When tensions are high during election season, people tend to misunderstand a lot of things that are actually said. Whether people are spreading rumors that President Joe Biden undoubtedly has dementia or questioning if the election really was stolen in 2020, the things that get the most attention unfortunately tend to have the least certainty behind them. And for this election race, the exact same thing is happening to the campaign of Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump. In particular, people are attempting to link him to the Republican-backed proposal called Project 2025 and touting it as a reason to fear his ascension to the Oval Office–but few have taken time to look at the history and contents of Project 2025 itself.
Project 2025, for those who are not aware, is an initiative to reform the government in a way that benefits Republican ideals. It was devised and published by a Republican think-tank called the Heritage Foundation which has actively suggested laws and policies since Ronald Reagan in 1981—and this may be their most radicalized pitch to the presidency yet.
Across the 900 pages of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation argues in favor of contentious ideas. It suggests the president challenge the legality of mifepristone, a commonly used abortion drug, while also recommending the reintroduction of the Comstock Act which would prohibit sending abortion-related medication and instruments through mail. It also goes into detail about gender autonomy and proposes that the Department of Health and Human Services have a biblically based definition of marriage and family, severely cutting back on the autonomy of transgender individuals.
Project 2025 also touches on immigration and backs increased funding for the US-Mexico border, restructuring border police administrations by getting rid of the Department of Homeland Security, instating a policy that forces asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their asylum case is pending, and cutting down on the amount of legally available work visas.
With regards to energy, it proposes cutting renewable energy research money and prioritizing secure energy sources like fossil fuels. When it comes to education, Project 2025 suggests abolishing the Department of Education to support individual school choice and crack down on what they dub “woke propaganda” and “inappropriate political indoctrination of our children” in the K-12 curriculum. And that is only the tip of the iceberg.
Whether or not one supports these ideas, their controversial nature is undeniable. However, it must be understood that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump does not support Project 2025—at least, not entirely. Trump has actively said on Truth Social, his go-to social media site, that he finds much of Project 2025 “ridiculous and abysmal” while explaining in presidential debates that there were “some good, some bad” ideas in the document. Many people have connected Project 2025 to Trump as it was headed by many of his advisers and staff members including Paul Dans, Mark Meadows, and Stephen Miller. The Heritage Foundation itself also carries ties to Trump, as they published similar recommendations in 2015 in anticipation of Trump’s first term. They went on to report that his administration adopted 64% of the policies that they suggested. But beyond these rather tenuous connections, nothing that Trump himself has said implies that he wants to support the most controversial and damning aspects of Project 2025. And it is imperative that people realize this because if they continue to associate a candidate with a policy that they have gone to explicit lengths to denounce, they will continue to fear a future that might not even happen, throwing out all the good said candidate can do for one hypothetical bad.
This does not mean, however, that Project 2025 is irrelevant to the upcoming elections. People certainly have conflated the ties that it has to Donald Trump amid the high tensions during the 2024 election season, but the possibility that his associates do support it certainly exists. The majority of Americans, people who cannot enter the Oval Office, will just have to wait and see if Trump’s administration and personally selected federal employees actually want to carry out Project 2025 and its main objectives even if their boss disapproves of it. But whatever the case is, it is imperative that people realize the things that could go down in 2025 as products of a system beyond a potential future President.
