Project 2025, a suggested roadmap for a second Trump Administration pulled together by the Heritage Foundation, is a nearly 1,000-page document written by a bunch of think tankers and right-wing policy experts running the gamut of conservatism.
President Joe Biden says the document “should scare every single American.” Democrats, one strategist told the Washington Post, need to “instill fear in the American people.” Donald Trump and his surrogates are already distancing the candidate from the effort.
So, I decided to read it. Listen, it wasn’t easy. But the chances that Biden, or any other person fearmongering about it, understands what’s in it, is highly doubtful.
For starters, most of the Project 2025 “mandate” is just a compendium of long-held conservative wishes for government.
The Associated Press warns the effort champions a “dramatic expansion of presidential power.” Yet, nothing in Project 2025 is even on par with Biden’s unconstitutional loan “forgiveness” plan. The alleged presidential abuses the media lays out are well within the president’s power. They’re just policies Democrats happen to dislike.
Project 2025, we are warned, suggests the firing of as many as 50,000 federal workers — which is well within the purview of the president. It will never happen, unfortunately.
Project 2025 suggests eliminating the Department of Education and its “woke-dominated system of public schools.” Conservatives have been promising to get rid of the Department of Education since Ronald Reagan first ran for the presidency. It will never happen.
Project 2025 suggests prohibiting the FBI from “fighting misinformation and disinformation.” Great! The state shouldn’t be in the business of dictating speech. Not only do bureaucrats have no monopoly on truth; they are highly prone to abusing power. This would not have been controversial even a decade ago.
Moreover, curbing the DOJ’s efforts is limiting executive power.
Project 2025 also suggests deactivating FBI investigations that are “contrary to the national interest.” The Department of Justice — now engaged in lawfare against Democrats’ main political rivals, parents, and pro-life protesters among others — exists within the executive branch. It should always presumably act in the national interest.
Project 2025 also proposes ending the “war on fossil fuels.” This, too, has been a mainstream GOP position since Democrats began openly promising to dismantle our energy economy. If voters don’t like it, they can vote of the party that promises “carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035.”
“Project 2025 is not a game, it’s white Christian nationalism,” the star of “The Avengers” and budding Christian theologian Mark Ruffalo warns. “It is the Sharia Law of the ‘Christian’ crazy people who aren’t Christian at all but want to control every aspect of your life through their narrow and exclusionary interpretation of Christ’s egalitarian, inclusive, and kindly teachings.”
Project 2025, you may be surprised to learn, does not feature a single mention of “Jesus” or “Christ.” It does champion long-held social conservative positions on religious freedom, abortion, marriage, and so on.
The policy guide features eight mentions of “God” in the entire document, most of those noting our “God-given individual rights to live freely.” Though this might be offensive to Politico writers or “New Right” intellectuals who’ve abandoned “liberalism,” it is one of the foundational ideas of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
“Christian” is mentioned seven times in the Project 2025 mandate. One, a warning about the left’s threats to tax-exemptions on churches and religious schools. Another mention suggests doing more to protect minority “Middle Eastern Christians” in foreign policy. Another reference reminds us about the COVID-era authoritarians who shut down “churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar.”
Faith is also touched on in a section about attacks on religious freedom that “compel a Christian website designer to imagine, create, and publish a custom website celebrating same-sex marriage but cannot compel an LGBT person to design a similar website celebrating opposite-sex marriage.” There is nothing extreme about that statement.
Now, obviously there are numerous other nods to socially conservative policy that comports largely with orthodox Christian positions. Not everyone in the right-center coalition might agree them–especially on abortion. Trump doesn’t even embrace them. So much for MAGA extremism. You’re free to agree or disagree with the suggestions, but there is nothing weird or unique or new about faith informing politics. Moreover, none of these policies undermine the rights of other citizens.
And though I strongly disagree with plenty of the economic and trade ideas found in Project 2025, that’s not what the left is taking issue with, of course. They’re feigning horror at decades-old social conservative positions and warning us about authoritarian policies that aren’t actually found anywhere in Project 2025.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.
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