Mar 21, 2025
Opinion: The manifesto is over 900 pages, so theoretically speaking, Trump has only executed the first chapter, writes John Casey.
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Opinion: The manifesto is over 900 pages, so theoretically speaking, Trump has only executed the first chapter, writes John Casey.
In an interview with NBC News, Paul Dans, who oversaw Project 2025, said the race was a "battle for the future of MAGA."
Project 2025 architect to challenge Lindsey Graham for Senate in South Carolina
In an interview with NBC News, Paul Dans, who oversaw Project 2025, said the race was a "battle for the future of MAGA."
July 28, 2025, 6:59 AM MST / Updated July 28, 2025, 8:46 AM MST
By Allan Smith
Paul Dans, the architect of Project 2025, is launching a Senate bid in South Carolina to oust Lindsey Graham.
Dans is set to announce his Republican primary bid with a formal launch Wednesday in Charleston. Graham is a close Trump ally but has for years faced skepticism from his MAGA allies. He is already facing a challenge from former Lt. Gov. André Bauer. President Donald Trump earlier this year offered Graham his “Complete and Total Endorsement.”
Eric Hananoki at MMFA:
Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official and the director of Project 2025, told a right-wing podcast last year that his group has a “great” relationship with former President Donald Trump, and “Trump's very bought in with this.” His comments fly in the face of Trump’s recent attempts to distance himself from Project 2025. Project 2025, which is organized by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation, states that “Dans directs Heritage’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, organizing policy and personnel recommendations and training for appointees in the next presidential administration. Prior to joining Heritage, Dans served in the Trump Administration as Chief of Staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.” Media Matters has heavily documented the extreme nature of Project 2025. Notably, Heritage Foundation president and key Project 2025 figure Kevin Roberts recently sparked heavy criticism when he said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Following the controversy, Trump attempted to distance himself from the Heritage plan and has repeatedly claimed, “I know nothing about Project 2025.” But media outlets including Media Matters have documented the numerous connections between the project and the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Dans himself appears to have contradicted Trump’s claim that he knows nothing about the project.
In an unearthed video by MMFA, Project 2025 Director Paul Dans has praised Donald Trump and said that he’s “very bought in with this.”
See Also:
MMFA: Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts on WMAL's The Vince Coglianese Show: “The overlap is tremendous” between Trump's campaign platform and Project 2025
I’d like to thank Trump voters,third party voters and the 90 million voters who stayed home
Paul Dans, the ousted director of Project 2025, says he’s delighted that Trump is implementing his agenda after all.
Pat Byrnes :: @thePatByrnes
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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
July 5, 2024 (Friday)
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JUL 06, 2024
For all that certain members of the media continue their freakout over Biden’s electability after his appearance in last Thursday’s event on CNN, it is Trump and his Republicans who appear to be nervous about the upcoming election.
Journalist Jennifer Schulze of Heartland Signal noted today that as of 8:00 this morning, the New York Times had published 192 pieces on Biden’s debate performance: 142 news articles and 50 opinion pieces. Trump was covered in 92 stories, about half of which were about the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. Although Trump has frequently slurred his words or trailed off while speaking and repeatedly fell asleep at his own criminal trial, none of the pieces mentioned Trump’s mental fitness.
But for all of what independent journalists are calling a “feeding frenzy,” egged on by right-wing media figures, it seems as if the true implications of Project 2025 are starting to gain traction and the Trump campaign recognizes that the policies that document advocates are hugely unpopular.
On July 2, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts assured Trump ally Steve Bannon’s followers that they are winning in what he called “the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” In March, Roberts told former Trump administration official and now right-wing media figure Sebastian Gorka about Project 2025: “There are parts of the plan that we will not share with the Left: the executive orders, the rules and regulations. Just like a good football team we don’t want to tip off our playbook to the Left.”
