Project 2025: Trumpism and the New Conservatism

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposes hard-right policies aligned closely with former President Trump’s “America First” agenda and is designed to eliminate the guardrails that stemmed his authoritarian tendencies in his first term. Project 2025 advocates and plans an unparalleled concentration of presidential power in a Trump second term. It reflects major shifts at Heritage and in the Republican Party away from Reagan to Bush era neoliberalism. Heritage began working on Project 2025 shortly after Kevin D. Roberts became its president in 2021. He reshaped the Heritage mission and originated Project 2025 to institutionalize Trumpism. Trump enthusiastically endorsed the effort. In a 2022 Heritage speech, he stated, “This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America” (Kroll & Surgey, 2024). However, Trump later declared that he “knew nothing about Project 2025” and had “no idea who was behind it” (Contorno, 2024). His disavowal came after Democrats drew public attention to the project and made it a major campaign issue by midyear 2024. The attacks on the proposed Trumpian policy regime resonated with fears of many voters.

Artist: Drew Martin

Trumpism’s nativist, isolationist, racist tendencies are deeply rooted in American culture and history and manifested prominently in the “white Christian nationalist” segment of Trump’s loyal base. Recent European New-Right “national conservative” movements have also shaped Trumpism. Heritage President Roberts (2023) describes their convergent politics, which he embraces, as “One-Nation Burkeanism” and often has referred to the Trumpian effort to make it our governing philosophy as a “Second American Revolution.” National conservatives contend that globalization, undocumented immigrants, excessive overall immigration, and left-liberal policies have eroded national sovereignty, cultural coherence, collective identity, and the character, loyalty, and obedience of citizenry. In their view, preserving global cultural diversity requires solidaristic nations with hard borders. They advocate a hierarchical ethos with a populist thrust critical of global elites and transnational institutions. National conservatives embrace right-leaning communitarian culture based on state religion and traditionalist family values and favor authoritarian leaders that seek to concentrate state power to realize their political and sociocultural ends. They advocate free enterprise counterbalanced by protectionist economic policies. A spearhead of national conservatism and architect of Hungary’s so-called “illiberal democracy,” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has long supported Trump, who considers the Hungarian leader the model “strongman” we all need, and the former president aspires to be.

Trump usually rambles in speeches and interviews – they are rife with falsehoods and non-sequiturs, and do not express a coherent political vision. Besides assertions about closing the border and expelling forcefully undocumented immigrants, Trump seldom addresses and appears to have little interest in concrete policy matters. However, his illiberal, authoritarian tendencies and manner of expression, which resonate powerfully with his base, have affinity for and facilitate the political ends and ideological program of his more intellectual, informed advisors, supporters, and fellow travelers. Consequently, Trumpism may have a life after the former president leaves the scene. Heritage President Roberts, former Director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, and many other prominent Republicans embrace the Trumpian variant of national conservativism (e.g., Senators Vance, Scott, Hawley, Johnson, Lee, Marshall, and Schmitt; Russell Vought, Ken Cuccinelli, Mark Meadows, Stephen Miller, Christoper Rufo, Peter Thiel, Vivek Ramaswamy, John Eastman, Julie Kelly, Paul Gottfried, John Yoo, Roger Kimball, Rod Dreher, Charlie Kirk, Balázs Orbán, and Tucker Carlson have spoken at national conservative meetings or signed its statement of principles [National Conservatism, 2024]). They advocate concentrated executive power capable of dismantling the left-liberal “Deep State” and creating a lasting hegemonic, Trumpian policy regime and culture. Project 2025 provides a detailed vision of the new national conservative order and governance mechanisms needed to bring it into being.

Project 2025 has “four pillars” – the “Presidential Personnel Database” of potential political appointees vetted for loyalty to Trump; online “Presidential Administration Academy” designed to prepare aspiring Trump political appointees for public service; a “180-Day Playbook” that drafts strategies to bring the new policy regime rapidly into being when Trump returns to power; and, most importantly, a 922 page, Mandate for Leadership (Dans & Groves, 2023) that details a raft of policy proposals and major organizational changes for government offices in a Trump second term. The Mandate often refers to the “next conservative president” but is framed explicitly for Trump. Heritage has formulated similar policy frameworks for other Republican presidential candidates since Reagan and contends that Trump embraced most of their first-term proposals. Plotting a much more radical transformation than earlier versions, Heritage designed the Mandate to avert political blockages to Trump’s strongman aspirations. Trump neither had a direct hand in creation of Project 2025 nor has he embraced the entire “wish list” of proposals, which were drafted by Heritage in collaboration with 110 other hard-right organizations. Yet, his influence is transparent. Trump agrees with many of the Mandate’s positions, some of which he has long held or has mentioned on the 2024 campaign trail and in his collection of policy plans, Agenda47. Trump and the Mandate both stress amassing presential power via executive orders. A CNN inquiry found that about 240 people had ties to Project 2025 and Trump. At least 140 former Trump Administration officials contributed directly to the project, including its Directors Paul Dans and Spencer Chretien. Twenty-eight of the Mandate’s 38 authors worked in the earlier Trump regime – six were former Cabinet secretaries; four were ambassador nominees; and others enforced his immigration restrictions (Contorno 2024).

