‘Essential and authoritative. Sheds serious light on the dark money, dark ideas & dark souls propelling Trump’s cruelty and betrayal of the USA.’ – James O’Brien
The Project
How
Project 2025
Is Reshaping America and the World
David A. Graham
THE PROJECT
The Project
HOW PROJECT 2025 IS RESHAPING AMERICA AND THE WORLD
David A. Graham
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First published in the United States by Random House in 2025
First published in the United Kingdom by WH Allen in 2025 1
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THE PROJECT
Introduction
WHEN PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP LEFT OFFICE IN January 2021, his administration was almost universally considered a failure. He had fallen well short of the expectations he’d set—building a wall on the Mexican border, revitalizing American manufacturing, and reshaping the economy—and haphazardly mismanaged a coronavirus pandemic that devastated the nation. After soundly losing the election in November 2020, Trump relied on a series of spurious lawsuits and other methods to try to subvert vote counts—bald-faced attempts to stay in power that culminated in the violent sacking of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Although Trump escaped conviction in a Senate impeachment trial, voters across the political spectrum blamed him for the riot, as did many GOP elected officials.
But even as the press was writing Trump’s political obituary, a small group of alumni of his administration was coalescing around a different view: Trump hadn’t
failed, he’d been sabotaged. They remained convinced that the election had been stolen, even though no evidence backed up their view; and although they didn’t necessarily disagree with critics who judged the Trump administration a policy failure, they believed the problem was that he had been failed by the system around him. In their view, a promising administration and a visionary president had been hobbled by lazy appointees, Republican saboteurs devoted to the GOP’s old dogmas, and career bureaucrats.
These contrarians believed that the only way to deliver the Christian, right-wing nation they desired was a carefully organized assault on the U.S. government as it existed. The next Republican president would have to rethink not only policy and politics, but the most fundamental questions of how the government operated— and, perhaps equally important, who operated it. This was not a conservative approach to government. It was self-consciously radical, rooted in a conviction that there was no constitutional order left to save. And its proponents believed not only that their chance would come soon, but that there was only one man who could and would bring it to fruition: Donald J. Trump.
During the four years of Joe Biden’s presidency, people including Paul Dans, Russell Vought, and Kevin D. Roberts dedicated themselves to preparing for a second Trump administration that would far outdo the first. Though some of the collaborators were also involved in
his reelection team, this work was all about what would happen once he’d won office. Working under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation, a fifty-year-old conservative think tank, they designed a four-pronged plan that included a detailed policy platform, a huge database of potential administration hires, training courses for aspiring staffers, and a playbook for a blitzkrieg takeover of the government on Day One. They named it Project 2025.
Project 2025 is a skeleton key for understanding the second Trump presidency—as well as the future of the Republican Party and the American right. It is not quite identical to the Trump agenda, but its careful planning, in contrast to the shambolic improvisation that Trump favors, means that Project 2025 is positioned to dominate the administration and provide the intellectual blueprint for policy and political decisions for the next four years and beyond.
Roberts, the president of Heritage, writes that Project 2025 has four goals: “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children; Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people; Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats; [and] Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’ ”
This summary hints at some of the more outré ideas, especially in foregrounding family issues and attacking the “administrative state”—an academic term that refers
to most of the federal bureaucracy as we know it. But Roberts also glosses over much of the radicalism of the plan. Project 2025 is a scheme to massively expand the power of the president. The principals involved want Trump to be able to stock the executive branch with political appointees; to fire civil servants at will; to discard the historical impartiality of the Justice Department; to attack the statutory independence of agencies like the Federal Communications Commission; and to seize powers of the Congress for the president.
One article of faith for Project 2025 is that the progressive movement, in contrast to the right, is highly organized and regimented. This perspective may come as a surprise to anyone who has watched the left in action over the last decade, but the authors are dead serious. Progressives sometimes dismiss conservative leaders as cynics, but these are the arguments of true believers.
“The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us,” Vought, Trump’s budget chief and a key figure in Project 2025, has said. “And they are going to continue to aim it until they no longer have to win elections.” Dans, the director of Project 2025 and a mid-level staffer in the first Trump administration, has warned that Americans were “living under kind of a tyrannical reign of Joe Biden” and “in the midst of a neo-Marxist revolution
here in the United States, and we have to wake up to what’s going on.”
The bleak view echoes “The Flight 93 Election,” a pseudonymous 2016 article in the Claremont Review of Books that became a rallying cry for radical right-wing intellectuals. (The title refers to the hijacked September 11 flight whose passengers and crew sacrificed their lives by forcing the terrorists to crash the plane far from its intended target of the Capitol building.) The author described the 2016 election in apocalyptic terms, arguing that for the right, Americans, and the West as a whole, drastic and possibly self-sacrificial action was necessary.
“2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane,” the essay warned. “There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.”
The writer, later revealed to be Michael Anton, went on to join Trump’s National Security Council. Later, he became a contributor to Project 2025, which incorporates his tone and vision. One central tenet of the project is that the only way to reverse perilous politicization of the executive branch is to further politicize it—that, as