This morning, although Roberts has described Project 2025 as “institutionalizing Trumpism,” Trump’s social media feed tried to distance the former president from Project 2025. “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” the post read. Despite this disavowal of any knowledge of the project, it continued: “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
In what appeared to be a coordinated statement, the directors of Project 2025 wrote on social media less than two hours later that they “do not speak for any candidate.”
Aside from the fact that “[a]nything they do, I wish them luck,” sounds much like the signaling Trump did to the Proud Boys when he told them to “stand back and stand by,” Trump’s assertion and Project 2025’s response can’t possibly erase the many and deep ties of the Trump camp to Project 2025. Juliet Jeske of Decoding Fox News noted that Trump’s name shows up on more than 190 pages of the Project 2025 playbook.
Rebekah Mercer, who sits on the board of the Heritage Foundation, was one of Trump’s top donors in 2016; her family founded and operated Cambridge Analytica, the company that misused the data of millions of Facebook users to push pro-Trump and anti-Clinton material in 2016. Trump’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has appeared in a Project 2025 video. Trump’s own super PAC has been running ads promoting Project 2025, calling it “Trump’s Project 2025,” and many of its policies—killing the Department of Education, erasing the separation of church and state, ending renewable energy programs and ramping up use of fossil fuels, deporting immigrants—are also Trump’s.
Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, as well as both of its associate directors, Spencer Chretien and Troup Hemenway, were in charge of personnel in Trump’s White House, and the theme of Project 2025 is that “people are policy,” by which they mean that hand-picked loyalists must replace civil servants. Trump’s former body man John McEntee, who reentered the White House as a senior advisor after having to leave because he failed a background check, was in charge of hiring in the last months of the Trump White House; he helped to draft Project 2025. Key Trump ally Russell Vought wrote the section of Project 2025 that called for an authoritarian leader; he is also on the platform committee of the Republican National Convention.
If indeed Trump knows nothing about Project 2025 and has no idea who is behind it, his cognitive ability is rotten. As former chair of the Republican National Committee Michael Steele wrote, “Since [Project 2025] is designed to institutionalize Trumpism and you know nothing about it, then why do you echo some of its policy priorities during your rallies? Coincidence? And how exactly don’t you know that Project 2025 Director Paul Dans served as your chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management, and Associate Director Spencer Chretien served as your special assistant and associate director of presidential personnel? And folks say we should be worried about Biden.”
Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 indicates just how toxic that plan is with voters. As political scientist Ian Bremmer dryly noted, it seems that “the second [A]merican revolution apparently [is] not polling as well as the first in internal focus groups.” Former Republican strategist Rick Wilson was even more direct, saying that Trump was trying to distance himself from Project 2025 because “most of it polls about like Ebola,” the deadly virus that causes severe bleeding and organ failure, and has a mortality rate of 80 to 90%.
The extremism of the MAGA Republicans was on display in another way today as well after The New Republic published a June 30 video of North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson, currently the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, saying to a church audience about their opponents—whom he identified in a scattershot speech as anything from communists to “wicked people” to those standing against “conservatives”—"Kill them! Some liberal somewhere is gonna say that sounds awful. Too bad!... Some folks need killing! It's time for somebody to say it.”
Today the Vatican turned against one of those extremists when it excommunicated pro-Trump archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who was the Vatican’s diplomat to the U.S. from 2011 to 2016, for “schism” after he refused to recognize the authority of Pope Francis. Viganò has repeatedly attacked Francis’s Catholic Church for being “inclusive, immigrationist, eco-sustainable, and gay-friendly.”
Also today, Trump’s lawyers asked Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing Trump’s criminal trial for retaining hundreds of classified documents, to dismiss charges that can no longer be prosecuted in light of the Supreme Court’s decision that a president cannot be charged for crimes committed while engaging in “official acts.” They also called the case “politically motivated” and asked Cannon to stop the case entirely in light of Justice Clarence Thomas’s suggestion that Special Counsel Jack Smith was not properly appointed.
