July 13, 2024
A policy wishlist is making waves in the United States. The Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise was published in April 2023 by the ‘2025 Presidential Transition Project’, referred to in short as ‘Project 2025’.
The 900-page document containing a plethora of extremely contentious policy proposals, has come under the spotlight ahead of next week’s Republican National Convention, where Donald Trump will formally be nominated as party’s presidential candidate for the November elections.
Here is all you need to know about Project 2025, and why Trump has tried to distance himself from it.
Ahead of each presidential election, many think tanks in Washington DC release policy wishlists. As the campaign heats up, these proposals can act as talking points for candidates, and perhaps even shape their official party platforms.
The Conservative Promise is one such policy wishlist, which lays out ambitious ideas for a prospective Trump presidency. It is published by Project 2025, which is “a broad coalition of conservative organisations that have come together to ensure a successful administration begins in January 2025”.
Project 2025 has also set up a personnel database which will help the future president make administrative appointments, a training programme to develop future conservative leaders, and “a 180-day playbook”, which presents a blueprint for the first six months of the next presidency.
“If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, 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. This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project,” the project’s website reads.
In popular discourse, Project 2025 has been used interchangeably with The Conservative Promise.
Simply put, Project 2025’s policy agenda takes some extreme positions.
Project 2025 builds off Heritage’s Mandate series, collaborating with more than 100 other conservative organisations. These include the Center for Renewing America, a Christian nationalist policy think tank headed by Russel Vought; Moms for Liberty, which has vociferously advocated against school curricula that mention LGBTQ+ rights, race and ethnicity, critical race theory, and discrimination; and the National Rifle Association, gun rights lobbying and advocacy group.
Officially, no. None of the organisations involved are directly affiliated to the Republican Party. As Heritage’s website claims, “we don’t work on behalf of any special interest or political party. Instead, our commitment is to the American people…”
That being said, the link between Project 2025, the Republican Party, and Donald Trump is undeniable. Apart from individually endorsing Trump and the Republican Party, these organisations are also among their biggest funders.
Moreover, several former Trump administrations have been directly affiliated with Project 2025. These include “former Director of the Office of Management and Budget Vought, former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, former deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn, and former Justice Department senior counsel Gene Hamilton,” an NBC News report said. Notably, Vought is pegged as one of the candidates to become Trump’s chief of staff, he were to win in November.
Heritage itself has long shared links with the Republican Party, and been instrumental in pushing it further to the right. A Heritage spokesperson told NBC News that it will have a sponsored presence at the Republican National Convention, as it did at the conventions in 2016 and 2012.
In 2022, Trump praised Heritage’s plans in a dinner sponsored by the foundation. “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork…for exactly what our movement will do… [when] the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America,” he said.
More recently, however, Trump has refused to even acknowledge Project 2025’s existence. In a post on social media platform Truth Social on Friday, Trump wrote: “I know nothing about Project 2025… I have no idea who is behind it”.
Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 comes as Democrats have mounted a scathing attack on the former president based on the controversial policy platform.
“248 years ago tomorrow America declared independence from a tyrannical king, and now Donald Trump and his allies want to make him one at our expense,” James Singer, a spokesperson for the Biden campaign, said last week. The campaign has also launched advertisements, and created a website tying Trump to Project 2025, possibly in an attempt to divert people’s attention from Biden’s own tanking fortunes.
While many of Project 2025’s priorities are aligned with Trump’s own explicated political positions, Project 2025 also goes beyond what Trump has said — or is likely to say during the campaign.
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