Donald Trump distances himself from Project 2025 after talk of new American Revolution
Trump has outlined his own plans to remake the government if he wins a second term, including staging the largest deportation operation in US history and imposing tariffs on potentially all imports. His campaign has previously warned outside allies not to presume to speak for the former president and suggested their transition-in-waiting efforts were unhelpful.
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What if Trump wins?
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast on Tuesday that Republicans are “in the process of taking this country back”. Former US congressman Dave Brat of Virginia hosted the show for Bannon, who is serving a four-month prison term.
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts said.
Those comments were widely circulated online and blasted by the Biden campaign, which issued a statement saying Trump and his allies were “dreaming of a violent revolution to destroy the very idea of America”.
Some of the people involved in Project 2025 are former senior administration officials. The project’s director is Paul Dans, who served as chief of staff at the US Office of Personnel Management under Trump.
Russ Vought, who was director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, wrote one of the chapters. John McEntee, a former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office in the Trump administration, is a senior adviser.
A spokesperson for the plan said Project 2025 is not tied to a specific candidate or campaign.
“We are a coalition of more than 110 conservative groups advocating policy and personnel recommendations for the next conservative president,” a statement said. “But it is ultimately up to that president, who we believe will be President Trump, to decide which recommendations to implement.”
Biden’s re-election campaign has said the plan will “gut democratic checks and balances and consolidate power in the Oval Office if he wins”.
“Trump’s campaign advisers and close allies wrote it – and are doing everything they can to elect him so he can execute their playbook immediately,” the campaign says on its website.
On Thursday, as the country celebrated Independence Day and Biden prepared for his television interview after his halting debate performance, the president’s campaign posted on X a shot from the dystopian television drama The Handmaid’s Tale showing a group of women in the show’s red dresses and white hats standing in formation by a reflecting pool with a cross at the far end where the Washington Monument should be.
The story revolves around women who are stripped of their identities and forced to give birth to children for other couples in a totalitarian regime.
“Fourth of July under Trump’s Project 2025,” the post said.