Free Republic

The Trump administration has rolled out Project 2025-aligned policies on trade, immigration, the federal workforce, the media, diversity initiatives and voting and transgender rights.The White House said Trump’s policies are “based on the best interests of the American people, period.”Experts have questioned the legality or wisdom of some policies, and liberal activists have promised to resist. In his Project 2025 chapter on trade, economist Peter Navarro called on the next U.S. president to bring about a domestic manufacturing “renaissance” by adopting reciprocal tariffs against trading partners and taking a particularly hard line on China.Promptly after being elected, President Trump appointed...

Kingsley Wilson, appointed in January to be deputy press secretary at the Pentagon, last year tweeted a neo-Nazi talking point about Jewish lynching victim Leo Frank. The post came amid a flood of far-right social media content by the Trump administration appointee, who previously worked at an organization founded by the architect of Project 2025, the Christian conservative blueprint for a Trump White House. Many of Wilson’s posts, which remain online, reflect antisemitic conspiracy theories. The one about Frank has resurged in recent years. Frank was a factory manager in Georgia who was convicted on thin evidence of killing a...

Donald Trump has signed an executive order that could make him the most powerful president in history by using an obscure Constitutional theory to enact his vision of presidential authority. The new order seeks to 'reign in independent agencies' by seizing various departments that normally act in accordance with Congress and bring them under control of the executive branch in the White House. The order also states that the president and attorney general will interpret the law, leaving Trump free from Congressional and judicial oversight. Observers suggest that Trump is using unitary executive theory which grants the president a wide...

Despite Democratic tactics to delay the confirmation vote, the Senate confirmed Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Republicans backed Vought’s nomination, arguing he proved a qualified candidate for the role since he previously held the position during President Donald Trump’s first term. Democrats, however, raised multiple concerns about his nomination and said his views on the Impoundment Control Act, which reinforces that Congress holds the power of the purse, disqualified him from the role. Democrats held a 30-hour-long protest against Vought's nomination, delivering speeches in the middle of the night on Wednesday in an attempt...

Powerless to stop President Trump or Russell T. Vought, the nominee to lead the White House budget office, Democrats pulled an all-nighter to show their opposition. There was no nursery rhyme reciting nor phone book reading. No cots wheeled out for senators to catch naps in between speechifying. But one by one on Wednesday night and into Thursday, Senate Democrats flocked to the floor for an all-night talkathon to protest the confirmation of Russell T. Vought, President Trump’s nominee to lead the White House budget office and an architect of his ultraconservative Project 2025 policy agenda. Several senators swigged caffeinated...

For years, world leaders have accused Russia of funding environmental groups in Europe to steer nations away from energy independence and strengthen Russia’s iron grip over the continent. As nations across the globe begin shunning Russian oil in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. leaders are also questioning how deep Russia’s ties go in the environmental community. "The Russians actually fund some of the most rabid environmental groups in Europe because they sic them on the energy projects that aren’t Russian," James Carafano, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign...

Staffers with Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) reportedly entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the Department of Commerce in Washington DC today, inciting concerns of downsizing at the agency. “They apparently just sort of walked past security and said: ‘Get out of my way,’ and they’re looking for access for the IT systems, as they have in other agencies,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former Noaa official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire. “They will have access to the entire computer system, a lot...

President Donald Trump's sweeping executive orders have drawn comparisons to Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint aimed at reshaping the federal government under a Republican administration. Newsweek examines the similarities. Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment via email. Why It Matters Project 2025, a 900-page document spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, set out plans to expand executive authority, replace civil servants with ideologically aligned appointees, limit abortion rights and impose much tougher restrictions on immigration. Democrats have painted the initiative as a road map for Trump's second term in an attempt to portray him as ideologically extreme. Trump...

They don’t like the trash talk. Washington DC’s District Department of Transportation denounced a transit ad that was spotted near the Capitol that likened MAGA hat wearers to garbage. “Keep DC trash free,” reads the incendiary ad spotted by Capitol Hill Baptist Church pastor Caleb Morell. The ad featured a red circle with a line through it over an image of a MAGA hat wearer holding a book labeled “Project 2025.” The bottom of the ad includes the logo for the District of Columbia Department of Public Works and the Mayor’s Office of the Clean City program. DDOT DC quickly...