Neoconservative, Brookings senior scholar, Robert Kagan’s (2023) Washington Post op-ed about the inevitability of dictatorship in a Trump second term stirred intense discussion about the Trumpian authoritarian drift, and opened way for later Democratic Party warnings about the threats to democracy posed by Project 2025 and Trumpism per se. A core policy goal stressed in the Mandate advocates dismantling the allegedly left-leaning U.S. civil service bureaucracy or “Deep State.” A decisive means designed to achieve this end, the Mandate proposes reviving the “Schedule F” executive order that Trump made in late October 2020 shortly before election day and Biden rescinded early in his presidency. The Mandate holds that several generations of progressive civil servants, sharing strong employment protections and lucrative benefit packages, hardened the New Deal era, left-liberal political culture of the federal bureaucracy into the Deep State, averting legislative control, weakening fatally executive power, and undercutting the collective will of the citizenry, who elect legislators and presidents to formulate policy and govern. Schedule F would have allowed Trump to remove up to an estimated 50,000 nonpartisan civil servants, construed to advocate, develop, or make public policy, and replace them with his loyalist political appointees. The Mandate advises that a second Trump regime must reinstate Schedule F to restore executive power able to forge, surveil, and bolster enforcement of the new conservative policy regime and ultimately “Save America.” The Project 2025 Presidential Personnel Database lists potential Schedule F employees who have been vetted for loyalty to Trumpism and are prepared for appointment immediately after the former president’s second inauguration. The Mandate advises close executive supervision of Schedule F employees to ensure they comply with Trump’s political agenda. The July 1, 2024, Supreme Court (SCOTUS) “immunity decision,” providing the president with extensive protection from prosecution, intensified fears that restoration of Schedule F would facilitate realization of the Mandate’s plan to concentrate executive power and ultimately usher in a Trumpian dictatorship.

Artist: Drew Martin

The Mandate argues that an “unaccountable” liberal-left bureaucratic managerial class captured the Department of Justice (DOJ) and treats Trumpian proposals as potential violations of federal law. It claims that the Biden DOJ’s “radical liberal agenda” – instituting and enforcing diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) rules and laws throughout government and wider society– is discriminatory and undercuts focus on the office’s primary constitutional duties to protect public safety and insure rule of law. The Biden Administration, it claims, “weaponized” the DOJ and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to sabotage Trump’s electoral chances and propagate Democratic Party lies about his supposed Russia collusion, deflect revelations about Hunter Biden’s laptop, weaken enforcement of immigration law, and limit free speech by monitoring alleged misinformation and disinformation and fake foreign influences in the social media.

The Mandate asserts that, in a second term, Trump must scuttle the DOJ Civil Rights Division DEI rules, transform the office so that it operates in accord with its constitutional duties, and institute firm executive control and supervision to ensure that it upholds the president’s political agenda. The Mandate’s impoverished vision of the DOJ mission diminishes the office’s post-World War II role in defending civil rights and extending full citizenship to vulnerable minorities. Claims about the liberal bias and discriminatory practices of DEI offices and personnel appear throughout the Mandate, which advocates their elimination in every branch of government. Trump has declared on the 2024 campaign trail that he would use DOJ in a second term to jail his political enemies, election officials he believes cheated him, former staff, political appointees, and lawyers he deems disloyal, and even Google for displaying unflattering Trump stories. Trumps frequent comments about his intent to weaponize DOJ stoked fears about the Mandateplan to bind the office tightly to him and his political purposes in a second term.

Trump has stressed repeatedly and emphatically threats posed by the alleged pervasive criminality of undocumented immigrants and that he would employ militaristic methods to locate and deport up to 15 to 20 million of them in a second term. He declared on the campaign trail that nearly 14 thousand “illegal immigrant” murderers were “on the loose” in the U.S. The Mandate also advises mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Trump proposed shifting funds from Homeland Security (DHS) to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when he was president. The Mandate contends that that Left “wokeness” and Biden Administration laxity has allowed DHS to abandon a most vital facet of its mission – ensuring border security and repelling illegal immigration. The Mandate calls for completing the border wall, enforcing much more strictly immigration law, and improving related surveilling and policing methods. It also proposes revoking benefits given to unaccompanied, undocumented immigrant children and raising standards for asylum claims. The HMS secretary is already a presidential appointee, but the Mandate adds that the office should be bolstered by a large team of political appointees vetted by the Office of Presidential Personnel to ensure compliance with the executive agenda to drastically reduce the flow of undocumented immigrants. These recommendations are in tune with the Mandate’s broader themes of centralizing executive power and eradicating DEI culture.

