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Exactly. It's a pretty bog standard ThinkTank wishlist of policies and politicos that they want to put into some of the literally thousands of political appointee positions that follow any election. Every other major ThinkTank does this.
The "fear" of Project 2025 is a strange media / twitterati / very-online-people invention. I think it allows a lot of vague gestures to the idea of shadowy planning by unnamed (but somehow very influential) "party insiders." They kind of did this with the Federalist society people after Kavanaugh and Barrett got confirmed. It's quite literally the same as, all of a sudden, telling you friends, "Did you know that the GOVERNMENT is, like, storing all of these old BOOKS in these, like, secure buildings and you have to get an official identification card to ACCESS them?!"
All you've done is dramatized a dusty old library
I was kinda shocked when Trump felt the need to distance himself from it publicly. Really bizarre behavior. From what I saw, he distanced himself from Project 2025 harder than he distanced himself from a lot of much worse things.
Trump needs to distance himself from a number of unpopular items on the movement conservative wishlist to be electable. In particular, he can't afford to be associated with "Cut Social Security and Medicare in order to cut taxes for the super-rich" - something that was a huge part of why he polled better than the Goldman-Aramco Republicans in 2016 - and he doesn't want (for good reasons) to be associated with the likely consequences of actually making an abortion ban stick.
Project 2025 includes entitlement reform and a big federal push against abortion (e.g. enforcing the Comstock Act) so Trump benefits from publicly rejecting it.
It strikes me as a Bad Move on his part, though I will confess that Donald is a significantly better political mind than me, possessed as Asimov put it of a tremendous instinctual understanding of psychohistory.
Attempting to distance himself from it will reduce or blunt Democratic attacks on him precisely zero, any more than Conservatives are less apt to attack Biden about the 2020 riots because of his public denouncements of defunding the police. He won't succeed in persuading anyone who has heard of Project 2025 and can process what it is that he isn't tied to it, he's more likely to succeed in convincing people who like the Heritage Foundation that he isn't a reliable executive for that purpose.
Trump has been an incredible maverick about that kind of thing up to this point. He's notable/notorious for his refusal to full-throatedly denounce some really out-of-the-mainstream support he gets. This is a guy who had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over for dinner, he's not afraid to charm people who are way outside the norm, he doesn't tack to the middle the way most politicians have, to the chagrin of media blobs and to great electoral success. Appealing to the extremes has gone well for him!
It strikes me as odd, because I've had the conversation with my wife, far more liberal than I am, and we both found the liberal obsession with Project 2025 groan-inducing. It's a very inside-baseball, extremely-online liberal attack, similar to the ever-idiotic analysis of party-platform positions. We're seeing the Trump campaign neuter the party platform too.
Maybe he's smarter than me, but I always think of this kind of stuff as more editorial page nonsense than having a real impact.
Maybe, but it could conceivably make him far more palatable centrists anyways. Think of Clinton and his Sister Souljah moment. Breaking publicly with your party's activists can win over that swing voter, if you can do it without making too many of your own people stay home.
I have to be honest, I don't know what sister Souljah means.
Here ya go.
The amazing part is that it doesn't have to be sincere at all. Clinton went back on his word and now backs things ten times more insane than what he denounced in the 90s. But they refuse to do it even as a tactic, because it doesn't give the same sadistic thrill as gaslighting.
I guess that's principled in a way.
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Trump has never reacted particularly well to the traditional small-government/social conservative/hawk conservative fusionist tendency, and there's a lot of that - particularly the free market libertarian streak - in the policy bits of Project 2025.
There’s also a lot of actual social conservatism, it’s highly disingenuous to criticize it as some libertarian / tea party thing.
I'm not treating it as a tea-party thing. To the contrary, it's a fusionist document. Trump doesn't like that stuff - he's pushing the GOP to the left on abortion, entitlements, and foreign policy all at once.