The other big news today was that the U.S. added 206,000 jobs in June, bringing the total number of jobs created under this administration to 15.7 million. Last month’s numbers were, once again, higher than economists expected and, according to economic analyst Steven Rattner, above job growth levels before the pandemic. He added that these jobs are not simply a bounceback from the depths of the pandemic: 6.2 million more Americans are employed now than before Covid hit.
Poking fun at the calls for Biden to step down, conservative lawyer George Conway posted: “Biden needs to RESIGN NOW before any more of these terrible job things are created.”
In a speech today in Madison, Wisconsin, Biden vowed to stay in the race, and the speech appeared strong enough that right-wing extremists, including Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and activist Laura Loomer, posted on social media—falsely—that he was having a medical emergency aboard Air Force One. Tonight, George Stephanopoulos of ABC interviewed Biden without a teleprompter or notes, focusing only on Biden’s age without any questions about policy. ABC News posted the interview transcript with the president’s conversation portrayed the “g”s dropped off the words and with other colloquial pronunciations spelled out, as if it were dialect. Trump, whose words the press tends to turn into clean prose, has refused to do an interview under the same conditions.
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
If you enjoy looking at historical parallels, Mein Kampf will be 100 years old in 2025.
Trump is trying to claim that he knows nothing of his own Mein Kampf – Project 2025 – which I think of as Mein Trumpf. He said on his failing "Truth Social" platform that he knows nothing about Project 2025 – but then said he disagrees with some of the things they say.
That's a typical half-baked Trump prevarication. How can he disagree with them if he knows nothing about them? 🤨
In reality, members of his administration and MAGA political operatives have high level connections to Project 2025. Trump himself has appeared before the Heritage Foundation which is the leading group behind Project 2025.
Laura Barrón-López of the PBS NewsHour exposes the Trump connections and talks about the blatant authoritarian objectives of Project 2025.
BONUS TRACK...
Trump 2024 vs. Project 2025 His campaign denies anything to do with the blueprint for a second term, but Trump’s alumni are all over it.
Of the 37 authors of the project’s core agenda, 27 came from Trump’s orbit, including prominent figures such as former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, former acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, and economic adviser Peter Navarro. Even more former administration and current campaign members helped craft other portions, like John McEntee, the former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, who served as a senior Heritage adviser working on personnel for a second term. McEntee said in an interview this year that while he had not coordinated directly with the campaign, Project 2025 will “integrate a lot of our work with them” once Trump assembles an official transition team. “It’s totally false he doesn’t know what P25 is,” one former senior adviser said of Trump’s remarks. “Privately, he is of course talking to Heritage, and [Heritage president] Kevin Roberts has reportedly even met with Trump on P25.”
The Trumpsters even have an affectionate acronym for it: P25.
The aim of the authors of Project 2025 is to permanently install MAGA-style government in the United States. We shouldn't let them.
What do a horrible boss, teen predator, and dog killer have in common?
Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern?:
Imagine being an employee so toxic that you were fired by a guy who boasted to his co-workers about beating a dog to death with a shovel. Now imagine that you are still less sketchy than the guy using the dating app he started to solicit 18 year old girls, offering them free trips to LA to “hook up.” What do these people have in common? They are key figures in Trump’s effort to redesign the federal public sector. The guys who should trigger calls to HR want to become the HR system for government.
I am speaking of Paul Dans, the head of Project 2025 until he exited in July, John McEntee, who led the screening of Republican political appointees for both Trump and Project 2025, and Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation overseeing Project 2025. Both Dans and McEntee are people who would not have held any positions of power in a normal presidential administration. McEntee was kicked out of the White House when he failed a security check due to frequent gambling. He had no obvious qualifications apart from being the guy who carried Trump’s bag and being unswervingly loyal to Trump. But when Trump brought him back to the White House, he ordered that McEntee also be put in charge of the enormously important Presidential Personnel Office.