Echoing Trump’s assertions that most environmental policy is a “scam,” and that climate change is a “hoax,” the Mandate holds that the related science, legislation, and management has been shaped by the “woke” left. Parallel to the DEI proposals, the Mandate advises eliminating or radically shifting the goals and practices of environmental protection and climate change policy offices, personnel, and regulations in all government agencies. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provided billions for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The Biden Administration also passed wide ranging environmental regulatory rules and supported major facets of the Green New Deal, which the Mandate contends erodes rule of law and ensures extension of Deep State size, reach, and power. The Mandate asserts repeatedly that the next conservative president must end Biden’s “war on fossil fuel” and reinstate Trump’s first term “energy dominance agenda,” stressing nearly unlimited drilling on federal lands and maximal fossil fuel production and usage. It holds that ensuring provision of “inexpensive,” “abundant,” “reliable” fossil fuel will accelerate economic growth, improve the American quality of life, and foster U.S. geopolitical dominance. Trump has asserted repeatedly that “drill, baby, drill” and “energy dominance” are top priorities. He told potential doner oil and gas industry executives at a Mar-a-Lago dinner that he would treat their industry much better than Biden has and he would basically give them what they want. He asked the executives for a billion dollars in campaign contributions to help him win the 2024 presidential election and thereby ensure friendly fossil fuel industry government policies (Joselow & Dawsey, 2024). The Mandate details them.

The Trumpian energy dominance agenda proposed by the Mandate advises the opposite of the massive reduction of fossil fuel production and usage called for in the United Nations Framework on Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) brokered “Paris Agreement,” which detailed policies to keep global surface temperatures from rising more than 2° Celsius (C) (3.6°Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels to avert the most severe, irreversible impacts of climate change, and, if possible, no more than 1.5°C (2.7°F) to protect low-lying coastal regions and small island nations. Most climate scientists hold that continuing the current level of fossil fuel usage will exceed these targets and cause ecological catastrophe. A survey of top climate scientists by the journal Nature found over 60% of those interviewed said we would reach 3°C or more this century; 88% said the climate crisis has already begun; and nearly as many said they would experience catastrophic impacts in their lifetimes (Tolleffson, 2021). Current U.S. climate policies are not nearly sufficient to stem the escalating crisis – the U.S. under Biden has produced more oil annually than any country ever. Trump’s energy dominance dgenda stresses raising fossil fuel production and usage far above today’s levels, maximizing its export, and rescinding Biden Administration policies and subsidies aimed to reduce GHGs. The Mandate’s plan to revive it would propel us on a nearly certain pathway to irreversible “Hothouse Earth.”

A report by Heritage analysts holds that U.S. elimination of GHGs will have miniscule effect on global temperatures this century, and pursuit of the U.N. targets would devastate domestic manufacturing, result in huge employment losses, shrink incomes, and cause electricity costs to soar (Dayaratina, Tubb, & Kreutzer 2022). The Mandate does not engage climate science theories or research – it simply presumes that, if climate change is occurring, its effects are minor and manageable and will remain that way in the future. It asserts that current climate policy is a “fanatical” left-wing political agenda. The Mandate urges U.S. withdrawal from the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement. It also advises the next Trump Administration to erase Biden’s climate change rules and guidelines from all government manuals, documents, and agendas.

The Mandate holds that the left has made the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) into an all-powerful regulator, unresponsive to local needs. It contends that the EPA’s coercive imposition of rarefied standards requiring a shift from oil, coal, and natural gas to “unreliable renewables” kills jobs and economic growth and expands and empowers Deep State bureaucracy. Climate activists that dominate the EPA, the Mandate asserts, increase bureaucratic interference throughout the economy, without congressional support. The Mandate contends that exaggerated claims about climate change impacts and consequent regulatory overreach erode property rights and increase prices across-the-board. It advises the next Trump Administration to eliminate the Offices of Enforcement and Compliance Assistance, Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, and Public Engagement and Environmental Education. It also advises that Trump should issue a “Day 1” executive order to assess, reorganize, and downsize the EPA: the overhaul must be executed by loyal political appointees identified, vetted, and ready to serve before Trump takes office. The Mandate holds that EPA reportage rules and regulation of GHGs and other types of pollution are far too stringent and are based on politically manipulated junk science.

