked apart at the seams by hundreds of interested parties.

Take the EPA, for example, where Project 2025 is paving a road for a Republican president to replace thousands of career civil servants and scientists with political appointees loyal to Trump — climate change deniers, if Trump’s recent cozying up with oil and gas executives is any indication. Here, just the issue of the integrity of America’s justice system is a lightning-rod for civil ethics watchdogs. The plan is also an existential threat to advocates who have been pushing the US towards a lower-emission future.

“Trump didn’t just threaten to be a dictator on day one; he wrote down a detailed plan for it with his Project 2025 agenda,” Climate Power’s rapid response director Pete Jones told The Independent. “Trump’s plan will raise costs, destroy clean energy jobs, and give Big Oil $110 billion in tax breaks — gutting their competition and protecting their huge profits at the expense of the middle class."

Or look at reproductive freedoms: Project 2025 has a section on that, too. Advocates for abortion rights and reproductive choice warn that the plan embraces a key conservative legal theory asserting that unborn fetuses deserve the rights of “personhood.” That would effectively outlaw abortion nationwide, were it to be accepted by the nation’s highest court.

“We know that Donald Trump and JD Vance embrace the most insidious tactics outlined in Project 2025,” EMILYs List president Jessica Mackler said. “They are denying connections to Project 2025 only because they know how deeply out-of-touch its dark agenda is with the American people. But voters aren’t fooled. They know if Trump wins, this is exactly how he will govern, with an extremist agenda that would jeopardize reproductive freedom and create a national abortion ban.”

There are other sections on immigration that are supportive of a national deportation task force. There’s a section on healthcare that calls for Obamacare to be gutted or eliminated entirely, throwing millions of Americans off of their healthcare plans (Trump himself admitted at his debate with Kamala Harris that he had no replacement plan, either.)

There are countless others, each with their own army of niche policy wonks up in arms over their existences.

It’s never a surprise when a Republican candidate for president angers one of these groups or the supporters of one of these causes. But it’s much rarer for them to horrify all of them at once, and send the entire broader Democratic policy sphere into a months-long tizzy. How often does the same ideological push by a conservative movement anger every group from the Planned Parenthood, to the Sierra Club, and even CREW?

“The Heritage Foundation was just clumsy in how they did it,” Eisen told The Independent. He contrasted it to other, more successful broad policy doctrines spearheaded by Republican presidents in the past. “However you may feel about the Reagan Revolution… did it shrink government? Did it grow government? Was it good for the people or bad? There was [still] a thesis there of putting government second and people first.”

Democrats have shown no signs of letting Trump get away with efforts to back away from something that was personally crafted for his second ascendance to power. And they shouldn’t: Polling shows that a clear majority of Americans who have heard about Project 2025 oppose it, given what they know. A survey from UMass-Amherst found that “more than half (53%) of Americans – and two-thirds of Democrats – indicated that they had read, seen or heard at least something about ‘Project 2025’”, and largely opposed its policy planks if they had.

The challenge for Trump will not be to try and escape from a blueprint for power which anyone familiar with his first term will understand was crafted solely in response to his setbacks, down to the letter. It will instead be to find a path through it — either by tying his opponent to an even more unpopular policy, or by offering his own alternative vision for a second Trump presidency, which so far is being defined by his enemies.