Donald Trump has publicly praised Project 2025, calling parts of the policy agenda "very conservative and very good." During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump distanced himself from the initiative. He called parts of the 900-page guideline spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation "ridiculous and abysmal." "I know nothing about Project 2025," he wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, in July. "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 and abysmal." On Thursday, Time magazine named Trump its 2024 Person of...

SEATTLE - Washington governor-elect Bob Ferguson announced on Monday that he is creating a subcommittee in his transition team with the sole aim of fighting Project 2025, which they expect will be put into motion by the Trump Administration. Ferguson's committee will be co-chaired by Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates CEO Jennifer Allen and King County Councilmember Jorge L. Barón, who formerly served as executive director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project from 2008 to 2023. "We are preparing in case President Trump attacks Washingtonians’ core freedoms," Governor-elect Ferguson said. "We will keep Washington moving forward no matter what happens at...

See attached images (or read the link…first few pages)

Donald Trump’s second administration has begun to take shape amid fears over extremist appointments and how far right the US will go while Republicans control the White House and probably both chambers of Congress. The range of names being put forward varies from members of Trump’s inner circle to the world’s richest man, tech mogul Elon Musk. Alongside plutocrats and technocrats are hardline ideologues on immigration and foreign policy and the controversial figure of Robert F Kennedy Jr, a leading vaccine conspiracy theorist. On Thursday, Trump made his first appointment, naming Susie Wiles, a co-campaign chair, White House chief of...

'The McRib is year long now' and '5 Buc-ees gas stations per state.'

Liberal commentator Joy Reid has slammed Trump voters and described Florida as 'extremely right-wing fascist' after the Sunshine State was called for the Republican nominee. Reid took part in the MSNBC election night panel on Tuesday and lashed out as votes rolled in, with Trump taking a the lead. 'Think about the last two weeks and the things that Donald Trump has said into the TV that people could hear him say and do,' she said. 'The vulgarity in front of families with young children and the threats to do mass deportation and a violent start to his dictatorship on...

Over the past few months, a lot of ink has been spilled and words spoken about Project 2025 and former President Donald Trump’s support for it. Almost all of what’s been written and said have been lies from biased writers and pundits. Commentators have alternately, and sometimes in the same story, called it “fascist,” anti-democratic,” a plan to “destroy the U.S. system of checks and balances,” and perhaps cringiest of all, “a Christo-Fascist plan to create a theocracy.” In actuality, Project 2025 is none of these things, except in the unhinged minds of the labelers. In fact, it is the...

EPA employees are shuffling to “safer” agencies. An Interior Department worker is putting off buying a new car and poring over Project 2025. And civil servants across the government are worried they might soon get fired. Federal employees throughout the executive branch are panicking at the thought of another Trump administration. Former President Donald Trump has pledged to “demolish the deep state.” His running mate, Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance, has said Trump ought to fire “every civil servant in the administrative state.” It’s not just campaign-trail bluster. In the waning days of his first administration, Trump sought to make...

Three points you might be missing: 1. Project 2025 is a winner. 2. J.D. Vance will be the second-greatest vice president. 3. Jill Biden is running the country. First things first. Democrats have made Project 2025, a policy paper of recommendations put out every four years by the Heritage Foundation, into a bogeyman. But the meat of Project 2025 is a feast for President Donald Trump to devour upon taking office on Jan. 20. The think tank titled it “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” Most of it is a reflection of Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda, and indeed...

The husband of one of the two moderators in next week’s CBS News debate featuring vice presidential candidates J.D. Vance and Tim Walz appears to have made two donations of $250 apiece to the controversial Lincoln Project during the 2020 election. Records from the Federal Election Commission show that Ali “Yado” Yakub, the husband of Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, contributed on July 2 and Sept. 26 of that year to the anti-Trump super-PAC.Screenshot of Ali ‘Yado’ Yakub’s donations in 2020 to the Lincoln Project / IMAGE: FEC.gov Voting records confirmed that the address listed was the residence of...

In 2024, the deep state that defeats Donald Trump might be his own.That, after all, is what Project 2025 was actually meant to be. The 900-page tome that Democrats hoist in front of the cameras is a festival of policy options, detailed down to the sub-agency level. But options for whom? Not for Trump himself. Even the most wonkish of presidents can only engage on a small fraction of what the executive branch does. And Donald Trump was not the most wonkish of presidents. When he said, during his debate with Kamala Harris, that he hadn’t read Project 2025 and...