In one of the least convincing performances this election season, former President Donald Trump has been trying to put daylight between himself and Project 2025, a 920-page manifesto for the next GOP president to follow. He has insisted that he has never heard of the head of the Heritage Foundation, which has spearheaded the conservative initiative. He not only has heard of him — he also flew on a private plane with him in 2022.
One of the people who would almost certainly be tapped to implement Project 2025 should Trump win is apparently unconcerned.
Trump’s campaign has tried to divert the public’s focus to the much less detailed, but still extreme, official Republican Party platform, and Trump’s frustration with being linked with the retrograde policies was so great that the head of the project was forced to step down. His campaign then issued a statement welcoming what it called reports of the group’s “demise.” But one of the people who would almost certainly be tapped to implement Project 2025 should Trump win is apparently unconcerned. In a newly released video from a British journalism nonprofit organization, Russell Vought makes it clear that it’s full steam ahead. They’re stilling plan to make their dystopia vision for America a reality.
Vought admitted as much in a conversation secretly recorded in a Washington hotel room last month. Unbeknownst to him, the two men he was meeting with were an undercover journalist and a paid actor from the United Kingdom’s Centre for Climate Reporting pretending to be relatives of a wealthy American donor. In the extremely candid chat that followed, as reported by CNN, Vought revealed just how much Project 2025 legwork has already been done:
In preparation for Trump’s potential return to the White House, Vought said in the meeting that he had a team of staffers working to draft regulations and executive orders that would translate Trump’s campaign speeches into government policy.
“We’ve got about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature that are, we’re planning for the next administration,” he said.
“For example, “you may say, ‘OK, all right, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation,’” Vought said. “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.”
What a perfect summary of the danger of Project 2025 and why the prospect of a second Trump administration shouldn’t be taken lightly. For months after Trump’s January 2017 inauguration, there was absolute chaos as his inexperienced staff struggled to work the levers of power. The executive order to put his promised “Muslim travel ban” into effect was quickly enjoined in federal court, prompting numerous rewrites to pass legal muster. It took three tries before the Supreme Court allowed a much-revised version to be put into place in 2018.
Vought’s claim that he and his team are drafting policy documents now speaks volumes about how different January 2025 could be. Vought’s is a name that longtime readers will recognize. He served in the Trump administration, rising to become the head of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. Since then, he and other MAGA B-listers have joined forces at the Center for Renewing America, feeding Republicans in Congress some of their most unpopular ideas and least effective strategies.
Even more concerning is that Vought intends to keep his group’s efforts hidden from view until after the election.
As such, Vought has been a rising figure among what can be generously described as the Trumpist intelligentsia. Accordingly, Vought was tapped to write Project 2025’s chapter on transforming the Executive Office of the Presidency, which laid out his vision for consolidating power in political appointees and away from career officials. He was also the policy chief for the Republican National Committee’s platform committee, further enmeshing himself and his ideas in the fabric of the GOP’s ideology.
Even more concerning is that Vought intends to keep his group’s efforts hidden from view until after the election. Another CCR journalist spoke with Micah Meadowcroft, the Center for Renewing America’s research director, who bragged about the clandestine methods being used to get the drafts into the Trump team’s hands:
“It’s a big, fat stack of papers that will be distributed during the transition period,” Meadowcroft said in the video — while noting that “you don’t actually, like, send them to their work emails,” in order to avoid disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
He described Vought’s work preparing executive orders and policy playbooks as “the second phase” of Project 2025.
This “second phase” of Project 2025 is what takes the document from being a set of wonky recommendations to an actual blueprint for what the next four years could look like. It’s how Trump triggers the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. It’s how he transforms the Justice Department into his own personal weapon for revenge. And it’s how the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court is given the cover to say it was all done legally.
It’s also why Trump is so eager to distance himself from the initiative, as the document’s drafters and overseers readily admit. If enough voters look closely enough at what he intends to do, then there’s a chance for opposition to those actions to take root. We’ve already seen Trump scramble since Democrats began hammering Project 2025 into the public consciousness.
It’s ironic that so many Republicans are now trying to say that the only way for Trump to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris is through a focus on policy over personal attacks. If that were the case, then we’d see them embracing and promoting Project 2025 and Vought’s work. Instead, they realize that remaining secretive gives them their best chance at executing their extreme ideas.