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Could it be about Trump trying to avoid getting trapped by a faction among his supporters? I'm thinking of a scenario where an independent right wing group publish their own "Here is what Trump is going to do." story. Some Trump supporters like the story and vote for Trump on that basis. Trump gets elected and then fails to do some of the things; they were never part of his plan. But his supporters are upset, claiming that he promised and is letting them down.
Sometimes this is fuss about nothing. Other times it is a bad look and Trump comes under real political pressure. So he wants to get out in front of the problem by being clear that it is not the official Trump manifesto.
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My two competing theories:
Trump read Project 2025 as "telling him which people to hire." Not exactly wrong, but also not right. If Trump hates one thing, it's being told what to do. He'll always slam that.
(tin foil hat) Actually a coordination between Project 2025 and the Trump campaign to create separation between the two. Trump doesn't need them to win the election (they aren't a campaign vehicle at all!) but they can bring along "bad vibes" because the Heritage Foundation always rubs some people the wrong way. Then, after the election, Trump can just ... hire everyone they recommend without every saying "Thanks, Project 2025!"
Trump thinks in terms of zero sum transactions. That's part of his frankly bizarre constant obsession with NATO spending. In looking at Project 2025, there's zero loss to him for bashing them and zero gain to endorsing them or growing closer. So ... just get it off the balance sheet!
Weirdly his obsession with Nato spending is my single favorite policy position of his.
His admonishment of other NATO countries for underspending on defense was prophetic. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine they are doing it of their own accord and non-NATO countries around Russia are rushing to join. The media likes to make fun of Trump saying Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine if he was president, but if Europe had built up it's armories back then, Russia would have thought twice about attacking and might have been defeated in the early stages of the war.
My impression is that most NATO countries want a prolonged conflict between Russia and Ukraine and so are not sending much of anything.
Here's how many main battle tanks NATO has access to:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1294391/nato-tank-strength-country/
Here's how many they've sent to Ukraine:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1364974/ukraine-military-aid-tanks/
More military investment doesn't make financial sense because there is no real enemy worth fearing. An actual war between NATO and Russia would be little more than a cleanup operation.
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Zooming out just a bit however, don't you think it's actually a good thing we are seeing greater emphasis on examining these non-official but still influential groups and what they actually do to policy within governments? Perhaps not, of course, panicking over it and we need to view it all in context, but isn't this still preferable to ignoring the whole thing as is historically the case? For example, if people had paid more attention to the Federalist Society's influence, they wouldn't have been as "surprised" about some of the actual Supreme Court picks that came out of the Trump years. While it's always tricky and potentially unfair to lump non-official positions in with official ones, the simple fact is that these non-official positions that are nonetheless strongly associated with one of the two major parties, and that's relevant info for a voter.
An analogy would be: you don't just marry a person, you marry their family too (in-laws). Factoring in what their family is like into a marriage decision might feel a little unfair, but it's eminently reasonable, because it's actually pretty hard to ignore the family in practice (and, even beyond that, this is the family that raised your potential spouse, so at least some of their ideas and values will have rubbed off).
I think this is what these kind of orgs would want you to think.
My opinion is that, in truth, all of them a far, far less influential than they want to be. I see big think tanks like Heritage, Brookings, CSIS etc. as something more like under performing charities that release ho-hum reports on various issues.
They do often function as halfway houses for former staffers who are (a) waiting for the next Congress / administration to come around and (b) Need to actually make some private sector levels of income before they go back to the goofy "salaries" of Congressional / admin staffers. But even that reveals something; if you have to find a bench to warm at a ThinkTank, and didn't get some actually big time job at a bank / law firm / lobby shop / tech company etc....are you that influential?
I once did some consulting work that dealt with illegal finance networks (terrorists, drug cartels etc.) I was doing a bunch of IT work for it, but wanted to get some degree of subject matter understanding. I asked which CSIS report I should read. The company laugh and introduced me to about four totally under-the-radar specialists in the space. They sell their research privately to firms who need it. It's higher quality, more quantitative, dispenses with policy "recommendations", and is generally delivered by folks who have worked outside of downtown D.C.
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