Project 2025 Is No Match for MAGA Dysfunction
If any two beliefs are shared by both critics and admirers of former President Donald Trump, they are these: His whims were frequently hamstrung by the people who surrounded him during his first term in office, and that won’t be allowed to happen again.
Trump’s victory in 2016 appeared to surprise his campaign as much as anyone. He boasted during the campaign that he hires “only the best people,” but that was easier said than done. Bereft of institutional backing, with no serious plans for a postelection transition, the 45th president had no choice but to turn to the “Beltway establishment” to​​staff his administration. “When I first got to Washington,” he lamented in April to Time, “I knew very few people.”
Trump was supposed to be a repudiation of “Conservatism, Inc.”—not just in tenor but in substance. Out were the commitments to limited government and free trade, the insistence on fiscal belt tightening and entitlement reform, and the largely sunny orientation toward immigrants associated with previous Republican leaders such as former House Speaker Paul Ryan. In were hardball politics that pulled no punches, minced no words, and had no qualms about a “muscular” state that interferes at will in people’s lives.
But Trump had trouble getting the rest of the governing apparatus to line up behind him. Unfavorable court rulings bookended his presidency, overturning his Muslim travel ban in 2017 and rejecting his election fraud claims in 2021, with other losses along the way. After he left office, the conservative America First Policy Institute released a report complaining that “career bureaucrats resist[ed] Trump Administration policies” by withholding information, slow-walking priorities, and otherwise refusing to carry out work that didn’t align with their ideological preferences.
Worse, Trump’s own advisers and appointees often seemed to be working at cross-purposes. “His White House was hastily staffed by a mix of underqualified true believers, opportunistic hacks and experienced but disloyal swamp creatures who colluded with journalists and permanent bureaucrats to undermine the president’s populist agenda,” wrote Sam Adler-Bell in The New York Times in January, summarizing the MAGA view. “The solution, then, should be simple: Find, vet and train the right people, and everything will be different.”
And so, almost immediately after Trump left office in January 2021, conservatives in Washington began mobilizing to prepare for his return.
The conservative Heritage Foundation has been releasing presidential policy blueprints, known as Mandate for Leadership, for decades. This time around, under the “Project 2025” banner, it announced a plan to supplement its policy work with a personnel database: a “conservative LinkedIn” that would “provide an opportunity for rock-solid conservatives to place themselves in contention for roles in the next administration,” the think tank explained.
Meanwhile, veterans of Trump’s first term launched the aforementioned America First Policy Institute, a rival group with much the same mission. Similar entities have been proliferating and expanding ever since: the Conservative Partnership Institute (led by former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint), American Moment (which focuses on identifying Trump-friendly young conservatives), the Society for American Civic Renewal (a spinoff of the Claremont Institute, home to attorney John Eastman, who is currently under indictment for helping Trump attempt to overturn the 2020 election), a new Association of Republican Presidential Appointees, and on and on.
A general telos unites many of these groups: to ensure, if Trump wins again, that his vision for America won’t be stymied by personnel who don’t fully embrace it. As Paul Dans, the director of Heritage’s Project 2025, put it on C-SPAN, “It’s incumbent on us to get the right people and make sure they have the right ethos.”
That strategy was on display in July with Trump’s selection of Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate. The pick stood in contrast to 2016, when Trump chose then–Indiana Gov. Mike Pence to balance the ticket and calm any misgivings that evangelical Christians and other traditional conservatives might have had about voting for a philandering TV star. Today, the only truly important qualification is loyalty. After the 2020 election, Pence refused an order from Trump to interfere with Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Vance, a power-hungry populist who once mused to a friend that Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” later said publicly that he can be counted on to do what his predecessor would not.
This explosion of activity has caused agita in Democratic circles and among the press, and there are a number of real causes for concern in these developments. Yet a clear-eyed analysis of the situation offers at least one source of comfort: Many of the things that prevented Trump from putting his worst impulses into action during his first term would likely do the same in a second one.
Be Afraid
The last public address Tucker Carlson gave before Fox News ousted him in April 2023 was a keynote speech at a dinner celebrating Heritage’s 50th anniversary. Hailing Carlson as a hero, Kevin Roberts, the foundation’s president, noted afterward that “if things go south for you at Fox News, there’s always a job for you at Heritage.”
Carlson by that time had earned a reputation for dabbling in conspiracy theories, racially tinged and otherwise, and questioning the free markets that Heritage had long claimed to defend. His appearance at the gala, alongside other changes then afoot at the think tank, caused many observers to wonder what in the world had happened to the once-staid Heritage Foundation.
I spoke with multiple people formerly associated with Heritage, from research fellows to senior staff. They painted a picture of an organization that has, in the 14 years since launching its lobbying arm, Heritage Action for America, come to care less about getting conservative policies into law and more about getting friendly Republicans into power. During the Trump era, that has increasingly meant defending the 45th president and attacking his enemies, full stop, no matter what.
Standing by Trump after the events of January 6, 2021, was apparently a bridge too far for some Heritage insiders. Then-President Kay Coles James and then–Executive Vice President Kim Holmes announced their resignations in March of that year. Many more departures would follow—some voluntary, others less so.
In contrast, Roberts, who succeeded James in late 2021, has seemed unbothered by Trump’s continued insistence that the 2020 vote was stolen. Asked in a January interview with The New York Time
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