The Mandate contends that Biden Administration fuel economy standards are so strict that they cannot be met by internal-combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. It argues that these EPA policies were designed to force U.S. consumers to shift to electronic vehicles (EVs), even though they prefer ICE vehicles. The Mandate asserts that Biden made the transition to EVs a primary goal of the Department of Transportation and supported it with huge government subsidies. The Mandate claims that the proposed transition and consequent policies undercut ICE production – the foundation of the US industrial base, enormous job provider, and driver of general economic growth – and thereby restrict consumer choices, increase unemployment, and incentivize consumers to keep lower priced, old, unsafe, polluting cars on the road. The Mandate also states that the proposed shift would increase dependence on Chinese rare earth minerals needed for EV batteries. The Mandate concludes that fuel economy limits and EV transition would not lower global temperatures. It advises a second Trump administration to increase vehicle milage limits and eliminate subsidies for a transition to EVs. Trump asserts that he would stop the phase out of ICEs and subsidies for the EV transition and impose a 200% tariff on cheap Chinese EV impots.

A Trumpian Department of Interior would cut restrictions on lease sales for both onshore and offshore oil production the Mandate argues. It calls for removing burdensome limits on mining in coal producing states, eliminating restrictive rules for Bureau of Land Management waste management, and opening much more Alaska public land to oil and gas production. The Mandate advises removing restrictive Endangered Species Act habitat exclusions and ceasing employment of species specialists to research, advise, and enforce the various facets of this act, because their ideological biases and self-interest favor species that they study. It also asserts that the next Trump Administration must rescind the Biden Administration “30×30” initiative, which calls for reserving at least 30% of U.S. lands and waters for conservation. The Mandate calls for revival of Trump’s efforts to downsize protected areas of National Monuments and for repeal of the 1906 Antiquities Act that allows presidents to provide emergency protections for scenic rivers, wilderness, endangered species, and unique natural places. It proposes scaling back the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to assess environmental and socioeconomic impacts of projects on federal lands or publicly owned facilities before issuing permits. The Mandate advises more antienvironmental moves than can be summarized here, but this relatively detailed discussion offers insight into draconian measures suffusing the document.

Project 2025 proposes a radical transformation of government, concentrating executive power, altering substantially or reversing department missions, reducing resources of offices or shutting them down, and ensuring appointee lockstep. Its proposals about religion, family, education, and gender manifest the same convergence of Trumpism and national conservatism as the topics discussed above in this essay. The Mandate does not engage environmental science, equates it with left-wing ideology, and says nothing about current scientifically supported, highly publicized ecological damages due largely to climate change (e.g., worsening heat waves, accelerating sea level rise, and increasingly severe floods and forest fires). This insouciant approach to enormously dangerous problems illuminates a postfactual sensibility expressed throughout the Mandate. Overcoming the so-called Deep State’s regulatory regime and substituting religiously justified strongman decision for the practices of civil servants and experts overrule and preclude the sober inquiry about factual matters needed for informed democratic deliberation. Enormously reckless and transparent in the case of climate change, this “post-truth” attitude shapes what Yale historian Tim Snyder (2021) describes as a “prefascist” climate in which substituting pertinent facts with misinformation and spectacle open way for rule by authoritarian strongmen and concentrated wealth. Project 2025 maps a path toward inward-oriented, nationalist capitalism sans liberal democracy, which could eventuate in, if our former “post-truth president” is elected again, the type of illiberal, corrupt, nepotistic, crony capitalist regime that has emerged under Orbán’s rule in Hungrary or possibly even something worse.

References

Contorno, S. (2024, July 11). Trump claims not to know who is behind Project 2025. A CNN review found at least 140 people who worked for him are involved. CNN. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/11/politics/trump-allies-project-2025/index.html

Dans P. & Groves, S. (Eds.). (2023). Mandate for leadership. Heritage Foundation. Retried from https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

Dayaratina, K., Tubb, K, & Kreutzer, D. (2022, June 16). The unsustainable costs of President Biden’s climate agenda. The Heritage Foundation. Retrieved from https://www.heritage.org/energy-economics/report/the-unsustainable-costs-president-bidens-climate-agenda

Dawsey, J. & Joselow, M. (2024, May 9). What Trump promised oil CEOs as he asked them to steer $1 billion to his campaign. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/

Kagan, R. (2023, November 30). A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable, we should stop pretending. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/30/trump-dictator-2024-election-robert-kagan/

Kroll, A. & Surgey N. (2024, August 10). Inside Project 2025’s secret training videos. ProPublica. Retrieved fromhttps://www.propublica.org/article/inisde-project-2025-secret-training-videos-trump-election

National Conservatism. (2024). National conservatism: A statement of principles. Edmund Burke Foundation. Retrieved from https://nationalconservatism.org/national-conservatism-a-statement-of-principles/

Roberts, K D. (2023, May 26). Burkean nationalism. Heritage Foundation. Retrieved from https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/burkean-nationalism

Snyder, T. (2021, December 28). The American abyss. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/tump-coup-html

Tollefson, J. (2021). Top climate scientists are sceptical that nations will rein in global warming. Nature, 599(7883), 22-24. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02990-w