One of Tump’s own appointees voiced concerns about McEntee, saying “Mr. President, I have never said no to anything you’ve asked me to do, but I am asking you to please reconsider this. I don’t think it is a good idea.” Trump grew apoplectic: “You people never fucking listen to me! You’re going to fucking do what I tell you to do.” Paul Dans was another Trump loyalist, one who struggled to find a place in the administration despite volunteering on the Trump campaign. He had no relevant experience in government, and had failed to make partner in an unremarkable legal career. Despite his lack of qualifications, Dans had a different explanation, which was that he was one of a group of “people getting sandbagged because somebody thought that they were too ‘America First’-y or too Trumpist.” He finally broke into government with a position in HUD thanks to a Federalist Society connection with James Bacon, a college student working for Ben Carson. Bacon would later get recruited by McEntee to join him at the Presidential Personnel Office, and in turn brought Dans on board.
“Toxic and Abusive Behavior”
From the Presidential Personnel Office, Dans star finally rose. He was deployed to the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the career civil service. At OPM he championed Schedule F, the directive that would allow appointees like Dans to fire long-time career public servants. The Director of OPM resigned when she was told by McEntee that she now answered to Dans, who became the de facto leader of the agency. Dans’ inexperience with government showed. Anytime he encountered a delay he assumed it was deliberate: “He questioned everything from the point of view that there was a conspiracy against him and the president,” said a fellow Republican appointee. He would lose his temper and “just throw bombs into senior staff meetings” making him an intimidating figure. The pattern of abusive workplace behavior did not stop him from being handed the plum assignment of leading Project 2025. And when Dans exited in late July, Heritage praised him, with Kevin Roberts posting that Dans “built the project from scratch and bravely led this endeavor over the last two years.” New reporting paints a darker story. Dans was fired for being a toxic colleague. He yelled and swore at co-workers, demeaning them. Colleagues said that Dans “always struggled to maintain collegiality” and described “toxic and abusive behavior” especially toward female colleagues. He failed to listen to repeated warnings, including from Roberts, to behave professionally. After an internal investigation, he was fired for what the Heritage Foundation now acknowledges was “professional misconduct and mistreatment of colleagues.”
The “Deputy President”
When the Trump administration ended, McEntee could have followed the route of other ex-Trumpers and joined a think tank. While he would eventually return to this world via Project 2025, his priorities were elsewhere. With backing from the tech billionaire and Trump/Vance supporter Peter Thiel, McEntee launched a dating app aimed at conservatives, called “The Right Stuff.” In explaining his motivation for creating the app, McEntee wrote: “Washington, D.C. is a very liberal city, and I'm super conservative. How could I find people who had the same values as me? I found I couldn't really use the apps because it was tough to find someone on there with similar opinions…Personally, I have never and would never date anyone who doesn't share the same political views as me.” McEntee’s app received mixed reviews. Users complained about the Ashley Madisonesque lack of women on the site.
[...]
The Dog Killer in Charge
Overseeing all of this is the Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. And Roberts has his own problems: multiple former colleagues said he had boasted about killing a neighbor’s dog with a shovel. The timing is bad, of course, since a key policy message of Trump and JD Vance (who wrote the foreword for Robert’s new book), is that that it is immigrants are killing beloved pets. Instead, it seems to be the person in charge of the governing blueprint that Trump keeps trying to distance himself from. While Roberts deserves some credit for firing Dans, the anonymous Heritage leaks disparaging Dans appear to have come after he demanded a $3.1 million severance package, which Heritage rebuffed. At the same time, Heritage has nothing to say about their other Project 2025 employee, McEntee. While it might denounce toxic behavior in their workplace, predatory behavior by their employees is fine. Dans is a person that Heritage would not employ because of his toxic behavior. But they think his ideas are appropriate for massively restructuring the federal personnel system so that people like Dans and McEntee can fire whoever they want. McEntee is not someone you would want anywhere near younger women. But he is the person that both Trump and Heritage put in charge of recruiting the next generation of appointees.
Don Moynihan wrote another solid column on how three toxic men who seek to control the federal civil service sector should Donald Trump get back in.