Trump Lied About Project 2025. It's Now His Road Map

There hasn't been much written about Project 2025 lately, as Trump stuns us with a barrage of sweeping government overhauls. But if you want to know where he's headed, get a copy and take notes.

The Donald Trump blueprint for our future: Project 2025

Remember all the “Sturm und Drang” over Project 2025? You don’t hear much about it anymore, even though Trump is walking through it step-by-step with his presidential orders and the actions of his administration.

So, if you want a good hint about where he’s headed from here, get a copy of Project 2025 and take notes. If he hasn’t yet announced something laid out in that tract, the odds are he will soon. During his campaign, Trump denied knowing anything about Project 2025, or the people that created it, even though several were in his previous administration. In fact, his campaign said folks involved in writing it might be banned from Trump’s administration.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump stated in July on his social media platform. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying, and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous.”

But what a surprise: Trump and his campaign team were lying! Who would have thought? And now, it’s essentially become the administration’s road map for how to move forward.

Let’s take a second to review the list of Project 2025 folks already in the administration, as provided by the American Federation of Government Employees, a group whose members are under attack by Trump based largely on the recommendations of Project 2025.

— Russ Vought, one of Project 2025’s top architects, is expected to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the agency that develops the president’s proposed budget and executes the president’s agenda.

— Stephen Miller, who was featured in videos produced by the Heritage Foundation promoting Project 2025, is Trump’s pick to be White House deputy chief of staff for policy and Trump’s homeland security adviser.

—Karoline Leavitt, listed as one of Project 2025’s instructors, will be White House press secretary.

— Brendan Carr, who authored a chapter “Federal Communications Commission” for Project 2025, as been nominated to chair the Federal Communications Commission.

— Tom Homan, listed as an overall contributor of Project 2025, has been appointed as Trump’s “border czar.”

And who knows how many Project 2025 underlings will be slipping into the administration under the cover of darkness. In a late-night purge on Friday, Trump fired the independent inspectors general of at least 14 major federal agencies crucial to the identification of government fraud, waste and abuse.

Wanna bet who gets those jobs? Wanna bet how little fraud will be found with Trump in control? Frankly, I’m not sure the word “fraud” is a concept he actually understands. His history suggests he equates the word “fraud” with being smart about things.

“These firings are Donald Trump’s way of telling us he is terrified of accountability and is hostile to facts and to transparency,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer said on the Senate floor Saturday.

You think?

For the uninitiated, Project 2025 is a nearly 1,000-page scheme that outlines in very specific, and ponderously overwhelming, terms how to build an autocracy, led by you-know-who. It describes an America poisoned by “wokeness” and overtaken by lawlessness and chaos, where conservatives need to seize power immediately – and for as long as possible – to right a sinking ship.

And, sadly, with Trump’s election it carries immense implications for the future of our democratic norms, institutions, and processes. You thought the election was just about the economy, right? Joe Biden was correct: It was nothing less than an attack on Democracy as we know it.

You can read Project 2025 here if you have the stomach to do so.

A Washington Post analysis posted yesterday identified more than two dozen presidential directives containing language that resembled text published in Project 2025. That amounts to more than half his directives since taking office, excluding pardons and appointments.

Here are some of the five most prominent, according to the Post story, written by Clara Ence Morse: Removing antidiscrimination protections; revoking security clearances; reframing sex and gender policy; ending anti-misinformation efforts; and withdrawing from international alliances.

None of this is surprising, of course, which is why Trump’s campaign response to Project 2025 was such a ludicrous political feint. Interviewed by Time Magazine, he criticized the timing of the document’s release, saying,“it was foolish to release it before the election.” But it hardly mattered.

Project 2025 is full of things Trump has ranted about for years. All it really does is give him the specific phrasing he needs to get his rants put down on paper, which isn’t one of his strong suits. It advocates targeting immigrant communities, abolishing birthright citizenship and dismantling the nation’s asylum system, undermining one of the most fundamental pillars of American democracy and the very reason many of us are here today.

What’s coming down the line? Project 2025 urges the censoring of academic discussions about race, gender, and systemic oppression, and it urges that federal funding for schools with curricula that touches on these subjects be cut.

“Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms,” Project 2025 states. In fact, the department does the opposite: It resolves discrimination complaints, enforces civil rights laws, and collects education data and trends, showing the effectiveness of schools in raising educational levels for all students.

As a white kid growing up, I don’t remember anyone putting me down for being white. You think that can be said of black kids in predominantly white school districts? Is it wrong to fight against something that holds the potential to harm 7.4 million Black students in public schools? And how many white kids truly feel discriminated against?

The Education Department also provides billions in aid to local school districts, which likely — if the MAGA response to the California wildfires is any indication— will become a political football in any approval of grants by Congress to individual states.

Let’s take a look at just a few more of the extreme far-right proposals from Project 2025 that we can expect Trump and his administration to push forward. It backs a crackdown on simple voting mistakes using a so-called “Election Crimes Branch” which Trump would keep close control of, and says the National Guard should be employed to break up protests.

Remember what happened in 1970 when members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of protestors at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine? I do, which is why this idea scares the heck out of me, along with Trump questioning a top official in the Army during his last administration about shooting protestors “in the legs or something.”

And in one of its key recommendations, Project 2025 suggests specific ways to expand presidential power to achieve its extreme, far-right goals without that pesky, annoying Congressional oversight rule imbued in the U.S. Constitution getting in the way.

If you think everything in Project 2025 isn’t on Trump’s to-do list, you haven’t been paying attention. Here’s the Project 2025 bottom line, which is clearly Trump’s as well: “Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”

Project 2025 often refers to “bias” in their dreadfully boring rants, but in almost all cases it comes down to kicking out folks telling the truth and replacing them with political ideologues who will say or report anything to the benefit of their political philosophy. That’s not America, that’s Russia.

Trump rolled out his plans for FEMA during trips to North Carolina and California last week. After blatantly lying about FEMA’s efforts in North Carolina, he insisted its job should be handled by individual states, with grants from the federal government, as approved — I’d guess — by Congress, although these days Trump seems to have forgotten the U.S. Congress even exists.

Meanwhile, the MAGA Republicans in Congress these days are saying that any funding for the California wildfires must be tied to the political changes they endorse, including new voting measures clearly designed to benefit their, as opposed to the political situation put in place by the state’s own voting public.

Is this really what we want? And how would states come up with the extra cash, experienced personnel and down-in-the-dirt workers to deal expansively with the increasing number of weather emergencies happening as a result of climate change, which Trump has called a “hoax.”

Yes, you guessed it, state leaders would either have to increase state taxes, or simply not do as much as is being done right now.

Trump has said he will change the Gulf of Mexico’s name to the “Gulf of America.” His actions, spurred by Project 2025, could well end up changing the name of the United States of America to the “Divided States of America.” But hey, we might get Greenland and Canada added in, right?

The phrase “Sturm und Drang,” which I used at the start of this rant, comes from German, where it literally means “storm and stress,” which seems appropriate these days to any discussion surrounding Trump. Interestingly, Project 2025 states the following at one point in its rant:

“Conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right. With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error. Time is running short.”

Not everything Trump is doing has far-reaching approval, and he isn’t addressing economic inflation in any positive way. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico is considered silly by many, while his pardon of convicted cop abusers and the end of birthright citizenship has not been supported by majorities in most polls.

Hopefully, as a result of the 2026 mid-term elections, this group will run out of time, and a Congress can be put in place to better leash a “rogue” president driven by a far-right extremist tract. What do you think?